![]() ![]() And in his later years, he dismissed notions that contemporary Hollywood could ever make serious films. A difficult man by nearly all accounts, he feuded with his contemporaries (an argument with his friend and fellow New Wave director Francois Truffaut over the latter's Day for Night in 1973 wasn't resolved before Truffaut's death in 1984). He began as a critic and, in a sense, he remained one all his life in famously quotable public statements: "All you need to make a movie," he once said "is a girl and a gun."īut as time went on, he was happy to dispense with both girls and guns, and also with plots. "My parents told me about literature, some other people told me about paintings about music, but no one told me about pictures." Godard had come to film in his early 20, he told NPR. ![]() "Yes," conceded Godard, "but not necessarily in that order." In a public debate in 1966, he kept calling film grammar itself into question, until an exasperated panelist finally sputtered, "Surely you agree that films should have a beginning, a middle part, and an end." As his art matured he grew less interested in narrative and more in experimenting, though he'd actually, always been experimenting. This overt emphasis on politics was itself a phase, and by the 1980s, Godard was looking inward and looking at film itself. Tout Va Bien, for instance, starring Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in the story of striking workers at a sausage factory. He embarked on a decade of deliberately revolutionary movies - low-budget provocations, non-commercial, shot in Palestine, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and filled with a Marxist fervor. And in that moment, his filmmaking took a turn. "We are behind the times," said this leader of the French New Wave. After shooting a police officer, he goes on the run to Italy with Seberg, his pregnant girlfriend who seems almost disinterested in him. He played a penniless young car thief who models himself on Hollywood movie gangsters. What greeted audiences in Godard's first feature, the 1960 crime drama Breathless, was the shock of the new.Īmerican actress Jean Seberg was cast opposite a then-unknown Jean Paul Belmondo, cigarette dangling sexily from his lip. ![]() The director and onetime "enfant terrible" of the French New Wave helped revolutionize popular cinema in the 1960s, and spent the rest of his career pushing boundaries and reinventing cinematic form. The family statement said the 91-year-old Godard had multiple illnesses and died from assisted suicide. Influential critic and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, has died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle, on Lake Geneva, his family said in a statement. He died at 91, according to French media. He was a key figure in French New Wave cinema. Film director Jean-Luc Godard at Cannes festival in 1982. ![]()
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