French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard who pioneered the Nouvelle Vague cinema movement with the 1959 film Breathless, has died aged 91.
Godard died “peacefully” and “surrounded by those close to him” in his home in Rolle, Switzerland, his family and producers told Agence France-Presse.
“He was a breakout star of French cinema,” President Emmanuel Macron said in a tweet. “Then he became a master. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic film-maker of the New Wave, invented an art that was resolutely modern and intensely free. We have lost a national treasure, the vision of a genius.”
Critics have hailed Godard as one of the great postwar film directors who during a particularly productive stretch in the 1960s produced 15 features that challenged the visual style and narrative conventions of Hollywood. Handheld cameras, jump cuts, and sometimes wandering dialogue became the trademark of Nouvelle Vague, a movement that influenced generations of filmmakers.
Godard was…