Director Jean-Luc Godard, icon of French New Wave cinema, dies at age 91
September 13, 2022, 2:21 pm

Director Jean-Luc Godard, icon of French New Wave cinema, dies at age 91

Director Jean-Luc Godard, icon of French New Wave cinema, has died at age 91, according to media in France - Photo. Twitter

French news agency AFP reported that Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss director has died aged 91, “peacefully at home” in Switzerland with his wife Anne-Marie Mieville at his side.

In a statement on Tuesday (Sep 13), his family said the Franco-Swiss director had died "peacefully at home". They added: "No official [funeral] ceremony will take place. He will be cremated."

Godard was a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionised cinema in the late 1950s and 60s.

Best known for his iconoclastic, seemingly improvised filming style, as well as unbending radicalism, Godard made his mark with a series of increasingly politicised films in the 1960s, before enjoying an unlikely career revival in recent years, with films such as Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language as he experimented with digital technology, according to The Gurdian.

The French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “We’ve lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius”. He said Godard was a “master” of cinema – “the most iconoclastic of the Nouvelle Vague”.

"Le cinéma n'est pas à l'abri du temps. Il est l'abri du temps."
Jean-Luc Godard, 1930-2022 pic.twitter.com/qHEpF1gqbQ
— La Cinémathèque (@cinemathequefr) September 13, 2022

Godard started as a film critic before stepping behind the camera with the stylish and edgy Breathless. Its stars Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo were glamorous in a new, casual way, while the camera was constantly moving, the editing was swift and bold, and the script semi-improvised.

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The director once said: "It was a film that took everything that cinema had done - girls, gangsters, cars - exploded all this and put an end, once and for all, to the old style."

Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, in reference to the latter film's original French title, and once said Godard was "so influential" to him as a director.

"Godard is one who taught me the fun and the freedom and the joy of breaking rules… I consider Godard to be to cinema what Bob Dylan was to music," he said.

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He had more than 100 films to his name in total, also including Une Femme Mariée (1964), Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966) and Week-end (1967).

Godard received an honorary Oscar in 2011, with the dedication reading: "For passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema."

Born in Paris in 1930, Godard grew up and went to school in Nyon, on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

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