Jean-Luc Godard

Known for: Breathless (1960); French New Wave

Jean-Luc Godard co-founded the French New Wave with his debut Breathless (1960), which disrupted continuity editing and narrative linearity in ways filmmakers continue to engage with. He spent the following six decades moving toward increasingly essayistic, political, and formally experimental work, eventually describing cinema itself as a subject of investigation. He died in 2022 by assisted suicide in Switzerland.