Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and father of French new wave, died “peacefully at home” on Tuesday at the age of 91, his family said.
The legendary maverick broke the conventions of cinema in the 1960s, shooting his gangster romance Out of Breath handheld on the streets of Paris and using a shopping cart for panning.
He went on to turn his noses up 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 (1965).
“There will be no official (funeral) ceremony,” his family said. “He will be cremated… And it really has to be done in private.”
The secrecy – and the decision to disappear in a puff of smoke – is typical of Godard, who loved to surprise the world from his hideout in the Swiss village of Rolle, where he lived as a practical recluse for decades.
There 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, creator of “M*A*S*H” and “The Player”, often blaming their fault on him speak.
– Movie “John Lennon and Che Guevara” –
French President Emmanuel Macron praised the director’s talent and mourned the loss of a “national treasure”.
“Jean-Luc Godard, the New Wave’s most iconoclastic filmmaker, has invented a resolutely modern, utterly free art. We have lost a national treasure, a genius,” Macron tweeted.
Godard’s house, with green shutters and a green bench in front, looked empty Tuesday, blinds drawn, with an abandoned ashtray and teapot on the windowsill, an AFP reporter said.
Despite the filmmaker’s often difficult relationship with critics, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian praised Godard, saying, “The last great modernist of the 20th century is dead.”
He compared him to other rebels of the 1960s like John Lennon and Che Guevara.
“Or maybe Godard was the Socrates of the medium and believed that having an unverified cinema wasn’t worth having,” he added.
Guy Lodge of the on-screen Bible Variety tweeted that it would be “quick to say he changed everything, but he certainly changed a lot of things.”
Indeed, Godard became a “god” to many political and artistic radicals of the 1960s, who hung on to every word of his often contradictory — and tongue-in-cheek — explanations of the state of cinema and the world.
– ‘Every edit is a lie’ –
“All it takes to make a movie is a gun and a girl,” he once proclaimed, referring to US actress Jean Seberg, the star of Breathless.
The film was both a fashion and film milestone, her pixie haircut copied by millions blown away by her effortless Parisian cool.
“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end—but not necessarily in that order,” Godard later explained, and “any edit is a lie.”
As he got older, Godard occasionally emerged from his Swiss hideout to shoot low-budget films well into his 80s.
However, he never regained the ability to shock or move more mainstream audiences as he had in the 1960s, despite a small group of disciples remaining stubbornly loyal to the master.
However, his regular appearances at the Cannes Film Festival — often via FaceTime — still drew crowds, though he no longer had the clout he had when he managed to close the festival entirely in 1968 in solidarity with student protests in Paris shut down .
Cannes also saw the premiere of 2017’s Redoubtable, a tragi-comic film about Godard’s doomed romance with French actress Anne Wiazemsky, directed by Oscar-winning director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius.
