During the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, two months after the release of “Breathless,” his first feature, Jean-Luc Godard told an interviewer, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago—simply because I have made a film, and the film was well received, and so forth. So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.” The twenty-nine-year-old director was not only daring the powers of the movie world to withdraw their approval but begging them to do so: “I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.” Godard, who will turn seventy this December, has been struggling ever since; indeed, he could hardly have anticipated the price he would pay for getting his wish.

In the history of cinema, only two other directors have made first full-length films that forever changed the art—D. W. Griffith, with “Birth of a Nation,” in 1915, and Orson Welles, with “Citizen Kane,” in 1941—and they, too, eventually found themselves in exile. Unlike Griffith and Welles, who fought to keep a place in the film industry and then, once excluded, tried to claw their way back in, Godard has remained productive on the margins, but at great personal sacrifice. His single-minded quest to unify his life and his work has had the extraordinary side effect of rendering him out of place in both: hyperreal and disarmingly present in his films; oracular and almost incorporeal in person.

When “Breathless” was first shown, it was an immediate critical and commercial success: no other film had been at once so connected to all that had gone before it and yet so liberating. The plot was a familiar one—a young man gone bad and on the run, the woman he loves unsure whether to run with him—but its execution was utterly new. Shot with a handheld camera in real locations, using available light, and edited with daring visual discontinuity, “Breathless” felt like a high-energy fusion of jazz and philosophy. The actors spoke in hyperbolic aphorisms that leaped from slang to Rilke, and ideas and emotions came and went in a heartbeat; the film resembled a live recording of a person thinking in real time. “Breathless” may not have been as endearing as Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” or as intellectually demanding as Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” but in the years to come it inspired New Cinemas from Czechoslovakia to Brazil.

Godard with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, filming “Breathless.” Photograph © Raymond Cauchetier Photograph © Raymond Cauchetier

Between 1960 and 1967, Godard made fourteen feature films, including such modernist classics as “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Pierrot le Fou,” and “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” and in them he continued to outdo both himself and his contemporaries in stretching the limits of narrative film. As a formal innovator, as a social critic, as an unflinching confessor of hot emotions and cold truths, he became a singular figure of the sixties. Writing in Partisan Review in February, 1968, Susan Sontag called him one of “the great culture heroes of our time,” and compared him to Picasso and Schoenberg. During Godard’s 1968 speaking tour of American universities, one student said he was “as irreplaceable, for us, as Bob Dylan.”

Yet by that point Godard was in a crisis of self-doubt; the pace of current events was outstripping his ability to invent new forms to engage them. In the earlier films, he had joyfully embraced the images of mass culture—magazines, advertising, pop tunes, and, above all, Hollywood movies. Now he felt repulsed by the world those images signified and fostered, with its unreflective consumerism and its support for the Vietnam War. The last of this torrent of films, “Weekend”—made famous by a ten-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam (actually three distinct shots, separated by brief intertitles)—concludes with two title cards: the first reads “End of Film,” the second “End of Cinema.” When Godard finished “Weekend,” he advised his production crew to look for work elsewhere. So began Godard’s defiant withdrawal—first from the movie industry, and then from Paris. He did not make another commercial film for more than a decade.

The films that Godard has made since his return to the movie business, in 1979, are arguably deeper, more technically accomplished, and more daring than the early ones. But they are also far more fragmented in form and rarefied in content, at a time when Hollywood has accustomed even sophisticated viewers to simpler films. This unhappy coincidence, combined with the changed economics of the industry, has made it impossible for any but the most assiduous American fans to keep up with Godard’s work of the past twenty years. The last time a Godard film received a regular commercial release in a first-run theatre in New York was in 1988, when “King Lear” played for three weeks at the Quad Cinema. According to Variety, it took in $61,821 at the box office in all of North America. It is currently unavailable on home video or DVD. The loss is tragic: it’s as if American museums and galleries were to show nothing of Picasso after Cubism.

When I mentioned to some friends that I was going to Switzerland to visit Godard, they were taken aback: they had assumed he was dead. In Godard’s futuristic film “Alphaville” (1965), the hero, Lemmy Caution, Secret Agent 003, is warned that as a romantic individualist he is out of date and doomed. “You will suffer something worse than death,” he is told. “You will become a legend.” This prophecy has been fulfilled in the person of Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard works out of the basement of a modern low-rise residential building in Rolle, the town in Switzerland where he and his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, have lived since 1978. Godard maintains that the town is outside one of the defining loops of modern life. “Here in Rolle,” he says, “you can’t get a package from Federal Express.”

I asked him why not.

“Because he comes by. I’m never in. He leaves word: ‘Call us.’ So, I don’t call.”

Rolle, set on a hillside by the shores of Lake Geneva, is in timeless harmony with its natural setting. Across the street from the hotel where I was staying was a thirteenth-century castle perched on the banks of the vast, jewel-bright lake. A hundred yards out, a small island with domes of dense foliage pierced by a proud, solemn obelisk resembled a Fragonard come to life; Mont Blanc hovered weightlessly in the distance.

When I arrived at Godard’s office, I could see the filmmaker through a glass door, seated at a broad, uncluttered trestle desk. He was talking on the phone as he waved me in, past one wall of compact disks and another of books and pictures. He sat facing a roomful of video equipment that could stock a small TV station, including a television monitor showing the semifinals of the French Open. (He is an enthusiastic tennis player, and ranks himself “ten-millionth in the world.”)

Godard was wearing black pants, black sandals, and a white T-shirt with a discreet Nike swoosh over the left breast. His hair was sparse and gray, and his face was spiky with white stubble. After several gentle politesses into the phone, he hung up and greeted me. He said that he and Miéville had long admired The New Yorker’s cartoons, and that they had clipped one that exemplified their own situation: a unicorn wearing a suit is seated at a desk and talking on the phone, with a caption reading, “These rumors of my nonexistence are making it very difficult for me to obtain financing.”