The significance of Jean-Luc Godard lies in that while his death marks the passing of a legendary figure in the world of radically imaginative cinema, it does not mark the end of an era that started in the 1960s. Core elements of his style of filmmaking are so ubiquitous and intutive to contemporary movie audiences that we never even stop to consider that it might have all come to be in the head of a visionary. His era is still the one we are in.
My discovery of Jean-Luc Godard's work was during the pandemic. I wouldn't have been exposed to the radical innovation that made him a significant figure in the evolution of filmmaking if it weren't for the time in isolation the pandemic forced upon me, allowing me first to revisit some of Billy Wilder, John Ford, Stanley Kramer, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks' films and contrast them with movies made by the likes of Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick and the French New Wave.
Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic assertion that the spatial and temporal continuity of the narrative being presented resides not on the screen but in the viewer's head, taking a jab at the notion held by classic Hollywood that was ruling the roost, demonstrates his radical inventiveness.
He successfully eschewed the commercially successful linear narrative storytelling that involved invisible editing and created a new bond between fiction and film that the French New Wave went on to represent. This new dialectical bond saw films as "critical essays" that drew attention to the process of their own creation rather than being an inert medium for storytelling or commercial potboilers. To compose his critical essays on celluloid, Godard innovatively combined the realism inherent in a documentary with fantastical filmmaking techniques like iris-in and iris-out, accelerated and decelerated camera motion, optically violent camera movement, and the drastic jump cut.
His inventive use of the jump cut created an unexpected ellipsis in the narrative by cutting out a portion of a single continuous shot and splicing the remaining footage together. This jump cut method stood in stark contrast to the establishing shot structure of classic Hollywood. However, he did not entirely repudiate the Hollywood mainstream. His earlier movies though replete with unusual visual puns, were essentially tributes to mainstream Hollywood movie genres like the American gangster thriller and the American musical comedy.
As a result of the remarkable technical and unique narrative developments shaped by Godard, which we now take for granted, he is rightfully credited with creating the film that started the tradition of modern movies. We ought to go back in time, maybe through a series of jump cuts, to 1960, to the film Breathless, which catalyzed the development of contemporary cinema that drops and streams on our smart screens. Caught in the whirlwind of streaming platforms and bingeing on recency bias, little do we realize that all the cool, nonlinear “modern” movie narration techniques are at least sixty years old and is a product of several non-mainstream cinematic countercurrents, one of which was stoked on celluloid by the luminous Jean-Luc Godard.
Roger Ebert on Breathless
“Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in 1960. No debut film since "Citizen Kane" in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard's technique of "jump cuts" is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society. […] "Breathless" remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years. What fascinates above all is the naivete and amorality of these two young characters: Michel, a car thief who idolizes Bogart and pretends to be tougher than he is, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American who peddles the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune while waiting to enroll at the Sorbonne. Do they know what they're doing? Both of the important killings in the movie occur because Michel accidentally comes into possession of someone else's gun; Patricia's involvement with him seems inspired in equal parts by affection, sex and fascination with his gangster persona.”