Godard, godfather of France’s New Wave, dies

PARIS: 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 with convention and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

Godard, 91, died peacefully and surrounded by loved ones at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle, on Lake Geneva, his family said in a statement. The statement gave assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland, as the cause of death.
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, a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers, including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them pals from the trendy, bohemian Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s. 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.

For the low-budget “Breathless,” Godard relied on a mobile, lightweight camera to capture street scenes. He dispensed with contrived backdrops and the “artifice” of Hollywood cinema of the time. The impact was immediate — “Breathless” arrived like a cinematic thunderclap when it was released in 1960 — and lasting. Most of his most influential and successful films came in the 1960s, including “Vivre Sa Vie” (My Life to Live), “Pierrot le Fou”, “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “Weekend”.

He switched to directing films steeped in leftist, anti-war politics through the 1970s before returning to more mainstream. Recent works, however — among them “Goodbye to Language” in 2014 and “The Image Book” in 2018 were more experimental and slimmed the audience largely to Godard geeks.