Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave cinema who pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after his 1960s heyday, died aged 91
Godard was among the world's most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as "Breathless" and "Contempt", which broke with convention and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.
Godard was not alone in creating France's New Wave , a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them pals from the trendy, bohemian Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s. Quentin Tarantino, director of 1990s cult films "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs", is among a more recent generation of filmmakers who took up the mantle of the boundary-bending tradition initiated by Godard and his Paris Left Bank cohorts.
"I've never gotten anything out of movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring," Bergman once said in an interview, according to his foundation's website.Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on Dec. 3, 1930 in Paris's plush Seventh Arrondissement. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank.
Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of short- and full-length films over more than half a century from the late 1950s.Godard spent the final years of his life in Rolle, a Swiss village on the banks of Lake Geneva - a region favoured by celebrities keen to avoid the spotlight.