Influential French film director Jean-Luc Godard has died at the age of 91 CBC News

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of French new wave cinema who, decades after its heyday in the 1960s, pushed the boundaries of cinema and inspired iconoclastic directors, died Tuesday at the age of 91, his family said.

Godard was one of the most renowned directors in the world, known for such classics as Breathless and contemptwho broke with convention and helped initiate a new way of filmmaking – with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogues.

“It’s not where you take things — it’s where you take them,” Godard once said.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a Twitter post: “We are losing a national treasure.”

Godard 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 the cause of death as assisted suicide.

A medical report recently revealed that the director had “multiple debilitating pathologies,” according to the family’s statement, who did not specify the conditions.

face of the new wave movement

Godard wasn’t the only one to create France’s New Wave, an honor he shares with at least a dozen colleagues, including François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them cronies from Paris’ trendy, bohemian Left Bank in the late 1950s years.

However, he became the face of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Hollywood and, even more unlikely, then-communist-ruled Czechoslovakia and Brazil.

“We owe him a lot,” former French culture minister Jack Lang wrote in an email to Reuters. “He filled the cinema with poetry and philosophy. His keen and unique gaze allowed us to see the imperceptible.”

Among those he influenced were American directors Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

British director Edgar Wright said on Twitter on Tuesday that “perhaps no other director has inspired so many people to just pick up a camera and start filming.”

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930 into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, an illustrious investment bank at the time.

This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering paths. Godard met like-minded people whose dissatisfaction with monotonous films that never strayed from convention sowed the seeds of a breakaway movement later dubbed the Nouvelle Vague.

“Sometimes reality is too complex”

With its more direct, unconventional approach to sex, violence, and its explorations of counterculture, anti-war politics, and other changing mores, the New Wave was about innovation in the making of films.

“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it shape,” Godard said.

After working on two films by Jacques Rivette and Rohmer in 1951, Godard attempted to direct his first film while touring with his father across North and South America, but never finished it.

Back in Europe, he took a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the fee he financed his first full film in 1954, action concretea 20-minute documentary about the construction of the dam.

After returning to Paris, Godard worked as a spokesman for an artist agency and made his first feature film in 1957 – All boys are called Patrickpublished in 1959 – and continued to refine his writing.

He also started working on Breathlesss, based on a story by Truffaut. It was to be Godard’s first major success when it was released in March 1960.

The film stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a penniless young thief who takes his cues from Hollywood film gangsters and, after shooting a police officer, flees to Italy with his American girlfriend, played by Jean Seberg.

In 1961, Godard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina, who appeared in a number of films he made during that decade, including to live my life, Alphaville and Crazy Peter – which also starred Belmondo and was allegedly filmed without a script. Marriage with Karina ended in 1965.

in the weekend, his characters mock the hypocrisy of bourgeois society while demonstrating the comic futility of violent class struggles. It was published a year before widespread anger at the establishment swept France and culminated in the legendary student riots of May 1968.

That same year he made an experimental documentary with the Rolling Stones. sympathy for the devil.

Godard also launched a career-long involvement in collective film projects with directors such as Roger Vadim, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini.

Films full of politics

In the 1970s he switched to directing films that were influenced by left-wing anti-war politics. His controversial modern nativity play Ave Maria made headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985.

Godard harbored a lifelong sympathy for various forms of socialism portrayed in films from the early 1970s to early 1990s. In December 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from the European Film Academy.

Godard has been making potshots in Hollywood over the years.

He stayed at home in Switzerland instead of traveling to Hollywood to accept an honorary Oscar at a private ceremony in November 2010 alongside film historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola and actor Eli Wallach.

However, more recent work – including Goodbye to the language 2014 and The picture book in 2018 – were more experimental and largely narrowed audiences down to Godard geeks.

Godard married his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. He later began a relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville.

Godard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979 after moving with Mieville to the Swiss community of Rolle, where he lived with her for the rest of his life.