French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, one of the fathers of the Nouvelle Vague, died Tuesday at the age of 91. The news was reported by the newspaper French liberationwhich cited relatives of the filmmaker.
Godard died surrounded by his family and by “assisted suicide” in Rolle, the town where he had lived for decades in Switzerland, according to a report in the Madrid newspaper The countrywhich quoted the Parisian outlet.
⚫ Jean-Luc Godard is dead https://t.co/gDLynUc7Ta pic.twitter.com/LQ5DXWPgap
— Liberation (@libe) September 13, 2022
“He wasn’t sick, he was just exhausted,” said a family friend. “So he had made the decision to finish. It was his decision and it was important to him that it be known.” This practice is legal in Switzerland, underlines the Spanish source.
Godard formed the nucleus of directors of the Nouvelle vague of French cinema in the 1950s with André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol.
His filmography includes 131 titles as a director (many of them shorts and documentaries), in what many remember as “a long and brilliant film career that includes 76 award nominations, with 51 awards”.
Godard began in the world of cinema as a critic in the 1950s with appearances in various specialized magazines. In parallel, he shot short films, in which he had as collaborators young people like Éric Rohmer or François Truffaut, creators of what would become known as the Nouvelle Vague.
He became known with his first feature film, At the end of the escape (1959), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. From then on, he alternated successes and failures at the box office, although he was always highly respected by critics and his actors, and very frequent in nominations for film awards.
Recognized as a master of cinema, a lover of public provocations and sullen at the same time, Godard is also the author of emblematic works such as Breathless (1960) or contempt (1963). His last works were two short films and a documentary in 2018.
“It was like an appearance in the French cinema. He later became a teacher. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We lose a national treasure, a great look,” French President Emmanuel Macron reacted on Twitter.
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Among the awards he received are an honorary Oscar, a special Palme d’Or and two French honorary Césars, awards that paid tribute to a very special career.
Godard worked with the best actors of the time, such as Belmondo, Alain Delon, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Pierre Léaud or Anna Karina, his muse during the first half of the 1960s and to whom he was married for a few years.
With information from El País, Efe and AFP.
