The Beauty of Godard's Films

“Cinema is never on time,” wrote the great critic Serge Daney. That statement never seemed to apply to Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur who was always of his time and ahead of it—a relentless interrogator of the present who also sought the horizons of a new future. This week, as we mourn the recent passing of one of our greatest artists, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two critics and Godard experts for a talk about the filmmaker’s life and career. Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker and is the author of the must-read Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, and Blair McClendon is a film editor, regular Film Comment contributor, and author of a beautiful remembrance of Godard published by n+1. The four discussed Godard’s vast and protean filmography, from foundational works like Breathless and La Chinoise to masterful essay films like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, and the ways in which Godard’s films awakened them, in their formative cinephilic years, to the aesthetic and political potentialities of cinema.