The cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the great French filmmaker who passed away last week at the age of ninety-one, remains singular. His work embodies the idea that the personal is the political, as Godard’s politics, for a time, would become totally intwined with his filmmaking. His personal growth as he transformed from a contrarian gadfly provocateur to a Marxist humanist is almost as unexpected as the narratives of some of his films. But the radical approach to filmmaking he developed along the way changed how we think about film entirely and is a primary reference point for many of the great filmmakers that followed him.

Love or hate Godard — and often it was easy enough to do both over the course of one of his films — he changed the rules of the game forever. Even if sometimes through sheer infuriation, his films stay with the viewer long after the credits have rolled.

Godard’s work, much like the man himself, feels like a series of contractions. Born the scion of a petit bourgeois family, he turned film critic, then filmmaker, then explicit Maoist propagandist before finally ending up as a humanist documenter of human conflict. Throughout it all, Godard remained aggressively confrontational, making films that sought to both please and infuriate audiences in equal measure. This carried over to his personal life, where he could be quick to criticize, resulting in several major rifts with friends and peers.