| Jean-Luc Godard, the influential French New Wave director, died on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. This week, in a moving tribute, the critic Richard Brody wrote, “For me, Godard’s passing is personal. A viewing of ‘Breathless’ at seventeen, in 1975, transformed me—made me instantly certain that my life would be centered on movies.” In 2000, Brody wrote a sweeping Profile of Godard for the magazine, following the director’s life from his bourgeois upbringing to the making of his first feature films, and then to his withdrawal from the movie industry and later career, working from self-imposed exile in Switzerland. (Brody later published the biography “Everything Is Cinema.”) Brody offers a fascinating snapshot of Godard as a person and artist—obsessive and eccentric, if not a bit curmudgeonly, and yet also inspiring and daring—while considering his crucial place in cinema. “He has taken the entirety of the cinema upon himself, has identified its survival with his own. . . . It is as if he had exchanged his place on earth for his place in history,” Brody writes. At one point, the director declares, of the art form, “If nobody makes good films, if nobody can make good films, then it will disappear. But as long as I’m alive it will last—let’s say for twenty years.” | 
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