Appreciation: Jean-Luc Godard, a master of cinema who changed the medium forever

Of all the endlessly quotable maxims and aphorisms that have poured from the mouth and the movies of Jean-Luc Godard — "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun," "The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second," "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order" — one that especially springs to mind today is this: "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."

It seems fitting to consider those words this week, and the void as well. Godard, filmmaker, critic, essayist, polemicist, crank, disruptor, legend and one of the most significant artists working in any medium over the last century, is gone at age 91, having died by assisted suicide at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, on Tuesday. The motion-picture medium that he studied, worshiped, mastered, mocked,