Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:

Andrew Sarris once wrote that Godard was "the most disconcerting of all contemporary directors, a veritable paragon of pardoxes, violent and yet vulnerable, the most elegant stylist and the most vulgar polemicist, the man of the moment and the artist for the ages." After making several shorts in the 1950s, this Swisseducated former film critic helmed his first feature, Breathless (1959), which galvanized the international film scene. An offhand tribute not only to the whole film noir tradition but also to more conventional Hollywood cinema (Godard remarked that Jean Seberg's character in the picture could just as well have been the woman she portrayed in Preminger's 1958 Bonjour Tristesse its jump cuts and hand-held shots delighted some with their spontaneity while outraging others for whom seamless editing and an unshakable camera are sacrosanct. (It also made lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo a star.) From that point on, 1960s film seemed to belong to Godard; his films were incredibly varied (he would go from a low-budget black-and-white satire like Les Caribiniers to a lush, wide-screen color production with an international cast like Contempt within less than a year) and, while widely controversial, were always eagerly awaited and studied. These included Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier 1960), banned by France's Ministry of Information because of its attitude towards the Algerian war; A Woman Is a Woman (1961), with Godard's then-wife Anna Karina as a stripper turning to two men for a baby; My Life to Live (1962), with Karina as a prostitute;Band of Outsiders (1964), an extremely enjoyable reinterpretation of American gangster films; A Married Woman (1964), again with Karina dallying amongst lovers; and Alphaville (1965), a fascinating combination of the science fiction and detective genres. By the time of Pierrot le Fou (1965), Godard was embracing a more politically committed cinema and continually striving to subvert, annihilate, and reinvent the narrative form. Made in USA (1966) was a pseudo-thriller awash in political and pop references; Masculine-Feminine (1966), a loose, fragmented look at "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola"; La Chinoise (1967), a dialogue of revolution among Parisian students; and Weekend (1968), a brilliant attack on violent, consumer culture that remains one of Godard's most dazzling achievements.
 

After the Paris student rebellion in May 1968, Godard's involvement with far left factions became all-consuming and he began a new phase of his career, creating-or trying to create-a new cinema from the bottom up (frequently with collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin). Some of these pieces were successful, some were not, and some were just bewildering; none of them was widely seen. The first was Le Gai Savoir (1968), featuring a political discourse between two people that lasts the duration of the film. In Pravda (1969), voices discuss events after the 1968 Czech invasion while appropriate images are shown; in Tout va bien (1972), journalist Jane Fonda and filmmaker Yves Montand are "radicalized" by striking workers; in A Letter to Jane (1972), Godard and Gorin discuss the meaning of a photograph of Jane Fonda shown on screen for the film's length. After this period, Godard concentrated on experiments with video for several years before returning to "commercial" film with the acclaimed Every Man for Himself (1980), about dispirited people coping with their place (and status) in the world. Most interestingly, Every Man featured a character named Godard, a character who says, "I make movies to keep myself busy. If I had the strength, I'd do nothing." Such autobiographical, selfcritical (and self-defeating) flourishes were also present in Passion (1982), First Name: Carmen (1983, with Godard himself playing a washed-up director) and The Rise and Fall of a Little Film Company from a novel by James Hadley Chase (1986, made for French TV), which confronts the impossibility of making a film with any significance in the modern era.
 

He achieved some of his greatest latterday notoriety for Hail Mary (1985), a typically idiosyncratic and iconoclastic modern nativity story that was praised by some and denounced by many others (including Pope John Paul II).   An abortive collaboration with Norman Mailer eventually resulted in the absolutely wacko English-language King Lear (1987), featuring Mailer and his daughter, theatrical director Peter Sellars, Brat Packer Molly Ringwald, veteran actor Burgess Meredith, Woody Allen, and Godard himself. His excellent 1990 film, Nouvelle Vague failed to get any U.S. distribution. More recently, he debuted Hélas pour moi (1993), Germany Year 90 Nine Zero and the pseudo-autobiographical JLG by JLG (both 1994).
 
 

Copyright ©1994 Leonard Maltin, used by arrangement with Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.