François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry.
Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014).
Anna Karina was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, model, and singer. She was French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's early collaborator, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), My Life to Live (1962), Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou (1965), and Alphaville (1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.
Breathless is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend Patricia. The film was Godard's first feature-length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor.
Contempt is a 1963 French New Wave drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on the 1954 Italian novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia. It stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, and Giorgia Moll.
Jean-Pierre Gorin is a French filmmaker and professor, best known for his work with Nouvelle Vague luminary Jean-Luc Godard, during what is often referred to as Godard's "radical" period.
Pierrot le Fou is a 1965 French New Wave romantic crime drama road film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. The film is based on the 1962 novel Obsession by Lionel White. It was Godard's tenth feature film, released between Alphaville and Masculin, féminin. The plot follows Ferdinand, an unhappily married man, as he escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by OAS hitmen from Algeria.
Anne Wiazemsky was a French actress and novelist. She made her cinema debut at the age of 18, playing Marie, the lead character in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). A year later she married the director Jean-Luc Godard and appeared in several of his films, including La Chinoise (1967), Week End (1967), and One Plus One (1968).
A Woman Is a Woman is a 1961 French musical romantic comedy film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy. It is a tribute to American musical comedy and associated with the French New Wave. It is Godard's third feature film, and his first in color and Cinemascope.
Une femme coquette (1955) was the first of four short fiction films made by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard preceding his work in feature-length narrative film.
The film industry based in Switzerland dates to the 1930s. It is influenced by the neighboring countries of France, Germany and Italy, with which it shares languages. Before the mid-1960s Swiss films were often sentimental, but the French New Wave led to more experimental cinema.
Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.
Juliet Berto, born Annie Jamet, was a French actress, director and screenwriter.
King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play in the style of experimental French New Wave cinema. The script was primarily by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. It is not a typical cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous tragedy, although some lines from the play are used in the film. Only three characters – Lear, Cordelia and Edgar – are common to both, and only Act I, scene 1 is given a conventional cinematic treatment in that two or three people actually engage in relatively meaningful dialogue.
Histoire(s) du cinéma is an eight-part video project begun by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1980s and completed in 1998. The longest, at 266 minutes, and one of the most complex of Godard's films, Histoire(s) du cinéma is an examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century; in this sense, it can also be considered a critique of the 20th century and how it perceives itself. The project is widely considered Godard's magnum opus.
Détective is a 1985 French crime film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was entered into the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.
Tribute to Éric Rohmer is a short 2010 video commissioned by Les Films du Losange as a tribute to Éric Rohmer by his friend and former colleague Jean-Luc Godard, and is the work that directly precedes the release of the 2010 feature Film Socialisme in Godard's filmography. It was first presented at the Soirée en hommage à Éric Rohmer on 8 February 2010 at the Cinémathèque Française. The short film consists of various titles of articles that Rohmer wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma appearing on a black background as Godard's narration muses about brief, fragmented memories of Rohmer. It ends with a shot of Godard looking directly into the camera, the 16:9 image's aspect ratio suddenly squished into 4:3, as he finishes his monologue.
Letter in Motion to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux is a 2014 short film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean Douchet was a French film director, historian, film critic and teacher who began his career in the early 1950s at Gazette du Cinéma and Cahiers du cinéma with members of the future French New Wave.
The Image Book is a 2018 Swiss avant-garde essay film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Initially titled Tentative de bleu and Image et parole, in December 2016 Wild Bunch co-chief Vincent Maraval stated that Godard had been shooting the film for almost two years "in various Arab countries, including Tunisia" and that it is an examination of the modern Arabic world. Godard told Séance magazine that he was shooting without actors but the film would have a storyteller. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The film was positively received by film critics. It was the final film directed by Godard before his death in 2022.
