Decades after his 1960s heyday, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of French New Wave cinema, who pushed the boundaries of cinema and inspired iconoclastic directors, announced Tuesday 91. French media such as Liberation newspaper reported that he died at the age of 18. Godard was one of the world’s most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as ‘Breathless’ and ‘Contempt’. These works helped break convention and initiate new ways of filmmaking, including handheld his camerawork, jump cuts, and existential dialogue.
For many moviegoers, no amount of praise is enough. With his unkempt black hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, Godard was a veritable revolutionary who made the artist of filmmaking, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with master painters and literary icons. “A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” Godard once said.
Godard wasn’t the only one to create the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). François is a credit he shares with at least a dozen of his colleagues, including Truffaut and Eric his Rohmer. However, he became the leading child of a movement that spawned sects in Japan, Hollywood, and perhaps even Czechoslovakia and Brazil, where the Communist Party ruled.
President Emmanuel Macron said: “Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the New Wave, has invented an art that is resolutely contemporary and very free. We are a national treasure, a genius look. Quentin Tarantino, director of 1990s cult films Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, takes up the mantle of the boundary-bending tradition started by Godard and his Left Bank Paris cohort. One of the more recent generation of filmmakers.
The 1976 Martin Scorsese-directed “Taxi Driver” follows a Vietnam veteran-turned-taxi driver who becomes increasingly obsessed with the need to clean up seedy New York and spend all night driving through the streets. A psychological thriller lit by ominous neon lights. According to filmmaker Edgar Wright, “R.I.P. Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most influential and icon-busting filmmakers.” I was doing it because maybe other directors didn’t inspire a lot of people to pick up a camera and start shooting.”
However, Godard was not universally respected. Among his sharpest critics is the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, a pioneer of European cinema, perhaps best known for his 1957 films The Seventh Seal and The Wild Strawberry. was included. “I got nothing out of the[Godard’s]films. They felt constructed, fake-intellectual, and completely dead.
NEW WAVE, NEW WAYS Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in the luxurious 7th arrondissement of Paris, into a wealthy French-Swiss family. His father was a doctor and his mother was the Swiss daughter who founded Banke Paribas, a prominent investment bank at the time.
This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering methods. Godard met like-minded people who were dissatisfied with mediocre films that never deviated from convention, sowing the seeds of the breakaway movement that came to be called the Nouvelle Vague. New Wave was about innovation in filmmaking, with a more outspoken and offbeat approach to exploring sex, violence, the counterculture, anti-war politics, and other shifting conventions.
Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, making dozens of short and feature films over the course of more than half a century, starting in the late 1950s. “Sometimes reality is too complicated. Stories make it happen,” said Godard.
Most of his most influential and commercially successful films are “Vivre Sa Vie”, “Pierrot le Fou”, “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “Weekend”. etc., were produced in the 1960s. Throughout his 1970s, he switched to directing films steeped in left-wing anti-war politics before returning to the more commercial mainstream. However, his more recent works (such as 2014’s “Goodbye to Language” and his 2018 “The Image Book”) have been more experimental and narrowed the audience down primarily to Godard and his geeks.
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