I dimly remember seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend on a twin bill with a Laurel and Hardy short—I think Nixon was president—and I suspect there was a kind of a shift in how I saw things; looking back, watching films was never quite the same. Godard was a giant of, as they say elsewhere, “cinema.” Director Wes Anderson intones:

Godard changed the movies as much as the American masters he grew up on: Welles, Hawks, Hitchcock, and the rest. He is as original as Picasso—but unlike Picasso, he has been denied the biography he has always deserved. This is it.