Five from Jean-Luc Godard

As he nears his 80th birthday, Jean-Luc Godard is no less the gadfly that he was 50 years ago, still dividing audiences with politically charged films that leap outside the confines of beginning-middle-end storytelling. However you define “Godardian,” there’s no denying his profound impact on the language of movies. With the French filmmaker set to receive an honorary Oscar this weekend, here are five indelible examples of the director’s alchemical blend of cinéma vérité and theatricality.

“Breathless” (1960): One of the most influential debut features ever made, this hommage to the American crime genre burst onto the screen with an exhilarating sense of self-knowing cool and spontaneity. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg presented a new breed of movie character, all sulky insouciance and casual beauty. Jittery jump cuts expressed the crossfire of their mismatched romance. Alongside Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” and Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” the Paris-set drama, with its brief but prescient glance at celebrity journalism, stood on the vanguard of the Nouvelle Vague.

“Vivre sa vie” (My Life to Live; 1962): Even as Godard explores the distancing effects of intertitles and episodic cuts, he enters new emotional territory with this character study of an aspiring actress who turns to prostitution. However well-traveled the doomed-heroine setup, there’s nothing familiar about the story’s uneasy tenderness, matter-of-fact and transcendent. Wearing a Louise Brooks ‘do, Anna Karina, the filmmaker’s muse and first wife, infuses every awkward transaction and exultant dance with poignant vitality.

“Alphaville” (1965): No one mixes high and low as insistently as Godard, and perhaps never as cheekily as in this sci-fi/noir mashup, subtitled “A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution.” As the titular private eye, Eddie Constantine wears a crumpled trench coat, fedora and imperturbable world-weariness. Poetry meets pulp fiction in the cracked tale of a heartless society ruled by computer system. Equal parts absurdity, menace and melancholy, the dystopian vision unfolds without a single special effect, all of it propelled by Paul Misraki’s gorgeous omen of a score.

“Week End” (1967): Capping his prolific ‘60s output with a film whose final onscreen title reads “End of Cinema,” Godard targets bourgeois consumerism with comic venom. This “film adrift in the cosmos,” as one of the intertitles asserts, centers on a murderously greedy couple and contains one of the most famous tracking shots ever put to film. The camera pans along a surreal traffic jam that traps not only cars but a horse-drawn dray and Shell Oil truck, all against a cacophony of horns. Amusement gives way to dread and shock — for the viewer, if not the impatient protagonists.

“Film Socialisme” (2010): Godard’s first feature shot entirely in digital formats split critics upon its Cannes premiere. Though other artists at his age might lean toward nostalgia, he chooses to set things adrift: One-third of the film takes place among the polyglot travelers on a cruise ship. Using subtitles that are abstractions rather than translations of the dialogue, Godard continues to explore the friction between image and text — an experiment that has memorably included the blinking neon signs in “Alphaville” and the “Masculin, feminin” intertitle that declared, “This film could be called ‘The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.’”

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