Welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm your host, Adam Schatz, and this week we're talking about the great filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who died on September 13th in Switzerland at the age of 91.

Later in the show, I'm going to be talking to the great filmmaker, Claire Deney,

about her relationship to Godard's work.

But we're going to start with the film critic Jim Hoberman, who is a contributor to the Lund Review of Books.

Jim, I want to start by recalling a great scene from Goddard's breakout feature,

Breathless from 1960, in which the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, playing a director named

Parvillescu, is asked by Gene Seberg what his ambition in life is,

and he says to become immortal and then to die. It seems as though Godard has been pretty

successful in achieving that goal, but what is it he's become immortal for? Well, I think that it's safe to say there is no filmmaker who has been more adept at deploying

the language of cinema than Godar.

I would not say that he's the only great filmmaker, just that I can't think of a

filmmaker who has been, has done more with the, with the elements of film than he.

He started out, of course, as a film critic, writing for Cai de Cinema in the 1950s. And,

you know, one of the really striking things about Godard's

early criticism is that he's incredibly passionate about certain kinds of American cinema,

gangster films, noir, and in fact, Breathless is dedicated, I think, to monogram pictures.

Why did the American cinema of that period speak to him so profoundly?

Well, I think in a general sense, the French moviegoers, and particularly these passionate

young cineasts, of whom Goddard was one, responded to the return of American movies, which had been absent from their

screens during the war. So that would be part of it. And that's how they came about certain

things. For example, film noir. Film noir is not a French invention. It's a French term for a

certain kind of movie which really had no particular name in the United States, a certain tendency

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