It is said that in Pierrot le Fou (1965), Belmondo really plays the character of Godard: a man who can’t choose between life and art.

This is a beautiful image of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard with two of his frequent collaborators: Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. To me, this image conveys the emotional lightness of Godard’s way of work, which allowed spontaneity and exchange of ideas, often simulating and changing the film on the go.

As David Sterritt remarked in his “The films of Jean-Luc Godard– seeing the invisible”:

“What is ultimately spontaneous as we watch a Godard film is not the story, the characters, or the cinematic techniques, all of which lie frozen on strips of celluloid. Rather, the spontaneity he treasures is found in the mercurial stream of creativity that flows from him and his collaborators as they work. While this creativity is as ephemeral as thought, it leaves unmistakable traces on the work we eventually view.”