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.



Eminem, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, N.W.A. and Janet Jackson Get Songwriters Hall of Fame Nods

Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
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Eminem, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, N.W.A. and Janet Jackson Get Songwriters Hall of Fame Nods

Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)

Eminem, Boy George, George Clinton, Sheryl Crow, Janet Jackson, the Doobie Brothers, N.W.A. and Alanis Morissette are among the nominees for the 2025 class at the Songwriters Hall of Fame, an eclectic group of rap, rock, hip-hop and pop pioneers.

Joining them on the ballot are Bryan Adams, with radio staples like “Summer of ’69” and “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?,” and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, hoping to get in 25 years after band founder Brian Wilson. David Gates, co-lead singer of the pop-music group Bread, is also looking for entry.

The Hall annually inducts performers and non-performers alike, and the latter category this year includes Walter Afanasieff, who helped Mariah Carey with her smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You;” Mike Chapman, who co-wrote Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield;” and Narada Michael Walden, the architect of Whitney Houston's “How Will I Know″ and Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love.”

Eligible voting members have until Dec. 22 to turn in ballots with their choices of three nominees from the songwriter category and three from the performing-songwriter category. The Associated Press got an early copy of the list.

Several performers are getting another shot at entry, including Clinton, whose Parliament-Funkadelic collective was hugely influential with hits like “Atomic Dog” and “Give Up the Funk,” and The Doobie Brothers — Tom Johnston, Patrick Simmons and Michael McDonald — with such classics as “Listen to the Music” and "Long Train Runnin.’” Steve Winwood, whose hits include “Higher Love” and “Roll With It,” has also been on the ballot before.

Hip-hop this year is represented by Eminem — whose hits include “Lose Yourself" and “Stan” — and N.W.A. members Dr. Dre, Eazy E, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella. Already in the Hall are hip-hop stars like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and Missy Elliot. Tommy James, with hits including ”Mony Mony,″ ”Crimson and Clover″ and ”I Think We’re Alone Now,″ has also earned a nod.

If Jackson, whose 1989 album “Rhythm Nation” was a landmark, gets into the Hall, it will be more than two decades after her late brother Michael. The Canadian songwriter Morissette, whose influential “Jagged Little Pill” has won Grammys, Tonys, Junos and MTV awards would also add to the Hall's rocking women. (Glen Ballard, who helped produce and write the album, is already in.)

As would Crow, the “All I Wanna Do” and “Everyday Is a Winding Road” singer-songwriter, is having a critical resurgence after being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. Boy George lifts the flag for '80s New Wave with the Culture Club hits “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.”

Other nominees for the non-performing category include Franne Golde, who co-wrote Selena’s ”Dreaming of You;″ Tom Douglas, who wrote country hits for Tim McGraw, Lady Antebellum and Miranda Lambert; Ashley Gorley, fresh off his co-writing smash “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen; and Roger Nichols, who co-wrote The Carpenters’ ″We’ve Only Just Begun.″

They join Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who contributed to the hit ″The Boy Is Mine″ by Brandy and Monica; Sonny Curtis, former member of the Crickets who wrote and performed the theme song for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show," ”Love is All Around,” and British composer Tony Macaulay, who wrote “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

The Hall also put forward three songwriting teams: Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who wrote “Secret Agent Man;” and Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, who penned the Four Tops hit “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got);” and Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, who wrote the Percy Sledge tune “Out of Left Field.”

The Songwriters Hall of Fame was established in 1969 to honor those creating popular music. A songwriter with a notable catalog of songs qualifies for induction 20 years after the first commercial release of a song.

Some already in the hall include Carole King, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Lionel Richie, Bill Withers, Neil Diamond and Phil Collins. Last year saw R.E.M., Steely Dan, Dean Pitchford, Hillary Lindsey and Timbaland inducted.