By Brian Love
PARIS (Reuters) – Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the leading figure in the French film movement Nouvelle Vague, which pushed the boundaries of cinema and inspired directors decades after its heyday in the 1960s, died on Tuesday at the age of 91 of age, informed his family and producers.
Godard was among the most acclaimed directors in the world, known for classics like “Bulled” and “Contempt,” which broke with convention and helped usher in a new way of filmmaking, with handheld camera work and existential dialogue.
“Jean-Luc Godard died peacefully at home, surrounded by his loved ones,” said the filmmaker’s wife, Anne-Marie Mieville, and his producers in a statement published by several French media outlets. Godard’s body will be cremated and there will be no official ceremony, they added.
For many movie buffs, no amount of praise is enough: Godard, with his unkempt black hair and heavy-lensed glasses, was a true revolutionary who turned filmmakers into artists, putting them on an equal footing with master painters and literary icons.
“A movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” Godard once said.
Godard was not the only one to create the French Nouvelle Vague, a credit he shares with at least a dozen colleagues, including François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them friends with the hip, bohemian left bank of Paris in the late 1950s.
However, he became the icon of a movement, which had repercussions in Japan, Hollywood and, more unlikely, in what was then communist Czechoslovakia and Brazil.
“Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the Nouvelle Vague, invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We are losing a national treasure, a look of genius,” tweeted French President Emmanuel Macron.
Quentin Tarantino, director of the 1990s cult films “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs,” is among a more recent generation of filmmakers who have taken up the mantle of the tradition started by Godard and his colleagues in Paris.
Before that came Martin Scorsese in 1976 with “Taxi Driver,” the disturbing neon-lit psychological thriller about a Vietnam war veteran turned taxi driver who spends his nights on the streets with a growing obsession with the need to clean up New York.
“Rest in peace, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential iconoclastic filmmakers of all,” said film director Edgar Wright. “It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio’s film production system, as perhaps no other director has inspired so many people to pick up a camera and start filming…”
Godard was not, however, universally revered. Among its most scathing critics was the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, himself a pioneer in European cinema who is perhaps best known for his 1957 films “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries.”
“I never took anything from (Godard’s) films. They felt built up, faked intellectuals and completely dead. Cinematically uninteresting and endlessly boring,” he once said in an interview, according to his foundation’s website.
NEW WAVE, NEW FORMS
Godard was born into a wealthy Swiss-French family on December 3, 1930, in Paris. His father was a doctor, his mother was the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank.
This creation contrasted with the pioneering paths he would follow later. Godard mingled with like-minded people whose dissatisfaction with humor films that never deviated from convention sowed the seeds of a disruptive movement that came to be called the Nouvelle Vague.
With its bolder, more outspoken approach to sex, violence and its explorations of counterculture, anti-war politics and other changing customs, Nouvelle Vague was about innovation in filmmaking.
Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of shorts and feature films over the course of more than half a century starting in the late 1950s.
“Sometimes reality is very complex. Stories give it shape,” Godard said.
Most of her most influential and commercially successful films came in the 1960s, including “Living Life”, “The Eleven O’Clock Demon”, “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “French Week-End”.
He switched to directing films steeped in leftist and anti-war politics during the 1970s, before returning to a more commercial stream. Recent works, however – among them “Adeus à Linguagem”, from 2014, and “O Livro de Imagem”, from 2018 – have been more experimental and restricted to an audience of Godard aficionados.
(Additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Sophie Louet)
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