Godard was one of the world’s most accomplished directors, known for classics like Breathless and Contempt, which broke convention and helped usher in a new way of filmmaking — with handheld camerawork, jump cuts and existential dialogue. “It’s not where you get things from – it’s where you take them,” Godard once said. French President Emmanuel Macron, in a tweet, said: “We are losing a national treasure.” Godard died peacefully 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 the director had “multiple disabling pathologies,” according to the family statement, which did not specify the conditions.
Face of the New Wave movement
Godard was not alone in creating France’s New Wave, a credit he shares with at least a dozen colleagues, including François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of whom were friends from Paris’s fashionable, bohemian Left Bank at the end of the decade of 1950. Godard appears in March 1960 with actress Jeanne Semberg, co-star of Breathless. (AFP/Getty Images) However, he became the face of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Hollywood and, more improbably, then-communist Czechoslovakia, as well as Brazil. “We owe him a lot,” former French culture minister Jacques Lange wrote in an emailed statement to Reuters. “He filled the cinema with poetry and philosophy. His sharp and unique eye made us see the subtle.” Among those he influenced were American directors Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. British filmmaker Edgar Wright said on Twitter on Tuesday that “perhaps no other filmmaker has inspired so many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting.” Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss who founded Banque Paribas, then a famous investment bank. This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering ways. Godard consorted with like-minded people whose dissatisfaction with dull films that never escaped convention sowed the seeds of a breakaway movement called the Nouvelle Vague.
“Sometimes reality is very complicated”
With its more honest, outlandish approach to sex, violence, and its explorations of counterculture, antiwar politics, and other shifting morals, the New Wave was about innovation in filmmaking. “Sometimes reality is very complicated. Stories give it form,” Godard said. Thank you Mr. Godard for expanding the boundaries of cinema. Gracias Jean-Luc Godard for enhancing language cinema. RIP pic.twitter.com/YuAJ6wiBqo —@antoniobanderas After working on two films by Jacques Rivette and Rohmer in 1951, Godard attempted to direct his first film while traveling through North and South America with his father, but never completed it. Back in Europe, he got a job in Switzerland as a builder on a dam project. He used the fee to finance his first full-length film in 1954, Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the construction of the dam. Returning to Paris, Godard worked as a representative for an artists’ agency and made his first film in 1957 — All Boys Are Called Patrick, released in 1959 — and continued to hone his writing. He also began work on Breathless, based on a story by Truffaut. It would be Godard’s first major hit when it was released in March 1960. The film stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a penniless young thief modeled after a Hollywood gangster who, after shooting a police officer, runs off to Italy with his American girlfriend, played by Jean Seberg. In 1961, Godard married the Danish model and actress Anna Karina, who appeared in a number of films he made during that decade, including My Life to Live, Alphaville and Crazy Pete — which also starred Belmondo and is rumored to have been filmed without a script. The marriage with Karina ended in 1965. Godard appears between Bill Wyman, left, and Mick Jagger while directing Sympathy for the Devil, July 30, 1968. (Hutton File/Getty Images) In Week End, his characters mock the hypocrisy of bourgeois society even as they demonstrate the comic futility of violent class warfare. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment rocked France, culminating in the iconic student unrest of May 1968. In the same year he directed an experimental documentary with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Godard also began what was to be a participation in collaborative film projects, with directors such as Roger Vadim, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini.
Films steeped in politics
In the 1970s he switched to directing films steeped in left-wing, anti-war politics. His controversial contemporary play Hail Mary made headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985. Godard had a lifelong sympathy for various forms of socialism depicted in films ranging from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. In December 2007 he was honored by the European Film Academy with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Godard, who appeared at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in France in 1997, rarely went outside Europe for work. (Getty Images) Godard has been potshotting at Hollywood over the years. He stayed home in Switzerland instead of traveling to Hollywood to receive the honorary Oscar at a private ceremony in November 2010, along with film historian and curator Kevin Brownlow, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola and actor Eli Wallach. However, recent works – including 2014’s Goodbye to Language and 2018’s The Image Book – have been more experimental and thinned out the audience largely to Godard geeks. RIP Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential, iconoclastic filmmakers of all. It was ironic that he himself respected the Hollywood studio filmmaking system, as perhaps no other director inspired so many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting… pic.twitter.com/KFOnnQ1H6n —@edgarwright Godard married his second wife, Anne Wiazemski, in 1967. He later began a relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville. Godard divorced Viazemski in 1979, after moving with Miéville to the Swiss municipality of Rolle, where he lived with her for the rest of his life.
