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Jean-Luc Godard is the cinematic equivalent of a Pablo Picasso, James Joyce or Igor Stravinsky. He transformed his medium, yet his films are often difficult and inspire polarised reactions, with even some of his admirers feeling betrayed by the so-called wilderness years he spent making `blackboard' pictures with Jean-Pierre Gorin (as part of the Dziga Vertov Group) and... [+]

Jean-Luc Godard is the cinematic equivalent of a Pablo Picasso, James Joyce or Igor Stravinsky. He transformed his medium, yet his films are often difficult and inspire polarised reactions, with even some of his admirers feeling betrayed by the so-called wilderness years he spent making `blackboard' pictures with Jean-Pierre Gorin (as part of the Dziga Vertov Group) and second wife, Anne-Marie Miéville. But without these explorations of the limits of an artform that Godard both reveres and deems cravenly conventional, there would have been no late-career masterpieces like the magisterial Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) and Éloge de l'Amour (2001).

As a hyperbolic critic on Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard championed Hollywood genre pictures and mavericks like Nicholas Ray and Frank Tashlin. Moreover, he became a master of the throwaway profundity: `All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun'; `Cinema is truth 24 times a second'; and `You need a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in that order'.

The latter quip informed his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (1959), which contained virtually every filmic device associated with the nouvelle vague, while he stripped the film-making process of any faux glamour in Le Mépris (1963). But though he and Danish muse Anna Karina had self-reflexive fun with the `neo-realist musical' Une Femme est une Femme (1961), the subversive noir Bande à Part (1964), the revisionist sci-fi Alphaville (1965) and the gangster pastiche Pierrot le Fou (1965), Godard was also seeking to goad the politicial and cinematic establishments by denouncing war, imperialism, consumerism and prostitution in `critical essays' like Le Petit soldat (1960), Vivre sa Vie (1962), Une Femme mariée (1965) and Masculin-Féminin (1966), which used cinéma-vérité interviews to explore the problems facing `the children of Marx and Coca-Cola'.

Filling the screen with Brechtian colloquies, speeches to camera, slogans, statistics, symbols and calligraphy to expose both the decadence of Western capitalism and the redundancy of traditional cinematic language, Godard attempted to become a movie revolutionary with Made in USA, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (both 1966), La Chinoise and Week-End (both 1967), which ended with captions proclaiming, `End of Cinema. End of World.'

For many, however, this would also signal the end of Godard as a creative artist, even though he continued to produce works of provocative accessibility like Passion (1982) and Détective (1985) and melancholic dissertations on a world that never ceases to disappoint him, Hélas pour moi (1993) and Notre Musique (2004). [-]