French film director Jean-Luc Godard dies at 91

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, godfather of French New Wave cinema, has died. this Tuesday (13), at the age of 91, according to Liberation newspaper, citing people close to the French-Swiss director.

Godard was among the most acclaimed directors in the world, known for classics like “Bulled” and “Contempt,” which pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after their heyday in the 1960s.

His films broke with the established conventions of French cinema in the 1960s and helped usher in a new way of making art, complete with portable camera work, jump cuts, and existential dialogue.

For many movie buffs, no words are enough: Godard, with his shaggy black hair and thick-rimmed glasses, was a true revolutionary who made artists out of filmmakers, putting them on the same level as master painters and literary icons.

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

Quentin Tarantino, director of “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” in the 1990s, is often cited as a member of a more recent generation of boundary-bending tradition that Godard and his companions on the Left Bank of Paris started.

Earlier came Martin Scorsese in 1976 with “Taxi Driver,” the disturbing neon-lit psychological thriller about a Vietnam veteran turned taxi driver who drives the streets all night with a growing obsession with the need to clean up decaying New York.

Godard was not everyone’s idol. Canadian wild child director Xavier Dolan, who at 25 shared an award with the octogenarian Godard at the 2014 Cannes film festival, courted controversy as much as Godard but called him “the grumpy old man” and “no hero of mine.” ”.

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

In a demonstration on social media, French President Emmanuel Macron said that “it was like an appearance in French cinema. So he became a master. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers, had invented a decidedly modern and intensely free art. We are missing a national treasure, a look of genius.”

Ce fut comme une apparition dans le cinéma français. Puis il en devint a maître. Jean-Luc Godard, le plus iconoclaste des cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague, avait inventé un art résolument moderne, intensément libre. Nous forgives a national trésor, a regard de génie. pic.twitter.com/bQneeqp8on

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) September 13, 2022