9. Jean-Luc Godard
Cinema's ultimate rebel, Jean-Luc Godard challenged everything and everyone with his devastating run of films in the 1960's. A former critic for Cahiers du Cinema, Godard attacked the French film industry for its staleness and along with Truffaut, Resnais, Chabrol,Rohmer, and others, he decided to make his own films and helped launch the French New Wave of which he was probably the most important and influential member. His debut film Breathless was released in 1960 to immediate and overwhelming acclaim, and which, with its innovative jump cuts and break with traditional editing, shook the cinematic world to the core. Over the next seven years, Godard directed fifteen feature films, most of which are considered classics by one group of critics or another, most notable My Life to Live, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, and Weekend although which ones are his best usually depends on who you ask. After 1967, Godard completely abandoned narrative cinema in favor of Avant-Garde and political films. and although he eventually returned to more conventional films in the 1980's, his work has generally been acknowledged to have never really reached that level of excellence again. Although he praised many traditional Hollywood movies during his time as a critic, his films were almost always completely untraditional. His films rarely relied on story or narrative but on unconventional methods, radical ideas, and challenging conventional ideals. His work probably requires more analysis than any other great directors and as such, Godard fans are some of the most impassioned of any director's fans. His influence on modern filmmaking is incalculable as many of his filmmaking techniques such as jump cuts are taken for granted today. His most lasting contribution is his desire for everything to be original, everything to be radical, and everything to be art. Just about any modern director that works outside the mainstream is likely to list Godard as an influence and few directors have more films to be considered classics.