Jean-Luc Godard, the French director and writer, has died at 91, the French newspaper Libération has reported.
Widely considered one of the finest auteur directors in history, Godard was a founding father of French cinema’s New Wave movement. He rose to prominence through the 1960s following the release of his ground-breaking 1959 film, Breathless. Such was the impact of the work that film critic and New York Film Festival founder Richard Roud once opined, “There is the cinema before Godard and the cinema after Godard.”
Radical in his approach to film-making, he pioneered the jump-cut technique, encouraged his actors to break the fourth wall as part of a Brechtian ‘alienation effect’, and together with his director of photography Raoul Coutard often shot with handheld cameras and without a script. Ardently dismissive of cinematic traditions, director Quentin Tarantino praised Godard’s ability to be “thumbing his nose at cinema technique but always finding some clever anti-version of technique.”
He considered his work the antithesis of Hollywood filmmaking, which he described as being “made mainly by lawyers and agents.” When in 2010 he was awarded an honorary Oscar, he didn’t travel to the ceremony and was dismissive of the accolade. “If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange,” Godard said at the time. “I asked myself, ‘Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films?’”
More comfortable on the European festival circuit, he was nominated for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion award eight times, receiving an honorary award in 1982 and the accolade itself in 1983. Nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or nine times, never successfully, he received the Jury Prize in 2014 aged 83 for Goodbye to Language, a deliberately grainy, visual essay produced in 3D which The New York Times called “baffling and beautiful.” In 2018, he received a Special Palme d’Or, the first-ever awarded, for his dystopian film The Image Book.
His dismissiveness of Hollywood was part of his anti-establishment spirit. After Breathless was well received at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, he told a journalist, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago—simply because I have made a film, and the film was well received, and so forth. So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.”
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