zhäN-lük gôdärˈ, 1930–, French film director and scriptwriter, b. Paris. Godard is probably the most influential of the French New Wave directors. His highly personal films are marked by a freewheeling approach to style, content, and story structure, and he initiated techniques that broke with traditional film narrative. In Breathless (1959), he introduced the jump cut, editing scenes so that only the beginning and end of an action are shown. He also used written material, interviews, and other documentarylike techniques to confuse the boundary between fiction and fact. Later films, such as La Chinoise (1967) and Weekend (1968), are openly essayistic in form, less concerned with character and story than with ideas and analysis of social issues.

Increasingly interested in Marxist and Maoist philosophies of communism, for a period Godard subsumed his identity into that of a filmmaking collective. After some years of inactivity, he returned in 1980 with Every Man for Himself and has since directed such films as Hail Mary (1985) and Hélas pour Moi (1994), both of which explore the possibility of the divine playing a role in everyday contemporary life; Forever Mozart (1996); and In Praise of Love (2001), a mournful study of the precarious nature of historical memory in a mass-media age. His eight-part Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98) is an extremely personal meditation on the history and nature of cinematic art.

See his autobiographical film, JLG/JLG (1994); Godard on Godard (1968; tr. 1972, repr. 1986), a collection of early writings; T. Mussman, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology (1968); C. MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2004); studies by C. Barr (1970), R. Roud (1980), C. MacCabe (1981), Y. Loshitzky (1995), W. W. Dixon (1997), K. Silverman and H. Farocki (1998), and D. Sterritt (1999).

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