Whether you’ve seen all of his films or none of them, if you are a fan of modern cinema, your movie viewing has almost certainly been influenced in one way or another by the work of French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, one of the key figures of the Nouvelle Vague school of filmmaking, known also as the French New Wave. This movement led to the development of the “auteur theory” of filmmaking, the school of thought that says that the director of the film is the chief architect of its story. Remarkable at the time, the auteur theory has become the leading school of thought in filmmaking and the reason why even the most casual moviegoer refers to “Spielberg’s new film” or “the works of Lucas”.

Godard’s films used innovative techniques such as filming in “natural” locations (a friend’s apartment, the street) under natural light and frequent jump cuts, techniques that allowed the director the chance to both express his philosophical outlook about film and stick to the extremely low budgets of his early career. Other significant components of his style including downgrading the importance of the script in favor of improvisation by the director and the actors to create the story as it was being filmed and engaging audiences to view his films with the awareness of their fictions instead of suspending disbelief to see the movie as a true story.

SIFF pays tribute to Godard with their Godard’s 60s series, screening nine of the director’s best films of the 1960s, including Breathless, a film that is often labelled as one of the most inluential films ever made. The series starts August 8 with Contempt, his first big budget film, in which Brigitte Bardot stars as the extremely dissatisfied wife of a screenwriter creating an adaptation of The Odyssey for a film-within-the-film directed by legendary Fritz Lang, who plays himself. Contempt runs through August 14th and is followed by Two or Three Things I Know About Her on August 15, Weekend on August 16, A Woman is a Woman on August 17, Band of Outsiders on August 18, Masculine Feminine on August 19, Pierrot le Fou on August 20, Breathless on August 21, and the exquisite Vivre Sa Vie August 22 through August 28.