Godard - icon or destroyer of cinema?

Jean-Luc Godard broke with the established conventions of French cinema Photo: UniFrance

The acclaimed pioneer of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, who made more than 50 films, has died at the age of 91.

Godard's Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, broke with the established conventions of French cinema in 1960 and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, complete with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

The director participated in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s most dramatic moments during the 1968 student up-risings and workers’ protests throughout France. A sit-in at the main theatre building by protesters including fellow directors Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut resulted in the festival being cancelled.

He continued to experiment in later years using digital technologies with such films as Film Socialisme and Goodbye To Language, a 3D film, involving a married woman and a single man and a dog that weaves in and out of their lives. The deliberately grainy exercise received a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. Despite being nominated for the Festival’s top award the Palme d’Or on no less than nine occasions he was never successful until he received a Special Palme d’Or for his dystopian The Image Book.

Godard who was half French and half Swiss, died in his home in the small town of Rolle in Switzerland, his family said in a statement.

Godard espoused Marxism, loved denouncing Capitalism and joined the Vietnam war protests Photo: UniFrance

The director who worked most of the time with his faithful director of photography Raoul Coutard, was dismissive of cinematic traditions which brought praise from the likes of Quentin Tarantino who admired his ability to “thumb his noise at cinema technique while always finding some clever anti-version of technique”.

His recalcitrant attitude carried through to honours. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010 but declined to travel to the ceremony. He said at the time: “If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange.” He queried whether the members of the Academy actually knew any of his films.

Godard espoused Marxism, loved denouncing Capitalism and joined the Vietnam war protests. He was a controversial supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Critics could not quite match his radical views with his family background of considerable privilege. Born in 1930 and one of four children his mother came from a revered French family and his father was a physician. His early and later life was spent in Switzerland but Paris was always his second home. He enrolled at the Sorbonne University in 1949 and honed his filmmaking passion at the Cinémathèque while writing about film for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma alongside the likes of François Truffaut. The pair fell out over their contrasting career paths with the more mainstream Truffaut famously calling Godard “a piece of shit on a pedestal”.

Godard was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010 but declined to travel to the ceremony Photo: UniFrance

Godard frequently worked with his first wife and muse Anna Karina on such films as A Woman is a Woman which scored her a best actress accolade at the Berlin Film Festival.

The pair divorced in 1965. Two years alter he married actress Anne Wiazemy who also appeared in such films as La Chinoise, Week End, and One Plus One. Later he took up with artist Anne-Marie Miéville and they ran a production company together and remained an item into old age.

The fact that Godard continued to defy screen conventions every step of the way lead the critic Susan Sontag to suggest that “Godard is not merely an iconoclast. He is a deliberate ‘destroyer of cinema.’” As Godard would decline to say: Vive le cinéma.

Read our reviews of Godard's films here.