Mention the films and videos of Jean-Luc Godard, and superlatives will flow from his admirers. He is “the one film-maker who never disappoints me,” says D. A. Pennebaker, a documentary filmmaker who once worked with him. His 1963 drama Contempt is not just an excellent film but “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe,” according to Colin MacCabe, a longtime supporter. “The unspoken debt to Godard,” writes critic Michael Atkinson, “has become a holy tithe filmmakers can never, it seems, hope to pay in full.” Others revive the out-of-fashion word “genius” to convey the extent of their enthusiasm.

It was not ever thus. Positif, one of France's most respected film magazines, described him in the early 1960s as a “bureaucrat with a taste for celluloid … a pretentious canary … an unrepentant spoiler of film … a press agent for himself.” French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who played a minor character in Godard's early Breathless, later said his movies were “anything shot anyhow.” The communist newspaper L'Humanité called the erstwhile Marxist a “parlor nihilist.” Superlatives indeed.

As these comments show, Godard's reputation has undergone more than its share of ups and downs. A journalist writing in 1963 called him both “the most idolized of the New Wave directors” and “the most unpopular man in the French cinema.”