Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on Hard Subjects)

Jean-Luc Godard was a French filmmaker whose radical approach to cinema fundamentally altered the language of narrative film in the postwar period. Beginning with Breathless in 1960, he dismantled classical editing conventions, fragmented dialogue, and linear storytelling to expose cinema as a constructed medium. His work, spanning feature films, video essays, and experimental collages, consistently interrogated the relationship between image and sound, political ideology and form. By the 1970s, his practice had expanded into collaborative video work and polemical investigations into cinema's capacity to represent truth.