“At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought,” wrote the 19-year-old critic and future filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1950. This is how strongly Godard responded to the screen, his future canvas. And our eternal wonder.
Like Picasso, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French-Swiss provocateur who died Tuesday at 91 made people see and experience the familiar, the death-haunted and the stubbornly life-affirming in a new way, whether they wanted the new way or not.
Consider the “jump cut,” the sudden visual transition, like an eye-blink, popularized — immortalized, really — by Godard’s 1960 sensation “Breathless.” (Godard dedicated “Breathless” to Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row Hollywood studio he and his fellow cinematheque devotees adored.)
