New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard has died – paper

PARIS, Sept 13 (Reuters) – Director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of French New Wave cinema, died on Tuesday at the age of 91, Liberation newspaper reported, citing people close to the French-Swiss director.

Godard was one of the world’s most accomplished directors, known for classics like “Breathless” and “Contempt,” which opened up cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic filmmakers decades after his 1960s heyday.

His films broke with the established conventions of French cinema in the 1960s and helped usher in a new way of filmmaking, complete with hand-held camerawork, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

For many film fans, words are not good enough: Godard, with his jet-black hair and heavy glasses, was a true revolutionary who made artists of cinematographers, placing them on the same level as leading painters and literary icons.

“It’s not where you get things from – it’s where you take them,” Godard once said.

Quentin Tarantino, director of “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” in the 1990s, is often cited as one of the latest generations of the boundary-bending tradition that Godard and his cohorts started on Paris’s Left Bank.

Earlier came Martin Scorsese in 1976 with “Taxi Driver,” the unsettling, neon-lit psychological thriller about a Vietnam veteran turned taxi driver who plies the streets all night with a growing obsession with cleaning up rainy New York .

Godard was not everyone’s idol. The feisty Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who at 25 shared a prize with an octogenarian Godard at the 2014 Cannes festival, courted controversy like Godard but called him “the grumpy old man” and “not my hero”. “.

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

Written by Brian Love and Ingrid Melander. Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Andrew Heavens and Raissa Kasolowsky

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