It was exactly 50 years ago that a young French film director named Jean-Luc Godard tore the cinema wide open with his aptly titled debut feature, "Breathless." Godard's rapid-fire gangster flick and the dozen-odd films that followed over the next seven years remain more blazingly, dizzyingly modern than anything else in movies. Trylon Microcinema's monthlong sampling of '60s Godard presents a quartet of 35mm prints from the peak period of the world's greatest living filmmaker, who turns a youthful 80 this year.

By the time of his fifth feature, "Contempt" (Feb. 19-20), in 1963, Godard had become the most radically experimental figure of the French New Wave. For this, he was ironically awarded a conventional studio movie, based on an Alberto Moravia novel and budgeted at $1 million (huge at the time). Telling the semi-autobiographical tale of a marriage's unraveling during an Italian film shoot, Godard playfully obliged his sex-crazed producers by throwing in gratuitous shots of Brigitte Bardot's bare bottom. Yet for these images, the director put a variety of colored filters over the lens -- so that his collaborators would be forced to take a little art with their titillation.

On myriad levels, the melancholy "Contempt" is a movie about the dangers of sleeping with devils. No wonder Godard's immediate follow-up, "Band of Outsiders" (Feb. 26-27), found him scurrying back to the industry's periphery. Brisk rather than brooding, and shot in black-and-white, it's a grungy gangster-movie-cum-screwball-comedy. Even the violence is slapsticky. Godard's wayward wife, Anna Karina, plays the flirty Odile opposite Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur as bumbling guys who'd do anything to be with her. The three members of this love triangle bounce around each other as if they're in a pinball machine. Near a jukebox, they suddenly break into a dance number, as Godard seems to ask, "Why can't this be a musical, too?"

"Band of Outsiders" is among Godard's slightest movies, but embedded in it is a running debate over what's classical and what's modern. Amazingly, the movie is both. Not so Godard's "Made in U.S.A." (Fri.-Sat.), whose chaos theory of cinema was light years ahead of its time. By 1966, the director was moving away from both conventional storytelling and Karina. His wife's part in "Made in U.S.A." is as a trenchcoat-clad investigator, a female Humphrey Bogart. But her true role is that of a gorgeous model, a beauty Godard can't yet bear to take his eyes off of. Indeed, for all its references to Bogie's "The Big Sleep," the movie arguably amounts to little more than a widescreen Technicolor excuse for Godard to shoot endless close-ups of his soon to be lost love. And what's wrong with that?

Nothing, although the personal becomes thrillingly political in what may be Godard's greatest movie, "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her" (Feb. 12-13). "2 or 3 Things" loads its cinematic cart full of consumer goods, the better to critique the excesses of modern culture. Like Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Godard was not only working like crazy in '66 but biting the hand that feeds. We're all prostitutes, argues "2 or 3 Things," which finds Godard following a day in the life of a hooker while tossing in advertising, philosophy, war commentary and whatever else struck him as being of the moment.

As it happens, almost a half-century later, that moment is still right now.