His family said Jean-Luc Godard, one of the 20th century’s most influential directors and father of the French New Wave, died “peacefully at home” on Tuesday at the age of 91.
His lawyer later confirmed that he died by euthanasia.
He challenged the conventions of 1960s cinema by filming the legendary maverick gangster novel Breathless on the streets of Paris with a handheld camera and using a shopping cart to pan the footage.
He continued to meddle in Hollywood and the older generation of French filmmakers, breaking the rules again in 1965’s Contempt (1963) with Brigitte Bardot and Pierrot le Fou.
“There was no official (funeral) ceremony,” his family said. “It will be cremated… And that really needs to happen privately.”
Godard’s lawyer, Patrick Jeanneret, confirmed a report by the French newspaper Liberation that he had asked for help to kill him.
This practice is set up in Switzerland and is permitted if it is presented on a disinterested basis to a person who can make a decision to end their suffering.
Jeanneret said, “According to the medical report, Godard sought legal aid in Switzerland to leave voluntarily as he suffered from ‘numerous disabling diseases’.
Godard lived as a de facto hermit in the Swiss village of Rolle for several decades.
‘National treasure’
He died there “peacefully at home” with his wife, Anne-Marie Mieville, according to the makers.
Godard’s influence cannot be underestimated: from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson to Robert Altman, creator of M*A*S*H and The Gambler, directors often talk about their debts to him.
French President Emmanuel Macron praised the director’s talent and lamented the loss of “a national treasure”.
“Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic director of the New Wave, invented a certain modern, supremely free art. We have lost a national treasure, a genius,” Macron tweeted.
An AFP reporter said Godard’s house, with its green shutters and green bench, appeared empty at the front entrance Tuesday, with the curtains drawn, an ashtray and a teapot thrown on the window sill.
Despite the director’s often difficult relationship with critics, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian praised Godard, saying that “the last great modernist of the 20th century is dead”.
He compared him to other 1960s rebels like John Lennon and Che Guevara.
“Or Godard is the Socrates of the media who believes an untested film is not worth having,” he added.
“Every arrangement is a lie”
Guy Lodge of Screen Bible Variety tweeted that “it’s presumptuous to say it ‘changed everything,’ but it really changed a lot of things.”
Indeed, Godard became a “god” for many of the political and creative radicals of the 1960s who stuck to every word of their often controversial and ironic statements about cinema and the world.
“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” said Breathless star American actress Jean Seberg once.
The movie was a fashion statement as well as a landmark in cinema, the pixie cut was copied by millions, admired by the Parisian punk.
Godard later said, “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not in that order,” and “every arrangement is a lie.”
As Godard aged, he occasionally stepped out of his Swiss retreat to make low-budget films, even in his 80s.
However, he never regained the ability to shock or move a large audience, as he did in the 1960s, but a small group of students remained stubbornly loyal to the master.
His occasional appearance at the Cannes Film Festival – often via FaceTime – still draws crowds, but it no longer has the effect it had when he managed to shut the festival down completely in 1968 in solidarity with the student protests in Paris.
Cannes also hosted the 2017 premiere of Scary, a tragicomic film directed by Oscar-winning The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius, about Godard’s cursed romance with French actress Anna Wiazemsky.
Source: Breitbart
