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Media coverage of Jean-Luc Godard’s death will fall short of what he merits. He was a game-changing creator on the level of Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and others who changed the grammar of film forever, but his best-known films are from a half-century ago. And there’s this: Under the standards by which successful directors are judged today — box office and awards — Godard was strictly a minor-league player.

His lifelong regard as a master is a tribute to his films above all, but it also speaks to a cinephile culture that elevated and supported him for decades despite the general public’s disinterest.

In the U.S., Godard’s films initially received erratic distribution with short-run showings at a few big-city theaters; even his best-known titles like “Breathless” and “Week-end” received marginal releases. They appeared erratically, out of order, and sometimes not until two or three years after their public debuts.

Pioneering French movie director Jean-Luc Godard and prolific television and film actor Jack Ging have died. Godard passed away at age 91. The French newspaper Liberation first reported the news of his death. Born on December 3, 1930, in Paris, France, Godard became a leading figure of the French New Wave movement, directing classic films such as Breathless (À bout de souffle), Le Petit Soldat, Vivre sa vie, Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and First Name: Carmen. His radical and politically motivated work is regarded as some of the most influential cinema in history. His final film was 2018’s The Image Book, which was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. As reported by Deadline, Ging, who was best known for playing General Harlan “Bull” Fulbright on NBC’s adventure series The A-Team, passed away on September 9 at his home in La Quinta, California. He...

The end of the filmmaking road is drawing near for Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave icon behind “Breathless,” “Contempt,” “Pierrot le Fou,” “Masculin Féminin,” and more. During a recent 85-minute conversation with the virtual International Film Festival of Kerala (via The Film Stage), Godard confirms his plan to retire from directing after his next two projects. The filmmaker currently has two scripts in various stages of development, one he announced is being made with European public service channel Arte and the other which is titled “Funny Wars.”

“I’m finishing my movie life—yes, my moviemaker’s life—by doing two scripts,” the 90-year-old Godard added about his plan to retire in the near future. “After, I will say, ‘Goodbye, cinema.’”

Godard will forever be associated with the French New Wave, a movement he pioneered with 1960 directorial debut “Breathless.” At that point in his career, Godard had been making...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

The Big Sick (Michael Showalter)

From start to finish, The Big Sick, directed by Michael Showalter, works as a lovingly-rendered, cinematic answer to the dinner party question: “So how did you two meet?” Based on comedian Kumail Nanjiani‘s real life (he co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Emily V. Gordon), we meet Kumail (Nanjiani) as he finishes a stand-up set in Chicago. He becomes fast friends with a...

Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Luc Godard is a difficult filmmaker to pin down because while his thematic concerns as an artist have remained more or less consistent over the last seven decades, his form is ever-shifting. His filmography is impossible to view in a vacuum, as his work strives to reflect on the constantly evolving cinema culture that surrounds it: Godard always works with the newest filmmaking technologies available, and his films have become increasingly abstracted and opaque as the wider culture of moving images has become increasingly fragmented. Rather than working to maintain an illusion of diegetic truth, Godard’s work as always foreground its status as a manufactured product—of technology, of an industry, of on-set conditions and of an individual’s imagination. Mubi’S Godard retrospective exemplifies the depth and range of Godard’s career as...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990) is playing June 16 - July 16, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom.“In striving to sin, to blaspheme, Ferrara’s heroes assert with Lucifer their moral autonomy, their sovereignty, their heroic identity, their glory, pitifully”—Tag Gallagher We’re introduced to Frank White (Christopher Walken) with one of director Abel Ferrara’s iconic roving pans, creeping left–right from the darkness of the prison wall to the harsh white of Frank’s cell. Frank is placed small in the frame, positioned slightly off-centre towards the bottom corner, his back to the camera as he prays silently. The prison bars dominate the composition, abstracted into silhouettes by Ferrara’s chiaroscuro lighting. A police baton enters the frame and knocks twice on the cell door, jarring Frank out of his concentration. The door is then...

Raoul Coutard, a prominent figure in French cinema, has died after suffering from a long illness. He was 92.

The cinematographer passed away on Tuesday night, near Bayonne, France. The news was confirmed by the French newspaper Le Figaro who was notified by his family. The specific cause of death is yet unknown.

Coutard was born on September 16, 1924 in Paris. He is most associated with the New Wave period and shooting most of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films (“Breathless,” “Contempt,” “My Life to Live”) along with his collaborations with Francois Truffaut (“Shoot the Piano Player,” “Jules and Jim”). He also was the director of photography on Costa Gavras’ “Z.”

His career lasted nearly half a century and included over 80 features. He made his directorial debut in 1970 with the film “Haoa Binh,” which was nominated for...

In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, would make him an icon of French cinema, inaugurating a career that has consistently expanded society’s definitions and expectations of cinema. That film alone would have reason enough to consider him an important filmmaker, but Godard went on to direct fourteen more features through 1967, culminating with his attack on bourgeois culture, Weekend.

Following this extraordinary run of films, Godard found himself at a moment of great change. His romantic and artistic partnership with Anna Karina had ended, to be replaced with a new (but short-lived) marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who would serve as a bridge to the current youth culture. Godard’s politics had also changed considerably since the 1950s. His conservatism, a relic of his parents’s politics, had been replaced with an interest in Maoism and an increasing distaste for anything evoking America. (Classic Hollywood cinema initially got a pass,...

‘Starry Eyes’: The feel disturbed movie of the year

This film is at its very core a success story. A very demented, gory, horrifying and darkly comical success story – one with tinges of satanic cult horror wrapped in psychological terror. The plot follows a young aspiring actress, Sarah, as she is called back to audition for a horror film that is being produced by a mysterious production company that pushes her to her limits – a dark exchange for fame and fortune… click here to read the article.

‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I’ is all prologue

In a previous review of the second instalment of The Hunger Games series for this website, I expressed some dismay that Catching Fire didn’t really have a conclusion to speak of, with its cliffhanger ending reminding me less of The Empire Strikes Back and more of The Matrix Reloaded orPirates of...

“If I love you, that’s the end of you.” — Carmen x

Following Passion (1982) and Scenario du film passion (1982), Jean-Luc Godard directed First Name: Carmen (1983), starring Marushka Detmers, Jacques Bonnaffe, and himself. Godard was inspired by Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), a musical-comedy about a woman that seduces a soldier ordered to escort her to the authorities. Preminger’s film is an adaptation of a 1943 stage production by Oscar Hammerstein II, which is itself an adaptation of the 1845 novella Carmen by Prospere Merimee. Anne-Marie Mieville was very interested in writing a script that was similar to the spirit of Preminger’s film, and Godard loved that film as well but wanted to change the music. Exit Bizet’s music and enter Beethoven’s “Late Quartets”, which are integral for First Name: Carmen.

Godard again collaborated with Raoul Coutard, but this time the famous New Wave cinematographer was billed as “lighting...

The latest issue of video magazine The Seventh Art talks to Atom Egoyan, Joe Berlinger, Evan Calder Williams, and Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund (see above for a 10 minute teaser for that interview). For his blog, David Bordwell shares further observations on Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage:

"As far as I can tell, Godard hasn’t used the converging-lens method to create 3D during shooting. Instead of “toeing-in” his cameras, he set them so that the lenses are strictly parallel. He and his Dp Fabrice Aragno apparently relied on software to generate the startling 3D we see onscreen.

This reminds me that postproduction has long been a central aspect of Godard’s creative process. Of course he creates marvelous shots while filming, but ever since Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), when he yanked out frames from the middle of his shots, he has always made post-shooting work more than simply trimming and polishing.

Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language has not only scored an impressive opening weekend per screen average, it's also prompting many, David Bordwell among them, to see it a second or third time. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Godard on Prénom Carmen (1983) and Jonathan Rosenbaum on Godard in the 90s—and on Numéro Deux (1975). Plus Peter Bogdanovich on Vincente Minnelli, Bilge Ebiri on Jack Clayton, David Kalat on Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Jonathan Yardley on John Cleese and Mark Cousins, Tilda Swinton and Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux's open letter of protest to Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. » - David Hudson...

Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language has not only scored an impressive opening weekend per screen average, it's also prompting many, David Bordwell among them, to see it a second or third time. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Godard on Prénom Carmen (1983) and Jonathan Rosenbaum on Godard in the 90s—and on Numéro Deux (1975). Plus Peter Bogdanovich on Vincente Minnelli, Bilge Ebiri on Jack Clayton, David Kalat on Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Jonathan Yardley on John Cleese and Mark Cousins, Tilda Swinton and Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux's open letter of protest to Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. » - David Hudson...

Thoughts occasioned by the release of Adieu au langage

Godard and the Permanently New

One “It has to face the men of the time and to meet/The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has/To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, and, like an insatiable actor, slowly and/With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat…”

Two “…no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. …what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it….novelty is better than repetition.”

-and modernity, novelty, superventing contemporareity in his cinema begins with a re-evaluation of screen time, direction, and space and his satisfactions at segmenting space as determined by...

I haven't looked forward to a new Godard movie since…never. The first Godard movie I saw upon its release in a movie theater was First Name: Carmen, in 1983, which overwhelmed me: I didn't yet understand that it's Ok not to completely comprehend everything a filmmaker puts in front of you, especially if that filmmaker is Jean-Luc Godard. First Name: Carmen made me feel like a philistine, an impostor, a person who had been born a member of the wrong club. I didn't yet know that Godard fans aren't born, they're made: Later, I would backtrack and see -- and be dazzled and confounded and captivated by -- Masculin Fèminin, Band of Outsiders, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, as well as, of course, the training-wheels Godard, Breathless, which, as hi...

London, May 10: Oscar-winning Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is will lead the jury of the prestigious 70th Venice film festival, organizers of the event announced on Thursday.

The 73-year-old director previously chaired the jury in 1983 when Jean-Luc Godard's 'First Name: Carmen' was awarded the Golden Lion, the BBC reported.

"At the time what I wanted from films was surprise and enjoyment. I haven't changed much since then," Bertolucci said in a statement.

Bertolucci is best known for the films 'Last Tango in Paris' and 'The Last Emperor', which won nine Oscars.

"Few directors can bring together,.

Paris -- While traditionally reserved for film biz professionals, this year's Festival de Cannes will be open to French cinephiles thanks to simultaneous screenings in TV and VOD formats of official fest selections Jean-Luc Godard's "Socialism" and Olivier Assayas' "Carlos."

Godard's documentary will screen in the Un Certain Regard category in Cannes on May 18 and simultaneously on French VOD portal Filmo TV.

Internet users will be able to discover the film at the same time as Cannes audiences via the www.filmotv.fr website.

The unprecedented screening will kick off a special "Jean-Luc Godard Festival" featuring 50 years of the director's work including "Breathless," "Contempt" and "First Name: Carmen." The Filmo TV interactive VOD service for film lovers was launched in 2009 by Wild Bunch. "Socialism" hits Gallic theaters on May 19.

Also on May 19, Assayas' 5 ½-hour TV miniseries "Carlos" will screen out of competition at the fest's Louis Lumiere theater.