Breathless & beyond: the unclassifiable cinema of Jean‑Luc Godard

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Dave O Mahony, the Irish Film Institute’s Head of Cinema Programming, takes aim at ‘a moving target’ – legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the subject of a new season at the IFI this February.

Programming a retrospective of the work of Jean-Luc Godard was something I had long intended to do, yet often shelved in favour of platforming a less troublesome canonical figure, such as Bergman, Truffaut or Varda. You know where you are with them. JLG is trickier. You might think you know his work, but really, you don’t.

We approach Godard with a set of assumptions: chic, ultra‑hip, the ’60s, black and white, sunglasses and jump cuts. So very, very French! But while this stereotypical image of retro cool might hold true for some of the early films, a closer inspection reveals an entirely unclassifiable, breathtakingly diverse filmography. Indeed, the sheer volume and variety of JLG’s output makes a mockery of categorisation. Across a career spanning from the late ’50s—when he made his early shorts – through to The Image Book in 2018, his final full‑length feature, he directed somewhere in the region of 43 films (depending on your criteria and sources), as well as a plethora of shorts, adverts, experimental pieces and documentaries.

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Listen: RTÉ Arena on the films of Jean-Luc Godard

So, I thought I knew who JLG was, but I didn’t – not really. Books helped, as they usually do: Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard is a truly essential, exhaustively researched tome. Requisite watching and rewatching helped too, but he remains one of those figures who, under scrutiny, becomes more opaque and enigmatic.

Godard doesn’t sit neatly in periods or phases. Picasso‑like, each decade seems to contradict the last – sometimes deliberately, sometimes mischievously. He first emerged as a prodigiously talented film critic at Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming the de facto ringleader of the nascent New Wave, alongside Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol, Rivette and others. A period of political radicalisation followed in the wake of the 1968 protests. Later, in the ’70s, Godard became an early adopter of experimental video technology, after which he pivoted towards a more traditional aesthetic in the ’80s, before returning to dense audiovisual essays in his final years, exploring themes of war, European identity, the ethics of image‑making, and above all, cinema itself – his enduring obsession.

Watch: Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague revisits the making of Breathless

So, where does one even begin? With Breathless, because everyone expects it – and because it makes chronological sense? Or do you open with something thornier, a film that announces from the outset that this won’t be all sunglasses and jump cuts? Godard made works that are playful, political, abrasive, tender, angry, forbidding… and often all of these at once. Any selection risks feeling incomplete or, worse, misleading.

But that’s also the reward. A Godard season isn’t about tidy conclusions; it’s about sparks flying, ideas colliding across decades, and cinema being constantly reimagined in real time. The challenge is real, but so is the exhilaration.

Truth, 24 Times Per Second: The Films of Jean-Luc Godard runs 1st Feb – 29th Mar at the Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar. The season consists of 24 films and two IFI Talks on Godard and his work. Full details and tickets are available here. Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders and Weekend will also be available to stream on IFI@Home from 1 February