Jean-Luc Godard, the brilliant “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who transformed popular filmmaking in 1960 with his debut film “Breathless” and for decades stood as one of the world’s most dynamic and provocative directors, has passed away. He was 91.
Tuesday, the Swiss news agency ATS cited Godard’s partner Anne-Marie Mieville and her producers as stating that he passed away quietly and surrounded by his loved ones at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle on Lake Geneva.
Macron praised Godard as “the most rebellious of the New Wave directors” who “created a genuinely modern, passionately liberated art form.”
Ce fut comme une apparition dans le cinéma francais. Puis il en devint un maitre. Jean-Luc Godard, le plus iconoclaste des cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague, avait inventé un art résolument moderne, intensément free. Nous perdons un trésor national, un regard de génie. pic.twitter.com/bQneeqp8on
13 September 2022 — Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron), Twitter
He continued, “We have lost the eye of a genius, a national treasure.”
Throughout a lengthy career that began in the 1950s as a cinema critic, Godard bucked convention. He redefined camera, sound, and narrative rules.
His films helped push Jean-Paul Belmondo to celebrity, and the 1985 condemnation of his controversial modern nativity play “Hail Mary” by Pope John Paul II made headlines.
But Godard also made a series of pictures that were frequently politically charged and experimental, which delighted few outside of a small fan base and frustrated many reviewers with their alleged exaggerated brilliance.
Director of the Cannes Film Festival Thierry Fremaux told the Associated Press on Tuesday that he was “very saddened” by the news of Godard’s passing.
Godard was born into a wealthy French-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris. He grew up in Nyon, Switzerland, and studied ethnology at the Sorbonne in France’s capital, where he became increasingly drawn to the cultural scene that flourished in the “cine-club” of the Latin Quarter after World War II.
In 1950, he launched the short-lived Gazette du Cinema. In 1952, he began contributing to the respected film journal Cahiers du Cinema.
After working on two films by Rivette and Rohmer in 1951, Godard attempted to complete his first picture while traveling with his father through North and South America, but was unsuccessful.
Back in Europe, he accepted a position as a dam construction worker in Switzerland. He used the payment to produce his first complete film, the 1954 20-minute documentary “Operation Concrete” on the construction of the dam.
Returning to Paris, Godard worked as a spokesperson for an artists’ agency and made his first feature film, “All Boys Are Named Patrick,” in 1957. The film was released in 1959, and Godard continued to refine his writing skills.
He also began work on “Breathless,” an adaptation of a Truffaut short tale. It was Godard’s first major success upon its March 1960 premiere.
The film stars Belmondo as a poor teenage robber who fashions himself after Hollywood gangsters and, after shooting a police officer, flees to Italy with his American girlfriend, Jean Seeberg.
Similar to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Godard’s picture established a new artistic standard for French cinema. Godard eschewed the traditional narrative structure in favor of many jump cuts that intercut philosophical conversations with action scenes.
All of it was spiced up with references to Hollywood gangster films and allusions to literature and the visual arts.
Godard also began a career-long participation in collaborative film projects by providing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” alongside Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. Godard also collaborated with Ugo Gregoretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Roberto Rossellini on the Italian film Let’s Have a Brainwash, with his scenes depicting an unsettling post-apocalyptic world.
Godard, who eventually became known for his uncompromising leftist political views, had a run-in with French authorities in 1960 when he made “The Little Soldier.” The film, which contained references to France’s colonial war in Algeria, was not published until 1963, a year after the conflict ended.
In the late 1960s, his work became increasingly political. In “Week End,” his characters lampoon both the hypocrisy of bourgeois society and the comic futility of class warfare. It was published a year prior to the French student uprisings of May 1968, which culminated in the iconic but brief student unrest.
Godard had a lifelong affinity for the various types of socialism portrayed in his films from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. In December 2007, the European Film Academy honored him with a lifetime achievement award.
Jean-Luc Godard smokes at the Cannes Film Festival in France on May 25, 1982. Jean-Jacques Levy / AP
Godard took jabs at Hollywood throughout his career.
In November 2010, he remained in Switzerland rather than traveling to Hollywood to receive an honorary Oscar alongside film preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola, and actor Eli Wallach.
Despite his declaration that he sympathized with the Jewish people and their plight in Nazi-occupied Europe, his lifelong advocacy for the Palestinian cause led him repeated allegations of antisemitism.
Tom Sherak, president of the Organization of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stated that Godard was acknowledged purely “for his contributions to film in the New Wave era” despite the fact that the academy had some concerns regarding Godard’s selection for the prize.
Godard released “Film Socialisme” in 2010, a three-chapter film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1961, Godard wed the Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina. She participated in a series of his films during the remainder of the 1960s, all of which are considered to be New Wave classics. Notable among them were “My Life to Live,” “Alphaville,” and “Crazy Pete,” which reportedly was shot without a script and starring Belmondo. They split up in 1965.
In 1967, Godard wed his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky. Later, he began dating the Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville. Godard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979, after relocating to the Swiss municipality of Rolle with Miéville, where he remained for the remainder of his life.
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