French Media Says Director Jean-Luc Godard Ends Life With Assisted Suicide
Nusantaratv.com – Film director Jean-Luc Godard died on Tuesday (13/9) local time at the age of 91 years.
French daily Liberation, which first reported the news, said Godard chose to end his life by assisted suicide, a practice permitted under Swiss law.
When contacted by Reuters, the family said they would not comment further on the matter.
“Jean-Luc Godard died peacefully in his home surrounded by loved ones,” said his wife Anne-Marie Mieville and producer in a statement published by several French media outlets.
Godard will be cremated and there will be no official ceremony, they said.
Godard is one of the world’s most famous directors, known for classics such as “Breathless” (1960) and “Contempt” (1963), who broke cinema’s “guidelines” and embarked on a new way of filmmaking with handheld cameras, jump cuts and dialogue. existential.
Godard was not alone in creating French New Wave cinema, a credit he shared with at least a dozen colleagues including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of whom were friends of the trendy Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s.
However, he became a central figure of the movement, inspiring filmmaking in Japan, Hollywood, even Czechoslovakia and Brazil.
“Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconic filmmaker of the New Wave, has discovered a very modern and very free art. We are missing a national treasure, a genius performance,” tweeted French President Emmanuel Macron.
Brigitte Bardot, who has appeared in several Godard films, and other filmmakers such as director Edgar Wright also paid tribute on Twitter.
“RIP Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential iconic filmmakers of them all,” said Wright.
However, Godard was not universally respected; some of his sharpest critics include the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.
“I never got anything out of (Godard’s) movies. They feel built on false intellectuals and are completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and very boring,” Bergman once said in an interview, according to his foundation’s website.
Godard himself was born into a wealthy French-Swiss family on December 3, 1930. His father was a doctor, his mother was the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas.
Over time, Godard fell out with like-minded people whose discontent with boring movies. They then made a breakaway movement that came to be called the Nouvelle Vague.
With its more open and unconventional approach to sex, violence, and exploration of counter-culture, anti-war politics, and other changing habits, New Wave is all about innovation in filmmaking.
Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of short and feature films over more than half a century from the late 1950s.