Jean-Luc Godard
![Godard in 1968](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Jean-Luc_Godard_at_Berkeley%2C_1968.jpg)
During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine ''Cahiers du Cinéma'', Godard criticised mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which de-emphasised innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature ''Breathless'', helping to establish the New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works. After the New Wave, his politics were less radical, and his later films came to be about human conflict and artistic representation "from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective."
Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as ''Vivre sa vie'' (1962), ''Bande à part'' (1964) and ''Pierrot le Fou'' (1965)—were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by ''Filmmaker'' magazine. In a 2002 ''Sight & Sound'' poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time. He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award. Provided by Wikipedia