Both attracted to and repelled by that culture, Godard fought to get all his conflicting feelings about it on film. Filled with ad graphics and movie posters, soundtracks whose music often sounded like a battle of the bands where Mozart fought it out with Sylvie Vartan, Godard's films essayed the sponge-like quality of pop. At the end of "Two or Three Things" the packages of consumer products are arranged in the grass in a mock-up of the preplanned apartment complexes we've seen blighting the outer borders of Paris; the whole image, visually beautiful and somewhat ominous, suggests the merging of the natural and the manufactured. As does the scene of the ye-ye singer Chantal Goya, in "Masculine-Feminine," recording her latest number, perfectly content as she turns herself into a shiny new product. Likewise, in "La chinoise" (1967), Godard's chilling and sympathetic portrait of radical youth, the piles of Mao's little red book that litter the radicals' apartment have the allure of a new car.

But Godard's political and social preoccupations have often obscured the emotion of his films. As analytical and cerebral as they were, Godard's films were also deeply romantic, whether the object of his affections was youth, the movies that remained his obsession or the Danish actress Anna Karina, who, before their divorce in the late '60s, starred in five of his films. The camera regards Karina with a mixture of adoration and bafflement, completely enraptured with the pigtailed schoolgirl she plays in "Band of Outsiders" and the eager young wife in his musical "A Woman Is a Woman," or suspicious of what that beauty might hide, as in the flawed and deeply affecting "Pierrot le fou" (1965), where Karina lures bored bourgeois Jean-Paul Belmondo into an imbroglio of gun smugglers and murder. If Godard's view of Karina was limited by the jealousies and pettiness of male sensibility, he was also aware of his own complicity in the shortcomings of romance. In 1963's "Contempt" ("Le mepris"), a film that relentlessly ties the breakdown of a marriage to the breakdown of film's ability to function as an art, a single moment of male thoughtlessness on the part of a struggling novelist and would-be screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) starts the process that unravels his relationship with his adoring wife (Brigitte Bardot, giving the performance of her life).

The fever to encompass more and more of the world in his films and to force himself to find a new film language with which to express his perceptions reached its peak in 1967's "Weekend." One of the seminal works of the decade and of movies as a whole, "Weekend" is a film about which it is impossible to ever resolve your feelings. Coming at the moment when the counterculture had reached its most expansive and celebratory height, "Weekend" is Godard's vision of the breakdown of society. The movie is both raging and distanced, horrifically funny and often just horrific. It's a movie designed to start arguments about its intent, its execution and its effect, which can be violently upsetting (the first time I saw it I left the theater shaking).

In the film, a bourgeois couple leaves the city for a weekend in the country and encounters the carnage of a car wreck, figures from history and finally a band of cannibal hippie-guerrillas whom, Godard appears to be saying, are both the logical outcome of this society and the promise of the "return to zero" from which a new society will come. The movie holds no answers, and perhaps only a filmmaker at the peak of his craft could remain in control making a film about breakdown. In the course of watching the film you begin to feel that the cogs of civilization itself are grinding to a halt and springing madly from their mechanism. It's no surprise when the film closes with the words "End - End of story - End of cinema."

And it wasn't a joke, either. Godard spent many of the following years as part of a radical filmmaking collective, sometimes not signing his name to films, sometimes turning out pictures whose main purpose was a maddening theoretical didacticism (as in the 1968 "Le gai savior"). There has been the occasional heralded return to "commercial" filmmaking, but though even in the '60s Godard's films didn't attract wide audiences outside of the festival circuit, his post-'60s work has made him almost entirely the province of critics, theorists and academics.

It's a mistake, however, to relegate Godard to the trash heap of the '60s, as some of his detractors in the generations of film critics that followed have been so eager to do. If the films he turned out in that decade are redolent of their time, their astounding technique, their driven freedom, the seeming contradiction of their sometimes maddening and even cryptic attempts to break through to a plain, shared language have kept them some of the most exciting and alive films ever made. I'd be hard pressed to name an artist in any medium who developed and changed at the almost frightening pace Godard did. If his films haven't aged, neither, in the right hands, did the techniques he pioneered. It's startling to see Bernardo Bertolucci's "Besieged" (that director's finest film in years), encounter its use of the jump-cuts Godard introduced 40 years ago and realize how utterly modern, even ahead of their time, Godard's films still seem.

That Godard has produced nothing to match "Besieged's" examination of the intersection of love and art and culture and race and language is a tragedy. But perhaps expecting a director who accomplished so much in eight years to continue at that rate is to expect Godard to be superhuman. The formal perfection of his late work is a heartbreaking reminder of what it is missing, of how it's the work of a man born to make movies, and who no longer seems to have any idea what good that is.

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