Modern film was born in the 1960s and Jean-Luc Godard was its father. For one pivotal decade, this founding father of the nouvelle vague created work that rewrote the grammar of cinema, each film more innovative than the last. We’ve selected nine of our favorite films from this incredible period.
“From Breathless through Weekend, Godard reinvented cinema. There are no analogies—imagine Faulkner's eight-novel run, The Sound and the Fury (1929) through The Wild Palms (1939), as a cultural intervention with the pow of Warhol's ‘silver’ period or the three Dylan-goes-electric LPs. Not since D.W. Griffith was knocking out a weekly two-reeler at the Biograph studio on 14th Street had there been anything to equal it." —J. Hoberman
Presented in association with KUOW 94.9 Public Radio
films
 | 1964, 96 min.
Godard’s nouvelle vague gangster movie starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur, was long unavailable in the United States before 2001 because of legal problems. more |
 | 1959, 90 min.
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s pouty-lipped homage to Bogart’s cigarette-smoking prowess, Jean Seberg’s fresh-faced American in Paris hawking International Herald Tribunes on the Champs d’Elysee, Mozart mixed with jazz—every jump cut signaled the beginning of modern cinema and the ascendancy of Jean-Luc Godard as innovator and artist. more |
 | 1963, 102 min.
Jean-Luc Godard’s chance to make a big-budget film with high-priced stars based on a best-selling novel, Contempt attains brilliant grace through the story of a marriage and a meditation on modern cinema. Presented in a glorious new 35 mm CinemaScope print for its 45th anniversary. more |
 | 1966, 103 min.
Godard presents his children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a portrait of youth and sex in ’60s Paris, and a society rocked by radical anti-war politics and shaded by American pop culture. more |
 | 1965, 110 min.
A musical, a gangster story, “a painting by Velásquez” (Godard), Pierrot unfolds under shimmering sun-drenched Provençal skies, beautifully captured by Raoul Coutard’s CinemaScope camera. more |
 | 1966, 90 min.
“Is she Marina Vlady or Juliette Janson?” asks the narrating Godard in a conspiratorial whisper. She’s both: an actress in a film and a housewife from the Paris suburbs who turns tricks in the city to make ends meet. more |
 | 1962, 85 min.
Beautiful new 35mm print! Godard’s poetic treatment of one woman’s slide into the oldest profession in the world stars his then-wife (and muse), the enigmatically lovely Anna Karina. more |
 | 1967, 105 min.
As motorists casually machine-gun one another over fender-benders, a bourgeois couple sets off for a weekend in the country. more |
 | 1961, 84 min.
Godard presents his children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a portrait of youth and sex in ’60s Paris, and a society rocked by radical anti-war politics and shaded by American pop culture. more |