Jean-Luc Godard, deeply influential French New Wave filmmaker, dies at 91
Jean-Luc Godard, the influential French New Wave writer-director who broke new ground in cinematic expression in the 1960s with films such as “Breathless,” “Contempt” and “Weekend” and became a guiding light to fellow filmmakers throughout his more than six-decade career, has died. He was 91.
Multiple French media outlets reported that they had learned the news of Godard’s death from the filmmaker’s relatives Tuesday. The French news outlet Liberation, citing an unnamed family member, said Godard died by assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland. “He was not sick,” the family member was quoted as saying, “he was simply exhausted.”
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed Godard as a “national treasure” who had “invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art” with his pioneering works.
Forever content to forgo commercial success in exchange for artistic freedom, Godard was the most inventive and radical of the directors of the French New Wave, which upended European cinema in the 1950s and ’60s,
