French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard died on Tuesday at the age of 91 in his hometown of Rolle, on Lake Geneva. His partner, Anne-Marie Mieville, informed the Swiss news agency ATS. It enfant terrible of the French nouvelle vague cinema has had an enormous influence on how cinema has developed since the Second World War with its extensive oeuvre.
Born in Paris as the son of a Swiss doctor and heir to a French banking family, Godard began his career in the early 1950s as a film critic, including for the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. In that role he had a major influence on the (re)appreciation of American cinema and directors Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, who inspired Godard for his own experimental cinema.
Godard made his directorial debut in 1960 with À bout the souffle, a gangster film in which protagonist Jean-Paul Belmondo imitates his hero Humphrey Bogart. Godard introduced several techniques that are still used today, such as jump cutshand-held camera work, and improvised dialogue.
Sympathy for socialism
In the 1960s, films such as Vivre sa vie (1962), in which he first collaborated with his later wife Anna Karina, and Le petit soldier (1963), one of the first French films to relate to the Algerian War of Independence.
Godard became increasingly political through his films as his career progressed. For example, in 1967 he made the anti-war pamphlet Loin du Vietnam. He showed himself in Ici et ailleurs (1976) advocate of the Palestinian cause. In several films his sympathy for socialism came to the fore and he was critical of Hollywood. In Eloge de l’amour from 2001, he investigated how the American narrative about love has distorted our thinking about love.
In December 2007, Godard was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Film Academy. Three years later, he also received an honorary Oscar for his oeuvre. He did not accept the award. “I don’t have a visa for the US and I don’t want to apply for one. Besides, I don’t want to fly that long,” he said at the time.
Also read this article about Godard’s cinematic influence:Godard doesn’t care about anything or anyone