(zhäN-lük gôdär'), 1930–, French film director and scriptwriter, b. Paris. He wrote criticism for a number of Parisian cinema journals in the early 1950s before embarking on his filmmaking career. Godard is probably the most influential of the French New Wave directors. His highly personal films are marked by a freewheeling approach to style, content, genre, continuity in time, and story structure, and he initiated techniques that broke with traditional film narrative. In his first feature film, Breathless (1959), he introduced a number of innovative features. These include the jump cut, editing scenes so that only the beginning and end of an action are shown; the use of written material, interviews, and other documentarylike techniques to confuse the boundary between fiction and fact; and the introduction of himself as a character and commentator. Films of the next decade, such as Contempt (1963), Pierre le Fou (1965), La Chinoise , and Weekend (both: 1967), are openly essayistic in…