Jean-Luc Godard

His debut, Breathless, began an ingenious and provocative career as an 'enfant terrible' of world cinema.

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. He used the pay to finance his first complete film in 1954, Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. His work turned more starkly political by the late 1960s. In 2010, Godard released Film Socialisme, a film in three chapters first shown at the Cannes Film Festival. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

Critic-turned-filmmaker Godard is known for films including 'Breathless' and 'Contempt'.

Godard was married twice, to Anna Karina from 1961 to 1965, and Anne Wiazemsky from 1967 to 1979. Both ladies were leading actresses in his films. He worked as a critic for then newly-founded French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1952, before making his first fiction short Une femme coquette in 1955.

Following the death of pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who died aged 91, tributes have poured in across social media for the filmmaker.

It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting…” Godard is one who taught me the fun and the freedom and the joy of breaking rules…and just fucking around with the entire medium but I consider Godard to be to cinema what Bob Dylan was to music.” Jean-Luc Godard’ and linked to his band Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 2015 album, Musique de Film Imaginé, which was inspired by the filmmaker. He broke the rules of filmmaking with his trademark irreverence, which, paradoxically, became the primary rule for most New Wave surges in global cinema. Godard first established himself in the late 1950s as part of the Nouvelle Vague movement, which helped revolutionise cinema. His oeuvre can be broken down into various periods, all of which espoused vastly differing artistic sensibilities, but they all had his revolutionary spirit in common.

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

Godard was not everyone's idol. [Quentin Tarantino](/topic/quentin-tarantino), director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs in the 1990s, is often cited as one of a more recent generation of boundary-bending tradition that Godard and his Paris Left Bank cohorts initiated. The French-Swiss director was a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionised cinema in the late 1950s and 60s

'Breathless' director influenced generations of film-makers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.

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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.

The director revolutionised cinema with New Wave films such as 'Breathless'

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Jean-Luc Godard, who transformed cinema with his radical film-making style, has died at the age of 91. Here is a look back at some of his most seminal works. Film still from Breathless. Image source, Shutterstock. "Modern movies begin here," wrote film ...

"It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies." Godard was the recipient of numerous other awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2011, for which the inscription read: "For passion. In 1968, Godard travelled to the UK intending to make a film about abortion. Contempt is often taken as a commentary on the machinations of the film industry, and Godard certainly faced uncomfortable compromises while making it. The following year, he helped to shut down the Cannes Film Festival in sympathy with the Paris student riots. If you have a story suggestion email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). Godard's original cut didn't include the full performance of Sympathy For The Devil. There, he captured the goosebump-raising moment when they wrote Sympathy For The Devil. "Modern movies begin here," wrote film critic Roger Ebert of Godard's debut feature Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960). It became one of his biggest critical and commercial successes. Here is a look back at some of his most seminal works. in her own home.

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard has died at the age of 91, the French newspaper Liberation has reported.

Forever living up to his reputation as an iconoclast, Jean-Luc defended the techniques and aesthetics of Hollywood’s golden-age directors, though he spurned the Hollywood studio system in his own work – preferring to take his camera to the streets of Paris and work on a shoestring budget. Godard was born in Paris in 1930 and grew up in Nyon on the banks of Lake Geneva. Godard was a key figure in the Nouvalle Vague scene of the 1950s and ’60s and is widely regarded as having revolutionised European cinema.

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.

Jean-Luc Godard, who transformed cinema with his radical film-making style, has died at the age of 91. · It was also the first film in which Godard directed his muse and future wife Anna Karina.

"It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies." Godard was the recipient of numerous other awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2011, for which the inscription read: "For passion. In 1968, Godard travelled to the UK intending to make a film about abortion. Contempt is often taken as a commentary on the machinations of the film industry, and Godard certainly faced uncomfortable compromises while making it. The following year, he helped to shut down the Cannes Film Festival in sympathy with the Paris student riots. If you have a story suggestion email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). Godard's original cut didn't include the full performance of Sympathy For The Devil. There, he captured the goosebump-raising moment when they wrote Sympathy For The Devil. "Modern movies begin here," wrote film critic Roger Ebert of Godard's debut feature Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960). It became one of his biggest critical and commercial successes. Here is a look back at some of his most seminal works. in her own home.

Jean-Luc Godard, one of the world's most revered film directors, known for his radical techniques and open-ended narrative structures, has died, the French ...

In 2018, he released “Le Livre d’image,” an essay-film full of “Godard’s familiar end-of-civilization motifs,” [as a Los Angeles Times critic put it](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-the-image-book-review-20190213-story.html), that focused on the Middle East. In 1998, Godard completed Histoire(s) du cinéma, a nearly four-hour, subjective rumination on film history that some consider the most important piece of his later career. The latter was acclaimed, with many critics calling it one of the year’s best. He found a minor second wind with 1982’s Passion, a story about filmmaking that starred Isabelle Huppert, but most of his work was dense and obscure. Godard’s staunch opposition to the Vietnam War was a trademark of 1967’s Two Or Three Things I Know About Her. Godard was the first to use prominent jump-cuts, today considered a groundbreaking advancement in film editing. “Language” won a jury prize at Cannes, but a producer accepted on Godard’s behalf. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation (minus the racism), Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He was determined to restore silent-film values to the well-established world of talkies. Scott wrote](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html): “Even now, at 50, it is still cool, still new, still — after all this time! Godard’s big-screen debut is one of the most auspicious directorial introductions in history, every bit as promising as D.W. — a bulletin from the future of movies.”

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.

Swiss news agency ATS quoted Godard's partner Anne-Marie Mieville and her producers as saying he died peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones at his home in ...

In December 2007, he was honoured by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. 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. Godard harboured a life-long sympathy for various forms of socialism depicted in films ranging from the early 1970s to early 1990s. Godard defied convention over a long career that began in the 1950s as a film critic. [Emmanuel Macron](/topic/emmanuel-macron) paid tribute to Godard as “the most iconoclastic of the New Wave directors” who “invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art form”. Director Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of French New Wave film who revolutionised popular 1960s cinema, has died at the age of 91.

The French New Wave director, who has died aged 91, never stopped playfully interrogating the artform, his own work, and the world: a true artist in every ...

So here’s to a life lived on its own terms and a body of work that proves it, from his crashing the barriers during the May 1968 riots to reinventing the visual grammar of modern film. Godard never stopped playfully interrogating the artform, his own work, and the world: a true artist in every sense. In the 60s and 70s, Godard would only become more radical, straining the very limits of motion picture sound and image, forever shifting the ideological and visual goalposts.

The lawyer of legendary French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard confirmed that Godard had chosen to end his life through assisted dying.

The paper also referenced a 2014 interview with Godard where the director explained his desire to end his life on his own terms if the situation came to that. Now, Godard’s legal council has confirmed that the director decided to end his own life through assisted suicide. The 91-year-old was one of the most influential visionaries that the medium had ever seen, becoming the face of the French New Wave thanks to his work on movies like Breathless and Contempt.

When a figure as titanic as Jean-Luc Godard dies in the middle of a film festival like Toronto, it feels like the world should just stop.

They’re too old to kick their legs up the way they did, but they dance with abandon and good cheer, in a way the real Varda and Godard never got to. [break into a dance called the Madison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61H_xl9dzgI). Faces Places didn’t turn out to be Varda’s final film—that ended up being 2019’s Varda by Agnès, a sort of self-curated retrospective of a career that only received its proper reverence in her last years—but it has the feeling of one, not least because one of its subjects is how Varda’s failing eyesight makes it increasingly difficult to make movies. The two were early allies, although Varda made her first movie while Godard was still an aspiring critic, and Godard appears in a film within Varda’s breakthrough feature, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7, starring in a short silent-film pastiche which the movie’s protagonist watches during the titular timespan. [Agnès Varda](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/oscars-honoree-agnes-varda-is-a-documentary-giant.html) and [Documentary Now!](https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/documentary-now-season-3-review-cate-blanchett-bill-hader.html), the news that the latter would be devoting an episode to parodying the former took me to the happiest of places. [pointed out Tuesday morning](https://twitter.com/cameron_tiff/status/1569655393399209984) after the news broke, Godard had hardened into such an anti-sentimental crank that he might have taken an outpouring of flowery postmortem sentiment as an affront.

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.