Iconic French filmmaker Godard dies
Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and the father of the French New Wave cinema, died "peacefully at home" yesterday aged 91, his family said.
His legal counsel later confirmed he died by assisted suicide.
The legendary maverick blew up the conventions of cinema in the 1960s, shooting his gangster romance "Breathless" on the streets of Paris with a hand-held camera, using a shopping trolley for panning shots.
He continued to thumb his nose at Hollywood and an older generation of French filmmakers by breaking all the rules again in "Contempt" (1963) with Brigitte Bardot and "Pierrot le Fou" in 1965.
"No official (funeral) ceremony will take place," his family said. "He will be cremated... And it really must happen in private."
Godard's legal counsel Patrick Jeanneret confirmed a report in French daily Liberation that he had resorted to assisted suicide.
The practice is regulated in Switzerland and permitted if offered without a selfish motive to a person with decision-making capacity to end their own suffering.
"Godard had recourse to legal assistance in Switzerland for a voluntary departure as he was stricken with 'multiple invalidating illnesses', according to the medical report," said Jeanneret.
Godard has lived as a virtual recluse for decades in the Swiss village of Rolle.
It was there that he died "peacefully at home", his wife Anne-Marie Mieville at his side, his producers said.
Godard's influence is hard to underestimate, with directors from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson to Robert Altman, the maker of "M*A*S*H" and "The Player", often speaking of their debt to him.
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the director's talent and mourned the loss of a "national treasure".
"Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the New Wave, invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We have lost a national treasure, a genius," Macron tweeted.
Despite the filmmaker's often difficult relationship with critics, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw heaped praise on Godard, saying, "The last great 20th-century modernist is dead".
He compared him to other 1960s rebels like John Lennon and Che Guevara.
"Or maybe Godard was the medium's Socrates, believing that an unexamined cinema was not worth having," he added.
Guy Lodge, of the screen bible Variety, tweeted that it was "glib to say 'he changed everything', but he sure changed a hell of a lot of things".
Indeed, Godard became a "god" to many 1960s political and artistic radicals who would hang on to every word of his often contradictory -- and tongue-in-cheek -- declarations on the state of cinema and the world.
"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," he once proclaimed, in a nod to US actress Jean Seberg, the star of "Breathless". The movie was a fashion as well as a film landmark, her pixie haircut copied by millions bowled over by her effortless Parisian cool.
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end -- but not necessarily in that order," Godard later famously declared, and "every edit is a lie".
Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris's plush Seventh Arrondissement. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank.
This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering ways. Godard fell in with like-minded folk whose dissatisfaction with humdrum movies that never strayed from convention sowed the seeds of a breakaway movement which came to be called the Nouvelle Vague.
With its more forthright, offbeat approach to sex, violence and its explorations of the counter-culture, anti-war politics and other changing mores, the New Wave was about innovation in the making of movies.
Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of short- and full-length films over more than half a century from the late 1950s.
"Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form," Godard said.
Most of his most influential and commercially successful films came in the 1960s, including "Vivre Sa Vie" (My Life to Live), "Pierrot le Fou", "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" and "Weekend".
He switched to directing films steeped in leftist, anti-war politics through the 1970s before returning to a more commercial mainstream. Recent works, however - among them "Goodbye to Language" in 2014 and "The Image Book" in 2018 - were more experimental and slimmed the audience largely to Godard geeks.