Jean-Luc Godard: The Permanent Revolutionary

German film critic Rebhandl has not only written a biography of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; this is also a systematic look at his many films, from 1957 to his death in 2022. Godard rose to prominence with the 1960 film Breathless, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Alongside New Wave directors such as Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Demy, he changed the course of French filmmaking. He was arguably the most influential French cineaste of his era. By 1970, Godard had abandoned linear-plot movies in favor of pointillistic and didactic collages of film. They referred frequently to film history, culminating in his eight-part, 266-minute long Histoire(s) du Cinema. Radical in most aspects, his positions on political matters often remained an enigma. He didn’t preach, seeing the filmmaker’s obligation as observing, not judging. Rebhandl’s thorough but compact account is helpful in figuring out an artist who was complex and, in later years, often elusive in his recorded utterances.