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Legendary film director Jean-Luc Godard has died at age 91.
Jeanneret added that the filmmaker had “multiple disabling pathologies” and “decided with a great lucidity, as he had all his life, to say, ‘Now, it’s enough.’ "
Born in Paris to a French-Swiss family, Godard was a rarely commercial, often radical, filmmaker whose first filmBreathless(A Bout de Souffle) catapulted both the director and French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo to international acclaim. The picture, which also starred American actress Jean Seberg, was later remade withRichard Gerein the starring role.
A gritty tribute to American gangster pictures filtered through post-war French urbanism, the film managed to capture a wry and self-derisive charm.
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Never shy about injecting politics into his work, Godard produced a documentary on France’s war in Algeria that was banned. In later years, his films were frequently attacked as polemics, though he had enjoyed something of a revival in the last decade.
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He did not, however, travel to the ceremony to accept the award, and hereportedly told a local news outletat the time that the honor meant “nothing” to him: “If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films? The award is called the Governor’s Award — does this mean that Schwarzenegger gives me the award?”
French President Emmanuel Macronwrotein eulogy on Twitter, translated to English, “It was like an apparition in French cinema. Then he became a master. 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.”
source: people.com
