Jean-Luc Godard: Iconic French director who revolutionised post-war cinema

PARIS, September 13

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Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France’s New Wave cinema who pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after his 1960s heyday, died on Tuesday aged 91, his family and producers said. Godard was among the world’s most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as “Breathless” and “Contempt”, which broke away from convention and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

His classics Breathless & Contempt helped kickstart new way of filmmaking

“Jean-Luc Godard died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones,” his wife Anne-Marie Mieville and producers said in a statement published by several French media. Godard will be cremated and there will be no official ceremony, they said. French daily Liberation, which first reported the news, said Godard chose to end his life through assisted suicide, a practice allowed under Swiss law, citing a person close to the family as saying that “it was his decision and it was important to him that people know about it”.

For many movie buffs, no praise is high enough: Godard, with his tousled black hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, was a veritable revolutionary who made artists of movie-makers, putting them on a par with master painters and icons of literature.

“A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” Godard once said.

Godard was not alone in creating France’s New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers, including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

However, he became the poster child of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Hollywood and, more improbably, in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia as well as in Brazil.

“Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the New Wave, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We are losing a national treasure, a look of genius,” President Emmanuel Macron tweeted. — Reuters