Giant of French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, dies in assisted suicide at 91
dIrECTor Jean- Luc Godard, the enfant terrible of French New Wave cinema, died by assisted suicide yesterday aged 91.
Godard’s partner, Anne-Marie Mieville, 76, said he died peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones at his home in the Swiss town of rolle on Lake Geneva.
relatives said the FrenchSwiss filmmaker, who blew up the conventions of cinema in the 1960s, had made the decision to end his life. He had spoken about doing so many times.
‘He was not ill, he was simply exhausted,’ a family source told French newspaper Liberation. ‘He therefore decided to end it completely. It was his decision and it was important for him that it be known.’
Godard, who has more than 100 titles to his name, inspired filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino decades after his Sixties heyday.
He shot his first film, 1960 gangster romance Breathless, on the streets of Paris with a hand-held camera, using a shopping trolley for panning shots.
Godard continued to thumb his nose at Hollywood and an older generation of French filmmakers by breaking all the rules again in 1963’s Contempt with Brigitte Bardot, followed by Pierrot Le Fou two years later.
He rejected conventional narrative style and instead used frequent jump-cuts that mingled philosophical discussions with action scenes. French president Emmanuel Macron described Godard as ‘the most iconoclastic of the New Wave directors’ who ‘invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art form’.
on Twitter, Bardot described him as one of ‘the last great star creators’.
Twice- divorced Godard had lived with Miss Mieville in Switzerland, where assisted suicide can be legal, since the 1970s.