Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Breathless’ Director and French New Wave Icon, Dead at 91.
A former film critic who wrote for the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma during its heyday of the 1950s, Godard emerged onto the scene in 1960 with his seminal debut feature, Breathless, which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
The Paris-set crime caper, which starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, forever changed the course of movies and heralded the arrival of cinematic modernism. Using jump cuts, nods to the camera and other meta-fictional devices, Breathless constantly interrupted and commented on the story as it was happening.
Those two movies played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where they won the Jury Prize and a Special Palme d’Or, respectively, though Godard never received the fest’s top prize in his lifetime. Nor did he ever win France’s Cesar Award, for which he was nominated twice, while in the U.S., he was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010.
Famous for his acerbic and political commentary that graced his trove of writings, interviews and news conferences as well as the dialogue and voiceovers of his films, Godard was an outspoken critic of everything from Charles de Gaulle to the Vietnam War to Hollywood to capitalism to filmmakers whose work he tore apart in his reviews or in public — including movies by such contemporaries as fellow French New Wave director Francois Truffaut, with whom he publicly split in the late 1970s.
Godard burst onto the scene with 1960’s À bout de souffle (Breathless), which started a run of acclaimed releases that rewrote the rules of film.
His work brought a new verve and daring to cinema and influenced directors from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Godard “had the vision of a genius”.
In a tribute on Twitter, Mr Macron wrote: “He was like an apparition in French cinema. Then he became a master of it.
Contempt, from 1963, starring Brigitte Bardot, was named by Scorsese as one of his 10 favourite movies. It is “one of the most moving films of its era” and Godard was “the great modern visual artists of cinema”, the Taxi Driver director wrote in 2014.
Godard’s storylines also mixed up time and space, changing the idea of a fixed narrative. He once said: “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order.”
He had more than 100 films to his name in total, also including Une Femme Mariée (1964), Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966) and Week-end (1967).
His most recent work was released in 2018, although some thought Godard became wilfully obscure as his career went on.
Godard received an honorary Oscar in 2011, with the dedication reading: “For passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema.”
Godard’s subsequent ’60s films honed his freewheeling, documentary-style cinematography and often starred Anna Karina, a paragon of on-screen ennui whom he married in 1961 after casting her in Une femme est une femme. From 1967’s Week-end, Godard’s films became increasingly political and Marxist. His 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil mixes scenes of the Rolling Stones recording the titular song with images of Black Panthers reading revolutionary texts. In the ’80s, Godard returned to more traditional filmmaking. His 2014 film Goodbye to Language won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His final film released in his lifetime, The Image Book, took the form of a visual essay that issued a challenge to politically tame filmmakers.
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