Jean-Luc Godard, deeply influential French New Wave filmmaker, dies at 91
Jean-Luc Godard, the influential French New Wave writer-director who broke new ground in cinematic expression in the 1960s with films such as “Breathless,” “Contempt” and “Weekend” and became a guiding light to fellow filmmakers throughout his more than six-decade career, has died. He was 91.
Forever content to forgo commercial success in exchange for artistic freedom, Godard was the most inventive and radical of the directors of the French New Wave, which upended European cinema in the 1950s and ’60s by reflecting their personal visions and challenging traditional filmmaking conventions., Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, the movie-obsessed Godard came to filmmaking after being a critic.
Shot on location in Paris, the low-budget romantic crime-drama starred Jean-Paul Belmondo as an amoral young thug with a Humphrey Bogart fixation who is on the run after stealing a car and killing a cop. His love interest is an American girl, played by Jean Seberg, who winds up betraying him. By the late ’60s, Godard had embarked on what Sterritt called his “ultra-radical political phase” as a filmmaker.
“No matter how apocalyptic or bleak his vision might be, his films made me feel hopeful because his brilliance and inventiveness were so dazzling,” Kinder said. “He just redefined what kind of pleasures cinema could give you.”Godard looks over footage while making his 1964 film “Band of Outsiders.”“I don’t really like telling a story,” he once said. “I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas.
“This makes him, I think, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of world cinema. He made everything possible.” In 1933, Godard’s family moved permanently to Switzerland after his father landed a position at a clinic near the village of Gland. Five years later, they moved to Nyon, Switzerland, where they lived during World War II.
For several years, Godard was also a petty thief, who stole repeatedly to support himself and was frequently caught, according to Colin MacCabe’s 2003 book, “Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy.”Godard, MacCabe wrote, claimed to have financed Rivette’s first short film by stealing from an uncle.
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