Like many writers for Cahiers du cinéma, Godard started making some brief forays into film direction. His first film was a documentary, Opération béton (1954).

In 1958, he shot Charlotte et son Jules (released in 1960) and Une histoire d'eau (released in 1961), the first was a homage to Jean Cocteau the second to Mack Sennett.

He continued his critical writing however and became one of the key proponents of the nouvelle vague or New Wave.

His first major work was À bout de souffle (1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. It was a success both critically and with audiences in France and internationally, and became a key film of the New Wave styles — American cinema influences, harsh editing, and a real pleasure in film-making.

His next success was Vivre sa vie (1962). The following year he made the marvellous failure Les Carabiniers, a homage to Vigo.

In 1964, Godard and his wife Anna Karina (married in 1961) formed a production company, Anouchka Films. In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution and Pierrot le Fou. At the end of that year he and Anna Karina divorced.

Godard and politics

Politics have never been far from the surface in Godard's films. One of his earliest features, Le Petit Soldat, dealt with the Algerian war of independence, and was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute rather than pursue any specific ideological agenda.

Godard's early career is characterised by the interspersing of such films with 'lighter' romantic films such as Une Femme est une Femmme; however, as the sixties progressed he began to merge the two genres — romantic and political — to produce films like Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou, masterpieces of alienation.

Towards the end of the decade he began to move ever-closer to overtly political statements in his films, shooting Masculin, féminin (1966) and Made in U.S.A (1966), amongst others. In 1967, he directed La Chinoise, marrying its star Anne Wiazemsky during filming.

Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in Maoist ideology. He formed the socialist-idealist Dziga-Vertov cinema group and produced a number of shorts outlining his politics.

In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings, but the dazzling anti-consumerist Week End was released in 1967. His films became intensely politicized and experimental, a phase that lasted until 1980.

Later films

His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with Sauve qui peut (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example Passion (1982), Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982), Prénom Carmen (1984) and Grandeur et décadence (1986).

There was, though, another flurry of controversy with Marie, Je vous salue (1985), which was banned by the Catholic Church for alleged heresy, and also with King Lear (1987), an extraordinary but much-excoriated essay on Shakespeare and language.

His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — films such as Nouvelle Vague (1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre (1995), and For Ever Mozart (1996).

During the 1990s he also produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series Histoires du Cinema, which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself.