[alec_irl]

Hard to overstate Godard's importance to the film world, both as a critic and a filmmaker. As a critic with Cahiers du Cinema he and others championed many forgotten Hollywood films and established one of the first recognizable 'canons' of film -- one of the beginning points of film history as a subject. And unlike his predecessor and colleague Bazin, Godard went beyond theory to actually create films that embodied the radical new ideas about film that the Cahiers crowd promoted. I've seen people in the thread mentioning Italian Neorealism, and some of the great Hollywood films of the 50s, all fantastic examples of forward-thinking film art. But Godard and his contemporaries' contributions were about synthesizing earlier developments with a pop-art bent in a way that destroyed established boundaries of the medium and paved the way for explosions of film creativity on the continent and beyond. His genius was finding a middle ground between directors like Hawks and Rosselini, or Ford and Renoir, and using that space to create indelible masterpieces. RIP JLG