Jean-Luc Godard

A cornerstone of cinema has died. Jean-Luc Godard was a great filmmaker but his contribution to the artform was greater than the average genius auteur's. He is one of a handful who could be said to have changed the whole shape of the medium. He and Truffaut, with the French New Wave starting in the late 1950s, changed the fundamental language of cinema, creating ripples that would eventually spread all over the world, as far as Japan and the U.S. The advances of 1970s American cinema into realism and complex storytelling couldn't have begun without the influence of the French New Wave, and therefore virtually all cinema to follow owes Godard a debt. He died yesterday at 91.

Human beings are compulsively reactionary. Once someone has thrown mud in your eye, the impulse to throw back something worse can be overwhelming so that the conflict becomes defined purely by conflict. But Godard was a rare critic whose motives were a perfect blend of love and criticism. For as much as Pierrot le Fou or Vivre sa vie deconstructs the tools of the filmmaker, operating as postmodernist manifestos on the manipulative quality of motion pictures, they were also imbued with real human warmth. Godard's maxim that "cinema is the truth 24 times a second and every cut is a lie" led to his tendency to treasure long takes of his actors, lingering on a shot of Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris until a natural smile starts to overtake her performance.

He breaks it all down but then he builds something from the old pieces that turn out to retain their lustre after the assault. He made something new that was really a distillation and accentuation of what was great about the old. He achieved a mixture of nature and artifice that's endlessly magnificent to behold.