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60 free Jean-Luc Godard trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Jean-Luc Godard trivia quiz runs from the jump cuts of Breathless to the 3D of Goodbye to Language. The easier questions cover the landmarks any film fan knows: the star of his debut, the movement he pioneered, the magazine he wrote for, Bardot in Contempt, the traffic jam in Weekend and the Rolling Stones film. Medium questions get into the Karina years: A Woman Is a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Band of Outsiders and its Madison dance, Alphaville's computer, Pierrot le Fou. The hard end is for cinephiles: the dam documentary he started with, the Prix Jean Vigo, the OAS in Pierrot, the unlicensed Richard Stark novel behind Made in U.S.A., the Dostoevsky source of La Chinoise, Kodak's 'racist' film stock, Sonimage in Grenoble, Histoire(s) du cinema and the Special Palme d'Or for The Image Book. There are also questions on Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, the shutdown of Cannes 1968, and Godard's death by assisted suicide in 2022. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Godard, his individual films and his collaborators, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Fans of this one should try our French New Wave, Brigitte Bardot and classic film director quizzes next.
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Q 01Godard's first feature, Breathless (1960), paired the American actress Seberg with which French actor?
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Godard had already tipped him in print in 1958 as 'the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow'.
Q 02Which then-unconventional editing technique made Breathless famous?
Jump cuts
The film also broke the eyeline match and had characters speak straight to camera.
Q 03Godard was a pioneer of which film movement?
The French New Wave
He is often called the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.
Q 04Before directing, Godard wrote criticism for which influential magazine?
Cahiers du Cinéma
He was the first of the young Cinémathèque crowd to be published there after André Bazin co-founded it in 1951.
Q 05Godard held French citizenship and that of which other country, where he spent much of his life?
Switzerland
His father was a Swiss physician who moved the family from Paris when Jean-Luc was four.
Q 06Godard's mother came from a banking family; her father Julien Monod helped found which bank?
Banque Paribas
The Monods also produced a theologian, a naturalist and a composer.
Q 07Godard's first film, the 1955 documentary short Opération béton, was about the building of what?
A dam
He was working on the Grande Dixence dam site at the time and rewrote a labourer's commentary.
Q 08The story of Breathless was suggested to Godard by which fellow New Wave director?
François Truffaut
It came from a news item about a petty criminal, Michel Portail, whose girlfriend turned him in.
Q 09In Breathless, Michel Poiccard shoots a motorcycle policeman after stealing a car in which city?
Marseille
He is pursued on the Route nationale 7 for crossing a solid line.
Q 10Jean Seberg's character in Breathless sells which newspaper on the Champs-Élysées?
New York Herald Tribune
Seberg took the part for $15,000, a sixth of the film's whole budget.
Q 11Which Hollywood star's poster does Belmondo's character reverently imitate in Breathless?
Humphrey Bogart
The film is also dedicated on screen to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio.
Q 12How were the tracking shots in Breathless achieved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard?
From a wheelchair pushed by Godard
Coutard had learned handheld work as an army documentary cameraman in Indochina.
Q 13Which New Wave director appears in Breathless as a dead body hit by a car?
Jacques Rivette
Q 21Which silent classic moves Nana to tears in a cinema in Vivre sa vie?
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Nana also debates the limits of language with a philosopher played by Brice Parain, Godard's old tutor.
Q 22Which critic called Vivre sa vie 'a perfect film' in an essay in Against Interpretation?
Susan Sontag
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 1962.
Q 23Contempt (1963), Godard's most commercially successful film, starred which French screen icon?
Brigitte Bardot
Producer Carlo Ponti had suggested Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni; Godard refused.
Godard himself plays the passer-by who points Michel out to the police.
Q 14Which prize did Godard win in 1960 for Breathless?
Prix Jean Vigo
He also took the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin that year.
Q 15Godard's Le Petit Soldat was banned by the French government for three years over its treatment of what?
The Algerian War
He later called it his 'most fascist film' for its equivocal picture of both sides.
Q 16In Le Petit Soldat (shot 1960), army deserter Bruno Forestier is hiding out in which city?
Geneva
The film also holds the much-quoted line that cinema is truth 24 times a second.
Q 17Godard's first wife and muse Anna Karina was born in which country?
Denmark
She hitch-hiked to Paris with the equivalent of $15 from her grandfather and became a model for Elle.
Q 18Who gave Hanne Karin Bayer the stage name Anna Karina, evoking Tolstoy?
Coco Chanel
She was working as a model for Elle at the time, having been discovered on the street at 14.
Q 19Karina won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin for which Godard film, his first in colour?
A Woman Is a Woman
She played Angela, a striptease dancer who dreams of MGM musicals and wants a baby.
Q 20Vivre sa vie (1962) is subtitled 'a film in' how many 'tableaux'?
Twelve
Karina plays Nana, an aspiring actress who drifts into prostitution.
Q 24Which legendary director plays himself, adapting Homer's Odyssey, in Contempt?
Fritz Lang
Godard cast himself as Lang's assistant director and gave Lang many of his own New Wave opinions to voice.
Q 25Contempt is based on Il disprezzo, a 1954 novel by which Italian writer?
Alberto Moravia
Jack Palance plays the vulgar American producer Prokosch.
Q 26Band of Outsiders (1964) is famous for a café dance scene that the actors called what?
The Madison
Its music was written by Michel Legrand, and the scene inspired the Uma Thurman-John Travolta dance in Pulp Fiction.
Q 27In Band of Outsiders the three leads try to break the record for running through which building?
The Louvre
Godard described the film as 'Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka'.
Q 28Which director named his production company 'A Band Apart' as a tribute to Godard's Bande à part?
Quentin Tarantino
He has called it his favourite Godard film.
Q 29In Alphaville (1965), Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution is sent to destroy which dictatorial computer?
Alpha 60
The film has no built sets: 1960s Paris stands in for the future city.
Q 30Alphaville won which top festival prize in 1965?
The Golden Bear at Berlin
The dissidents' lines are faux quotations from Paul Éluard's Capitale de la douleur.