Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most influential French-Swiss film directors, screenwriters, and film critics of the 20th century, also known as the post-war era, passed away on 13th September 2022.

Jean-Luc Godard was known for breaking the rule book of cinematography and establishing the New Wave Moment that changed the concept and culture of filmmaking. He rose to prominence of his profession as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement in the 1960s. His work revolutionised the motion picture format, through its experiments with narrative, continuity, sound, and cinematography.

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His work incorporates numerous references to film history, and he showed glimpses of his political views and prominent Marxist philosophy. His politics became less radical after the New Wave, and his later films are about the representation and human conflict from a humanist and a Marxist perspective.

Godard first received global recognition for his feature film Breathless, in the year 1960, as the film helped in establishing the New Wave movement in France and presented it across the world.

Godard was ranked third among the top ten directors of all time in the year 2002 for his work by the ‘Sight & Sound’ poll. He was honored with “creating one of the most extensive bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century.”  His work has been central to narrative theory, challenging both the commercial narrative cinema norms and the vocabulary of film criticism of that time. Godard received an Academy Honorary Award in 2010 but did not attend the ceremony.

Jean-Luc Godard was a man who inspired millions to experiment and find their way through the art of filmmaking.

Today, we pay tribute to the pioneer of one of the largest cinematic revolutions by taking a look at his classic work that speaks of timelessness.

Here are some must-read quotes by Jean- Luc Godard

“What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.”

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body-both go together, they can’t be separated.”

“In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and ‘get’ everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don’t understand each atom of the potato!”

“Photography is the truth. The cinema is truthful twenty-four times per second.”

List of some must-watch films by Jean-Luc Godard

1960 – Breathless

1961 – A Woman Is a Woman

1962 – My Life to Live

1963 – The Little Soldier

1966 – Made in U.S.A.

1968 – A Film Like Any Other

1968 – One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil)

1969 – British Sounds

1970 – Wind from the East

1971 – Vladimir et Rosa

1972 – Tout va bien

1972 – Letter to Jane

1987 – Keep Your Right Up

1990 – New Wave

1991 – Germany Year 90 Nine Zero

1996 – For Ever Mozart

2001 – In Praise of Love

2014 – Goodbye to Language

2018 – The Image Book

How Celebrities and The World Paid Tribute to Jean-Luc Godard on Social Media

Band of Outsiders (1964)

Dir: Jean-Luc Godard pic.twitter.com/rUPRjx0ViB

— Emir Han (@RealEmirHan) September 13, 2022

RIP Jean-Luc Godard. We remember when he cast then 21-year-old Senegalese theoretician and revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop in his 1967 cult classic, ‘La Chinoise’ pic.twitter.com/RFmZE9ESNp

— Africa Is a Country (@africasacountry) September 13, 2022

Goodnight to Jean-Luc Godard, a titan of cinema whose work introduced the world to a new cinematic lexicon and exerted an incalculable influence on modern cinema that refused to wane in his more than six decades of filmmaking. pic.twitter.com/IJIm3nC88j

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) September 13, 2022

honouring jean-luc Godard today by smoking a lot of cigarettes, reading random quotes from modernist literature, making vague pronouncements about the meaning of life, attempting to overthrow the French government. things of that nature

— gg lily allen (@lumpen_princess) September 13, 2022

«Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death…in one word: emotion»

— Jean-Luc Godard  pic.twitter.com/V3U6RtQYFH

— Lost In Film (@LostInFilm) September 13, 2022

Remember that Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE contains the greatest fight scene ever filmed. #RIPJLG pic.twitter.com/b5WE2cimHF

— Dave Eves  (@CinemaVsDave) September 13, 2022