Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) is a founding member, with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rhomer, of the French New Wave movement in the 1950s, strongly influenced by the theoretical writing of André Bazin and the critical pedagogy of the founder of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois.

A continued experiment and innovation on film and video, the massive corpus of Godard is often discussed in four distinct periods. Works before 1968 (Pierrot le fou, Week-End, Le Petit Soldat, Bande à part, Vivre sa vie, etc.), despite their dark themes, are an exuberant celebration of the cinema. Under the radical influence of revolutionary movements, the spirit of 1968 and the Vietnam War, works after 1968 (Le Vent d'est, One Plus One, Gay savoir) set out to find, and reflexively critique, forms of direct political engagement. Godard forms the Dziga Vertov Group (Struggles in Italy, Vladimir and Rosa), collaborates with the Maoist film-maker Jean-Pierre Gorin (Tout va bien, Letter to Jane). In the third period, Godard retreats from the cinema: in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, he turns to video and creates for television a series of complex visual essays on communication, the family, childhood (Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication, France/tour/détour/deux/enfants). In the last melancholy phase in the 1980s, which also includes the massive Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard returns to the cinema with profoundly philosophical and self-reflexive works (Passion, Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro, In Praise of Love, Notre musique), all marked by the sentiment that cinema failed to fulfil its role.

Godard’s critical writings on the cinema from the period 1950–67 are collected in the book Godard on Godard (1968; published in English 1972). Godard’s thoughts on the history of film are in the book Cinema (in conversation with Youssef Ishaghpour, 2000; published in English 2005).