A Tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, From the Movies

Today is Jean-Luc Godard’s 85^th birthday, and it’s a safe bet that he’ll be celebrating it with a movie. Perhaps no other director has been so completely immersed in the cinema as Godard. And perhaps no other filmmaker since World War II has had such a profound influence on the movies. He helped develop the auteur theory with Cahiers du cinéma, he reinvented the movies with Breathless, he made the coolest movie of all time with Contempt, and he’s still changing with the times.

So it’s appropriate that so many of Godard’s artistic descendants—from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino to Paul Thomas Anderson to Wes Anderson to Alejandro González Iñárritu—have paid tribute to him in their movies. (Tarantino even named his production company, A Band Apart, after one of Godard’s masterpieces.) Now that he’s entered his 60^th year of filmmaking, here’s a compilation of six decades of homages to the New Wave master.