Jean-Luc Godard’s films teach us to demand more from the lives we’re given | Lynsey Hanley

The work of the French-Swiss director, who died this week, is playful - but deadly serious about what life is for

According to Jean-Luc Godard, movies give us truth at 24 frames per second". If you watch the films of the French-Swiss director, who died this week aged 91, you'll understand what he means, though not in the most obvious ways. His work taught me as much about how truths are messed about, obfuscated and subverted in our age of mass media as any academic writing has done, not least because I was able to watch it at home on television.

I came to Godard's films in my late teens, as a first-generation student raised on whatever was showing on The Four TV Channels. That very lack of choice made what was shown all the more significant. It helped that there was an evident attempt to avoid medium-brow sludge, and instead offer a little bit of everything.

Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide