Born December 3, 1930, in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director who is particularly known for the major part he played in the French New Wave movement and the evolution of cinema.  

 

An important influence on Jean-Luc Godard’s work is Jean Rouch, an anthropologist who became the first practitioner and theoretician of the documentary-like film style cinéma vérité (“cinema truth”). This cinema style employs lightweight television equipment to observe their subject with total informality, without preconceived bias so that the theme and motifs emerge only when shooting or during the editing stage. This did not only influence Jean Luc Godard but the French New Wave itself. 

 

To fully understand and appreciate the French New Wave techniques, it’s important to know that French New Wave encourages breaking the rules set by the mainstream cinema of the time. The movement believes in deconstructing the relationship between the film and the viewers. Godard uses his art to create disbelief and moved the viewer outside of their comfort zone. He forced them to become active viewers rather than simply passive witnesses. He and the other filmmakers of the movement used the camera to play with the audience’s expectations instead of using it to dazzle them with a complex narrative and delusive images. The purpose was to remind the audience what they are looking at: pictures dancing in a world of movements that was totally against the period’s norms. Godard's stylistic approach was often described as a necessary harsh critique of the audience itself. The filmmaker’s work resulted in an assemble of strange disjointed scenes that didn’t care for discomfort as long as it kept the art alive. It deconstructed cinema itself; narrative, the difference between the actor and his character, and even the viewer's role as a passive watcher. The movement’s then daring self-awareness of cinema has remained in today’s cinema. 

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La Nouvelle Vague considered the film’s techniques as the style itself. The movement’s filmmakers are auteurs who display their own vision of the world in their films. Using movies that challenge the usual relationship one might have with this art. 

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The French movement also liked to break the 180º rule to disorient the audience. In the car scene in the first five minutes of Godard’s Breathless, the rule is broken as it jumps between front and back seats. The fourth wall is also often broken in the movement. It is also seen in Breathless, at the end, when one of the characters talks directly to the camera with no apparent reason.