Godard’s 12 Best Films: A Beginner’s Guide to the Great Filmmaker’s Work

12. “Tout Va Bien” (1972)

Just before the Hanoi Jane controversy blew up her political activist image and a year after she won her Best Actress Oscar for “Klute,” Jane Fonda teamed with Godard and co-director/writer Jean-Pierre Gorin for this anti-establishment screed about a strike at a sausage factory witnessed by an American reporter (Fonda) and her French husband (Yves Montand). On this film, Godard learned that hiring stars would bring money, and so he uses them to both represent and interrogate the middle-class bourgeoisie, dissecting marriage, consumption, and capitalism in pop art colors. —RL 

11. “Week-End” (1967)

A howl of rage in cinematic form, “Week-End” is the dark side view of the Summer of Love that was 1967. It also marks the end of the first phase of Godard’s filmography, and arguably the end of the French New Wave proper. So this, along with “Tout Va Bien” should only be seen after all the other movies on this list, even those on here made in the 21st Century.

“Week-End” stars Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne as a hateful bourgeois couple who have the aim of securing her inheritance from her father (by murder if required). But the movie is really about the journey to get to her parents’ home, a cross-country panorama that’s like “The Odyssey” as told by the Hells Angels. There’s death, destruction, invectives about Europe’s mistreatment of the Congo, an appearance from Emily Brontë, and, eventually, cannibalism. 

“Week-End” is probably best known for two things today: its eight-plus minute tracking shot of our couple heading into the country and making their way past an astonishing traffic jam that just goes on and on and on… there are so many dead bodies in wrecked cars in this movie. And the other thing is for its final shot, a title card simply saying “Fin de Cinema.” Not just of the movie, but of cinema as a whole.—CB

10. “My Life to Live” (1962)

Godard’s fourth feature is a #MeToo movie 55 years before #MeToo. Anna Karina plays Nana, a Parisian waif who turns to sex work to support herself. It does not go well and it is not empowering. Michel Legrand’s mournful score sets the tone, but it’s Godard’s unique flourishes that draw you in: at one moment, he has Nana write out an entire handwritten letter, with an extreme closeup of the paper and her hand as we see in real-time what she’s trying to communicate. “Vivre sa vie” is full of moments like that. They could be called distancing devices because they’re such extreme intrusions of style, but somehow they result in you being even more emotionally engaged with Nana’s story.—CB

9. “Film Socialisme” (2010)

Here’s how in tune with the culture Godard was even in his late 70s. Much of his late masterpiece “Film Socialisme” takes place on a decadent cruise ship patrolling the Mediterranean: his camera revels in the over-consumption on display in its casinos and on its buffet tables. This same cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, literally wrecked off the coast of Italy less than two years after the film’s Cannes premiere, killing 32 people. For three years, it sat half-capsized, run aground in shallow water, a symbol of contemporary Europe’s carelessness, before it was finally scrapped. “Film Socialisme” itself seemed like a prophecy then — that that would be the ship Godard would choose for his diagnostic study of Europe’s capitalist malaise, of all things. It also happens to be a great movie, with Godard shooting in HD for the first time and making full use of digital’s gloomy possibilities.—CB 

8. “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” (1967)

Definitely pair “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” with “Film Socialisme,” the omega to this film’s alpha. It’s a thoughtful look at how everything in our culture, whether we want to believe it or not, has a pricepoint and all communication is in some way advertising. Marina Vlady plays a stewardess who moonlights as a sex worker, with she and a colleague at one point wearing TWA and Pan-Am travel bags on their heads while with their clients. The final shot is one of Godard’s most memorable, of a collection of primary-color product packages given a Stonehenge-like arrangement. “Pierrot le fou” announced that in this advertising-soaked culture we were now living in “the age of the ass.” “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” tells us that age is here to stay.—CB

7. “Alphaville” (1965)

Godard pioneered French New Wave pulp sci-fi with “Alphaville,” shooting a dystopian noir on real locations in Paris over a dystopian soundstage, giving the film its bracingly unvarnished look. Eddie Constantine plays trench coat-donning secret agent Lemmy Caution who sets out to take down a fascist technocracy. He’s aided by Anna Karina as a citizen of Alphaville who awakens to its sinister dictatorship and helps take down Alpha 60, the mastermind computer powering the city, from the inside. This dazzling and defiantly unconventional science fiction entry makes the case that Godard should’ve attempted more in his lifetime — and it also remains one of the most influential films of all time.—RL 

6. “Goodbye to Language” (2014)

Jean-Luc Godard radically redefined the 3D moviegoing experience with “Goodbye to Language,” the 42nd film in the iconoclast’s long and winding career. Really, it’s his mockery of the 3D process, but still “Goodbye to Language” feels almost “Man with a Movie Camera”-esque, like you’re seeing movies for the first time, in its complete erosion of film grammar. Godard uses the medium like an impressionist, blurring and overlapping frames, and positioning jutting objects that occlude the ongoing dramas of a man, a woman, and a dog. Close one eye and see one world; close the other eye, and a new world opens up. —RL 

5. “Breathless” (1960)

Something that needs to be talked about more with Godard’s films is just how quotable they are. “Breathless” had so much going for it to make it instantly iconic: Jean Seberg and her famous haircut, Jean-Paul Belmondo in his aviators, such a run-and-gun style that Godard was pushed around in a wheelchair to shoot some of its more sinuous tracking shots, Martial Solal’s voffala piano tinkle of a theme.

But it’s the writing and the quotability of “Breathless” that may really cause it to lodge in people’s brains the way it does. When a young girl asks Belmondo for money for a youth fund, his response: “I prefer the old.” When Seberg asks a writer at a press conference his greatest ambition and he says “To become immortal and then die.” Those are incredible. But there’s a punchiness and a pulpiness to Godard’s writing all throughout that sets a tone for an entirely new age of collapsed hierarchies in art — the movie literally begins with Belmondo’s line “Yeah, I’m an asshole.” So also could be Godard. And we loved him for it.—CB

4. “Masculin Feminin” (1966)

Godard’s freewheeling portrait of 1960s Paris on the cusp of a revolution paired him with Truffaut favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud as well as singer/actress Chantal Goya, who play a self-styled intellectual and pop star who strike up an affair. While the film has elements of romantic comedy, it’s also as restlessly satirical as any Godard film: He wanted to call “Masculin Feminin” “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” which is actually one of the chapter titles of the movie, and that’s a fitting descriptor for his portrait of youth culture that’s funny, sweetly romantic, and rigorously intellectual all at once. —RL 

3. “Every Man for Himself” (1980)

“Sauve Qui Peut” brought Godard back to “commercial” cinema (however commercial a Godard film might be) after a decade of avant-garde moviemaking with a French star-powered vehicle featuring Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, and Nathalie Baye. The script by Jean-Claude Carrière and Anne-Marie Miéville examines the lives of these three people, with Dutronc playing a TV director, Baye his ex, and Huppert a sex worker. Despite the names, this is still a daring and experimental work that eschews easy cutting and exposition and is iconoclastic as ever for its formal daring, including a slow-down “decomposition” technique. Godard amusingly took to promoting the film on “The Dick Cavett Show” and said this was his “second first film.”—RL  

2. “Contempt” (1963)

Godard’s Technicolor epic “Contempt” is both a brilliant study of the artistic temperament and one of the most searing films about a marital breakdown ever made. Michel Piccoli (who died just over two years ago at age 94) plays a screenwriter who’s hired by a crude American producer (Jack Palance) as a script doctor on a new adaptation of “The Odyssey” directed by Fritz Lang, who plays himself. Meanwhile, he’s torn over his wife Camille (a bombshell Brigitte Bardot), who thinks he’s using her to fuel his career. For this film, Godard seamlessly transitioned into studio filmmaking after he was approached by Carlo Ponti to make the film, yet it retained all of the director’s subversive essence. —RL 

1. Pierrot le fou (1965)

“Pierrot le fou” is one of the most beautiful works of art of the 20th century. Not just of movies. One of the most beautiful works of any medium. Each shot is composed with a rigor and a compositional sense that’s so refined you’d think it might just be a structural film. But it’s also so freewheeling and shaggy-dog in its tone that nothing about it feels mannered. People have often described Led Zeppelin’s sound as “tight but loose” — that’s “Pierrot le fou.”

Godard perfected the Pop Art color scheme he’d deployed previously in “A Woman Is a Woman” and “Contempt,” and the entire journey of the movie, of two lovers on the run across the French countryside, is an experience of entertainment and pleasure — even as it goes off on Godard’s heady ramblings about Diego Velazquez and “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Anna Karina, Godard’s single greatest collaborator other than his cinematographer Raoul Coutard, gives an affecting and mesmerizing performance as a wannabe gangster/assassin/crook who nonetheless conveys hurt when Belmondo says something like “I come to you with ideas, and you come to me only with feelings.” Of course she responds, “But there are ideas in feelings.” 

Anyone who has ever thought Godard’s movies are cold intellectual exercises needs to watch “Pierrot le fou.” He never made a more romantic movie or a more sensual one, and the landscapes he photographs are enveloping. Eras of artistic thought are compressed into one sublime expression of emotion. Feelings do contain ideas, after all. —CB