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A landmark critical biography explores the crucial resonances between the life, the work, and the times of this most influential filmmaker

When Jean-Luc Godard, exemplary director of the French New Wave, wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Among the greatest cinematic innovations, Godard's films straddle the line between fiction and documentary, criticism and art. Similarly, his persona projects the shifting images of cultural hero, impassioned loner, business dealer, and creative rebel. Indeed, Godard has entered the modern canon as a figure as mythologized as he is influential.

In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody draws on hundreds of interviews with friends, family, and collaborators as well as on unpublished archival footage to paint the fullest picture yet of the elusive director. Paying meticulous attention to the intellectual and political currents of the moment, as well as the emotional forces at work, Brody traces an arc from Godard's early writing as a critic for the important Cahiers du Cinema, to his heyday of popular success with such films as Breathless and Contempt, through the Maoist years, and up to the grand vision of the television series History of Cinema. Throughout, Brody argues that Godard's work, life, and the zeitgeist are inseparable, the films the product of a single obsessive quest to unify biography, creativity, and history.

Lucid, original, and unrivaled in its breadth, Everything Is Cinema sheds unprecedented light on one of the great artists of our time.