 |
| Photo Credit: AP. |
GENEVA (AP) — Jean-Luc Godard, the iconic “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who revolutionized popular cinema in 1960 with his first feature, “Breathless,” and stood for years among the film world’s most influential directors, died Tuesday. He was 91.
Godard died
peacefully and 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 assisted
suicide, which is legal in Switzerland, as the cause of death.
A medical
report recently revealed the director had “multiple invalidating pathologies,”
according to the family statement, which did not specify the conditions.
Over a long
career that began in the 1950s as a film critic, Godard was perhaps the most
boundary-breaking director among New Wave filmmakers who rewrote the rules for
camera, sound and narrative — rebelling against an earlier tradition of more
formulaic storytelling.
For the
low-budget “Breathless,” Godard relied on a mobile, lightweight camera to
capture street scenes and reach moviegoers in a new way.
He dispensed
with contrived backdrops and the “artifice” of Hollywood cinema of the time,
said one film expert. The impact was immediate — “Breathless” arrived like a
cinematic thunderclap when it was released in 1960 — and lasting.
“There’s a bit of Godard in nearly all films
today,” said Frederic Maire, president of the Swiss Cinematheque. “Nearly all
directors who have gone to film school today, or learned movie-making at
cinematheques, have seen Godard’s films — and were amazed, jolted and shocked by
his way of telling stories.”
French
President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute, saying: “We have lost a national treasure,
the eye of a genius.”
Godard
worked with some of the best-known actors in French cinema, such as Jean-Paul
Belmondo, who was propelled to stardom through the director’s films, and
Brigitte Bardot, who starred in his acclaimed 1963 work “Contempt.”
Beyond that,
he profiled the early Rolling Stones, gave a voice to Marxist, leftist and
1960s-era Black Power politics, and his controversial modern nativity play
“Hail Mary” grabbed headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985.
While many
of his works were lauded, Godard also made a string of films that were
politically charged and experimental, and pleased few outside a small circle of
fans, while frustrating many critics who saw them as filled with overblown
intellectualism.
Cannes Film
Festival Director Thierry Fremaux said by phone he was “sad, sad — immensely
so” at the news of Godard’s death.
Born into a
wealthy French-Swiss family on Dec. 3, 1930 in Paris, Godard grew up in Nyon,
Switzerland, and studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, where he was increasingly
drawn to the cultural scene that flourished in the Latin Quarter “cine-club”
after World War II.
He became
friends with future big-name directors Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and
Eric Rohmer, and in 1950 founded the short-lived Gazette du Cinema. By 1952 he
had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.
After
working on two films by Rivette and Rohmer in 1951, Godard tried to direct his
first movie while traveling through North and South America with his father,
but never finished it.
Back in
Europe, he took a job in Switzerland as a construction worker on a dam project.
He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 “Operation
Concrete,” a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam.
Returning to
Paris, Godard worked as spokesman for an artists’ agency and continued to hone
his writing.
He also
began work on “Breathless,” based on a story by Truffaut.
The movie
stars Belmondo as a penniless young thief who models himself on Hollywood movie
gangsters and who, after he shoots a police officer, goes on the run with his
American girlfriend, played by Jean Seberg.
Godard’s
cinematic creations were suffused with the gritty, sassy tones of a resurgent
postwar France — known domestically as the “Glorious 30” years through to the
late 1970s -- and they served up some of the most poignant images and lines
from what was then a rich, avant-garde heyday of French filmmaking.
The images
in “Breathless” of an ingenue Seberg traipsing along Paris’ Champs-Elysées
loudly hawking “New York Herald Tribune” newspapers in a tight T-shirt, and
close-ups of a cigarette-smoking, fedora-wearing Belmondo running a thumb
methodically, pensively across his lips could be enshrined among the most memorable
images of French cinema.
Along with
Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” released in 1959, Godard’s film set a new tone for
French movie aesthetics. Godard rejected conventional narrative style and
instead used frequent jump-cuts that mingled philosophical discussions with
action scenes. He spiced it all up with references to Hollywood gangster movies
and nods to literature and visual art.
Godard also
launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film
projects, contributing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” along with directors
such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He also worked with Ugo Gregoretti,
Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini on the Italian movie “Let’s Have a
Brainwash,” with Godard’s scenes portraying a disturbing post-Apocalypse world.
Godard, who
was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political
views, had a first brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made “The
Little Soldier.” The movie, filled with references to France’s colonial war in
Algeria, was not released until 1963, a year after the conflict ended.
His work
turned more starkly political by the late 1960s. In “Weekend,” his characters
lampoon hypocrisy in bourgeois society even as they demonstrate the comic
futility of violent class war. It came out a year before popular anger at the
establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student
unrest of May 1968.
Godard
harbored a life-long sympathy for various forms of socialism depicted in films
from the early 1970s to the 1990s.
Some of
global cinema’s greatest directors counted Godard’s boundary-breaking work as
an influence, including Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian De Palma
and Jonathan Demme.
“Black Swan”
director Darren Aronofsky tweeted: “learned a lot from my vhs copy of breathless…
thank you maestro.”
Godard took
potshots at Hollywood over the years.
He remained
home in Switzerland rather than travel to Hollywood to receive an honorary
Oscar at a private ceremony in November 2010 alongside film historian and
preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola and
actor Eli Wallach.
His lifelong
advocacy of the Palestinian cause also brought him repeated accusations of
antisemitism, despite his insistence that he sympathized with the Jewish people
and their plight in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Though the
academy received some complaints about Godard being selected to receive the
award, academy President Tom Sherak said the director was recognized solely
“for his contributions to film in the New Wave era.”
Godard
married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina in 1961. She appeared in a string
of movies he made during the remainder of the 1960s, all of them seen as New
Wave landmarks. Notable among them were “My Life to Live,” “Alphaville” and
“Crazy Pete” — which also starred Belmondo and was rumored to have been shot
without a script. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965.
Godard
married his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. He later started a
relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. Godard divorced
Wiazemsky in 1979, after he had moved with Mieville to Rolle, where he lived
with her for the rest of his life.
Adamson
reported from Paris. Former AP correspondent John Heilprin contributed
biographical material to this report.