Leading New Wave Film Director Jean-Luc Godard Dies Aged 91

In this file photo taken on May 21, 1988 Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard attends a press conference during the Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on May 21, 1988 Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard attends a press conference during the Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes. (AFP)
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Leading New Wave Film Director Jean-Luc Godard Dies Aged 91

In this file photo taken on May 21, 1988 Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard attends a press conference during the Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on May 21, 1988 Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard attends a press conference during the Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes. (AFP)

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave cinema who pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after his 1960s heyday, died on Tuesday aged 91, his family and producers said.

Godard was among the world's most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as "Breathless" and "Contempt", which broke with convention and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

"Jean-Luc Godard died peacefully at his home surrounded by loved ones," his wife Anne-Marie Mieville and producers said in a statement published by several French media. Godard will be cremated and there will be no official ceremony, they said.

French daily Liberation, which first reported the news, said Godard chose to end his life through assisted suicide, a practice allowed under Swiss law, citing a person close to the family as saying that "it was his decision and it was important to him that people know about it."

When contacted by Reuters, the family said they would make no further comment on the matter.

For many movie buffs, no praise is high enough: Godard, with his tousled black hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, was a veritable revolutionary who made artists of movie-makers, putting them on a par with master painters and icons of literature.

"A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order," he once said.

Godard was not alone in creating France's New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them pals from the trendy, bohemian Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s.

However, he became the poster child of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Hollywood and, more improbably, in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia as well as in Brazil.

"Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the New Wave, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We are losing a national treasure, a look of genius," President Emmanuel Macron tweeted.

Brigitte Bardot, who appeared in several of Godard's films, also paid tribute on Twitter.

"Godard created Contempt and then, breathless, he has joined the firmament of the last great star-makers", Bardot wrote, in a play on the titles of two of the filmmaker's 1960s classics "Contempt", which she starred in, and "Breathless".

Quentin Tarantino, director of 1990s cult films "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs", is among a more recent generation of filmmakers who took up the mantle of the boundary-bending tradition initiated by Godard and his Paris Left Bank cohorts.

Earlier came Martin Scorsese in 1976 with "Taxi Driver", the disturbing neon-lit psychological thriller of a Vietnam veteran turned cabbie who steers through the streets all night with a growing obsession for the need to clean up seedy New York City.

"RIP Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential, iconoclastic filmmakers of them all," said film director Edgar Wright. "It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio filmmaking system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting..."

Godard was not universally revered however; some of his sharpest critics included the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, himself a trailblazer in European cinema who is perhaps best known for his 1957 films "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries".

"I've never gotten anything out of (Godard's) movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring," Bergman once said in an interview, according to his foundation's website.

New Wave, new ways

Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on Dec. 3, 1930 in Paris's plush Seventh Arrondissement. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank.

This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering ways. Godard fell in with like-minded folk whose dissatisfaction with humdrum movies that never strayed from convention sowed the seeds of a breakaway movement which came to be called the Nouvelle Vague.

With its more forthright, offbeat approach to violence and its explorations of the counter-culture, anti-war politics and other changing mores, the New Wave was about innovation in the making of movies.

Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of short- and full-length films over more than half a century from the late 1950s.

"Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form," Godard said.

Cigars and coffee

Godard spent the final years of his life in Rolle, a Swiss village on the banks of Lake Geneva - a region favored by celebrities keen to avoid the spotlight.

"We would come across him here, he had a very unique silhouette, he was always smoking his iconic cigar and he used to drink his coffee in a restaurant on the main street," said Rolle Mayor Monique Pugnale.

"We used to see him almost every week, he came to buy a cookie," said Nadine von Wattenwyl, who runs a grocery store. "We knew already what he wanted, so we were ready."

Most of Godard's most influential and commercially successful films came in the 1960s, including "Vivre Sa Vie" (My Life to Live), "Pierrot le Fou", "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" and "Weekend".

He switched to directing films steeped in leftist, anti-war politics through the 1970s before returning to a more commercial mainstream. Recent works, however - among them "Goodbye to Language" in 2014 and "The Image Book" in 2018 - were more experimental and slimmed the audience largely to Godard geeks.



Argentine Prosecutors Charge 3 People Linked to Death of Liam Payne

FILE PHOTO: A woman passes by a message written as a tribute to former One Direction singer Liam Payne, who was found dead after he fell from a third-floor hotel room balcony in Buenos Aires, in Manchester, Britain, October 21, 2024. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A woman passes by a message written as a tribute to former One Direction singer Liam Payne, who was found dead after he fell from a third-floor hotel room balcony in Buenos Aires, in Manchester, Britain, October 21, 2024. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo
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Argentine Prosecutors Charge 3 People Linked to Death of Liam Payne

FILE PHOTO: A woman passes by a message written as a tribute to former One Direction singer Liam Payne, who was found dead after he fell from a third-floor hotel room balcony in Buenos Aires, in Manchester, Britain, October 21, 2024. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A woman passes by a message written as a tribute to former One Direction singer Liam Payne, who was found dead after he fell from a third-floor hotel room balcony in Buenos Aires, in Manchester, Britain, October 21, 2024. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo

Three people have been charged in connection with the death of Liam Payne, a former member of musical group One Direction who died after falling from the balcony of his hotel room in Buenos Aires last month, Argentine prosecutors said Thursday.
Prosecutor Andrés Madrea charged the three suspects, whose identities were not revealed, with ​​the crimes of “abandonment of a person followed by death” and “supplying and facilitating the use of narcotics,” the prosecutor’s office said. Madrea also requested their arrest to judge Laura Bruniard, who ruled the three cannot leave the country, The Associated Press reported.
Payne fell from his room's balcony on the third floor of his hotel in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo, in the Argentine capital. His autopsy said he died from multiple injuries and external bleeding.
Prosecutors also said that Payne’s toxicological exams showed that his body had "traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescribed antidepressant” in the moments before his death.
Investigators said hours after Payne’s death that he was by himself when he fell. But the prosecutors' office said Thursday that one of the people charged was often with the singer during his time in Buenos Aires. The second is a hotel staffer who allegedly gave Payne cocaine during his stay between Oct. 13 and 16. And the third is a drug dealer.
The charges in Payne’s case bear some resemblance to the US cases stemming from the death of “Friends” star Matthew Perry a year ago. The actor’s personal assistant and a longtime friend are among those charged with helping supply him with ketamine in the final months of his life, leading up to his overdose on the anesthetic.
Three young men were similarly charged in the opioid-overdose death of rapper Mac Miller in 2018.
Local authorities gathered, among other pieces of evidence, Payne's cell phone records, material for forensics and testimonies. They are yet to unlock the singer’s personal computer – which is damaged – and other devices that were seized.
Payne’s autopsy showed his injuries were neither caused by self-harm nor by physical intervention of others. The document also said that he did not have the reflex of protecting himself in the fall, which suggests he might have been unconscious.
Prosecutors in Argentina also ruled out the chances of Payne committing suicide.
One Direction was among the most successful boy bands of recent times. It announced an indefinite hiatus in 2016 and Payne — like his former bandmates Zayn Malik, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, and Louis Tomlinson — pursued a solo career.
The singer had posted on his Snapchat account that he traveled to Argentina to attend Horan’s concert in Buenos Aires on Oct. 2. He shared videos of himself dancing with his girlfriend, American influencer Kate Cassidy, and singing along in the stands. Cassidy had left Argentina after the show, but Payne stayed behind.