Jean-Luc Godard

According to French media outlets, the famous director has died at 91.

Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who shared an award with Godard at the Cannes film festival in 2014, said Godard was a "grinchy old man" and "no hero of mine". French President Emmanuel Macron has taken to social media to pay tribute to Godard who he said was a "national treasure". - French President Emmanuel Macron described Godard as a "national treasure"

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave cinema, has died aged 91, newspaper Liberation says,...

He switched to directing films steeped in leftist, anti-war politics through the 1970s before returning to a more commercial mainstream. Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris's plush Seventh Arrondissement. This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering ways. His sharp and unique eye made us see the imperceptible." Godard was not everyone's idol. "He filled cinema with poetry and philosophy.

French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Godard as “the most iconoclastic of the New Wave directors”.

Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a first brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to The Seven Deadly Sins along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrests of May 1968. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. He profiled the early Rolling Stones, gave a voice to Marxist, leftist and 1960s-era Black Power politics, and his controversial modern nativity play “Hail Mary” grabbed headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985.

Godard revolutionised popular cinema and stood for years as one of the world's most provocative filmmakers.

His work turned more political by the late 1960s. Notable among them were My Life to Live, Alphaville and Crazy Pete. He was friends with future big-name directors Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris’s plush Seventh Arrondissement. In 1961, Godard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina, who appeared in a string of movies he made during the remainder of the 1960s, all of them seen as New Wave landmarks. We have lost a national treasure, a genius,” Macron tweeted.

A titan in the history of film, the French New Wave director's groundbreaking movies changed the medium forever.

More comfortable on the European festival circuit, he was nominated for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion award eight times, receiving an honorary award in 1982 and the accolade itself in 1983. Ardently dismissive of cinematic traditions, director Quentin Tarantino praised Godard’s ability to be “thumbing his nose at cinema technique but always finding some clever anti-version of technique.” Such was the impact of the work that film critic and New York Film Festival founder Richard Roud once opined, “There is the cinema before Godard and the cinema after Godard.”

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard -- a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s and 60s ...

"It was like an apparition in French cinema," Macron tweeted. Godard's first feature film, "À bout de souffle" ("Breathless") in 1960, was a celebration of the nonchalant improvisational cinematography that became synonymous with his style. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave directors, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art.

Godard's political ardour fuelled by the May 68 upheaval in France led to the shutting down of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students ...

His political ardour, fuelled by the May ‘68 upheavals in France, would culminate in protest, co-organised by François Truffaut, that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Being an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy, the intellectual penchants resound in his moving images that often touch upon socio-political issues. He threw down the gauntlet to mainstream French cinema's “Tradition of Quality”, which enshrined established convention rather than innovation and experimentation.

The ingenious “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who revolutionised popular cinema in 1960 with his debut feature Breathless has died, French media ...

In December 2007 he was honoured by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to The Seven Deadly Sins along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrest of May 1968. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

With “Breathless” in 1960, the filmmaker rode the crest of the French New Wave movement to liberate a hidebound movie industry.

Mr. One of Mr. Reemerging in the 1980s based in Rolle, Mr. In the meantime, Mr. “Breathless,” one of Mr. At his best, Mr. Much of “Breathless,” made on a shoestring budget, was filmed by handheld camera on the streets of Paris. The award revived a long-standing debate about whether Mr. Sontag wrote that Mr. Hollywood studios tended to look on movies as a collaborative effort organized by a producer, but Mr. Where a playfulness and exuberance pervaded his early films, Mr. These techniques and motifs set a template for much of his later work, with characters who stepped out of character to wink, wave and mug at the camera.

Godard, the "enfant terrible" of the French New Wave who revolutionized popular cinema in 1960 with his debut feature Breathless, stood for years as one of ...

In December 2007 he was honored by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrests of May 1968. Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to The Seven Deadly Sins along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

Jean-Luc Godard died "peacefully" at his home in Switzerland, his family said.

His breakthrough, “Breathless,” was a blockbuster that sold more than 2 million tickets in France when it debuted. After Agnes Varda, who was also closely associated with the New Wave movement, died in 2019, Goddard was one of the last survivors. That was his foray into film-making with “Operation Concrete.” In 1949, he enrolled as an ethnology student at the Sorbonne in Paris before dropping out. Godard’s work took on a more sociological turn in the late 1960s. His mother, Odile, belonged to a wealthy family of bankers. It was a desire to show that everything was allowed.” That year, Godard embraced socialism by setting up a Marxist cinema collective called Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet director. His father, Paul-Jean, studied medicine in France before moving the family to Switzerland, where he had found work in a clinic. The movie introduced an aesthetic revolution with new filming techniques, the use of hand-held cameras and jump cuts that gave the viewer the impression of moving forward in time. “It’s a movie that’s been made in reaction to everything that wasn’t being made,” Godard said in an interview in 1960. The filmmaker used assisted suicide, which in his case was medically and legally validated, Godard’s legal counsel

The medical report on death of 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life.

[Libération](https://www.liberation.fr/culture/jean-luc-godard-est-mort-20220913_LLEGXZFQSFDC3FBJCP7AWXSYWI/) quoted an unnamed source close to the family who said: “He was not sick, he was simply exhausted. During Macron’s campaign for reelection earlier this spring, he had promised to open the issue up to debate, suggesting he was personally in favour of legalising doctor-assisted dying. He “had recourse to legal assistance in Switzerland for a voluntary departure” because he was “stricken with ‘multiple incapacitating illnesses’”, Godard’s legal council, Patrick Jeanneret, told AFP. not at all,” he said. He said he didn’t foresee wanting to continue living at any cost. Asked whether he could imagine resorting to assisted dying, he said: “yes”, but added “for now”, saying that the choice was “still very difficult.”

The French director did more than transform the aesthetic and the practice of filmmaking—he turned the cinema into the central art form of his time.

To the end of his life, he was still fighting his way up and in, even from the heights of cinematic history that he had scaled. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. (I interviewed Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who called the town Rollywood.) Godard made his domestic activities and local observations converge with the history of the cinema and the grand-scale politics of his era. At the restaurant where we ate, he was voluble, and his conversation was wide-ranging, embracing Shakespeare (we discussed “Coriolanus”) and “Schindler’s List,” the Second World War and the later films of classic Hollywood directors and aspects of his own youth (such as his avoidance of military service both in France and in Switzerland), and he talked of food (the coffee and the local fish), and made winking fun of the shirt that a man at another table was wearing. There was no legend to look up to, no dominant figure to inspire or overawe; I naïvely but sincerely saw the film face to face, so to speak, and saw him in it the same way, as a filmmaker virtually addressing his audience, across the decades, in real time. And, as prolific as he was during his first flush of artistic fervor, he was even more so at the time of his return—though he made fewer features (“only” eighteen from 1980 onward), he also created video essays, including the monumental “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that were crucibles, epilogues, and living notebooks for his features. He sought a culture of his own, and, with his largely autodidactic passion for movies, he found one that was resolutely modern—and that, with his intellectual fervor, he helped raise to equality with the classics. Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort and propriety—his father was a doctor, his mother was a medical assistant and the scion of a major banking family—and his artistic interests were encouraged, but his voyage into the cinema was a self-conscious revolt against his cultural heritage. At twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Cahiers, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of rigorously reasoned artistic freedom; at twenty-five, he wrote an instant-classic essay on film editing, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. What he retained to the very end of his career (his final feature, “ [The Image Book](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-image-book-reviewed-jean-luc-godard-confronts-cinemas-depiction-of-the-arab-world),” was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of adventure. [to Bob Dylan’s](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bob-dylan-in-correspondence).) Yet, like many artistic heroes of the sixties, Godard found that his public image and his private life, his fame and his ambitions, came into conflict. But it wasn’t just the news that made his films feel like the embodiment of their times—it was Godard’s insolence, his defiance, his derisive humor, his sense of freedom.