When Billy Wilder informed him of the death of director Ernst Lubitsch with the pithy line “No more Lubitsch,” William Wyler quipped in reply, “Worse than that, no more Lubitsch films.” It’s a sentiment that has since often been echoed by cinephiles when hearing of the loss of a cherished filmmaker, and it no doubt ran through many minds this week upon hearing that Jean-Luc Godard had passed away, at the age of 91, by means of assisted suicide.

For more than six decades, Godard’s work had reached us like cinematic UFOs. Utterly unlike anything else at the film festivals, art house theaters, and cinematheques where they were screened, his films were singularly able to stimulate, provoke, and divide audiences, winning over viewers receptive to his challenging output — many of whom became Godard diehards — while repelling those with more conservative tastes.

While Godard had a shifting relationship with the political left during his time as a filmmaker, his works were always a strident riposte to the status quo. But it is above all for his restless formal innovation, repeatedly reinventing the very language of cinema, that Godard’s films gained such acclaim during his lifetime, influencing multiple generations of aspiring cineasts. This is why they still demand to be watched today. An avatar of cinematic modernism, it is little exaggeration to claim that Godard is to his art what Picasso is to painting, Stravinsky to music, or Joyce to literature.