Jean-Luc Godard, who died Sept. 13 at 91, was the filmmaker who changed everything. He directed “Breathless,” the 1960 landmark that helped to launch the French New Wave, employing a new, fast, leaping-ahead technique and style — the jump cut — that altered the DNA of how movies were made.
In the ’60s, he took his camera out into the streets and into cafés, stores, offices and apartments, so that a Godard film often seemed like a documentary about fictional characters. He drew many of those characters from Old Hollywood, a world he’d grown up on and remained obsessed with, but one that he always made seem a million miles away, like some black-and-white Garden of Eden. So even as you were watching Jean-Paul Belmondo play a glamorous hoodlum or…
