Jean-Luc Godard Is Not Dead Yet, So Let’s Stop Obsessing Over His Early Films

“Brace yourselves for a wave of Godard nostalgia. It’s 50 years since Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and co. closed down the 1968 Cannes film festival in solidarity with student protests in Paris. … Those were the days, eh? When cinema was radical and part of the revolutionary struggle. Nobody embodied that more than Godard. He is cinema’s Picasso and its Che Guevara. He is the auteur wannabe auteurs want to be and remains the most dazzling, inventive, stylish, insouciantly brilliant yet confrontationally political film-maker the medium has ever seen. But by the time of Cannes 1968, Godard was also closing the curtain on his own auteur status.” And, argues Steve Rose, we should do the same thing.