Jean-Luc Godard – Conversations

Jean-Luc Godard loves to provoke controversy. He has always considered himself as much a critic as a filmmaker — for him, the two roles are identical. In both fields, Godard has taken it upon himself to shake up established conventions as much as possible.
In a bold 1968 interview with critic Peter Brunette — included in this book — he stated: “If I don’t give something to the audience, it’s not an insult to them, quite the opposite.”

Godard invites us to engage differently with spectatorship. We must treat Godard — and his cinematic mirror — as part of ourselves, reflecting our own ideas and provocations, urging us to move beyond habitual ways of watching.
From Breathless to Vivre sa vie, his films continually reinvent cinema, confronting us with their political, cultural, and moral questions. In his luminous career, we find a figure who achieved worldwide fame — since winning the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1968 — declaring: “I seek to change the world.”

These conversations offer a lively, engaging portrait of Godard, in a voice that is direct, witty, and unmistakably his own. They retrace his long artistic journey, reopen the poetry of cinematic origins, and present a brilliant sample of his sharp English-language wit and his playful challenge to serious cultural dialogue.