French media is reporting the death at age 91 of French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard,
A significant figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the filmmaking movement that transformed cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted a tribute to the director and lamented the loss of a “national treasure” for the nation.
According to Macron’s tweet, “It was like an apparition in a French movie.” Then he rose to become one of its lords. The most controversial of the New Wave filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard, had created a resolutely contemporary, fiercely free work. We lose a great outlook and a national treasure.
According to Reuters, Godard came from an affluent family and was born on December 3, 1930, in Paris, France, to a doctor and the daughter of the founder of a Swiss investment bank.
His first to filmmaking came in 1954 with the short film “Opération Béton” (“Operation Concrete”), which he made while pursuing an ethnology degree at the University of Paris.
Breathless, Godard’s debut feature film, was a celebration of the casual improvisational cinematography that would come to represent his aesthetic.
His films focused on complicated subjects like caprice, indignity, and fickleness in the years that followed.
His “trilogy of the sublime,” which consisted of three movies that examined femininity, nature, and religion, was among his significant later works. These movies were “Passion,” “Prénom Carmen,” and “Je Vous salue, Marie,” which were released in 1982, 1984, and 1985, respectively.
The Danish-French actress Anna Karina, who played numerous roles and was briefly married to the filmmaker, remarked that working with Godard frequently required them to learn the dialogue moments before filming without a screenplay.
Godard had a quirky, rebellious side, just like his filmography. He participated in a press conference via video chat rather than in person at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1987 and 1998, he earned honorary César Awards during his long career. In 2010, he was given an honorary Academy Award.
Many condolences have been made on social media by members of the filmmaking business.
Antonio Banderas, an actor, hailed Godard for “pushing the horizons of the film” in a tweet.
He was referred to as “one of the most influential, iconoclastic film-makers of them all” by Edgar Wright, the director of “Baby Driver” and “Hot Fuzz.”
Wright wrote on Twitter that it was ironic that the Hollywood studio system was adored by the director himself because he may have been the director who inspired the most individuals to pick up cameras and start filming.
The first to report Godard’s passing was the French publication Liberation.