Jean-Luc Godard

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. In 1988, he began one of his most ambitious projects, a seven-part series on the history of film, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which he completed in 1998. After a pair of aggressively didactic films, “Un Film Comme les Autres” (1968) and “Le Gai Savoir” (1969), and an abortive project with the Rolling Stones, released against Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard directed a candy-colored, wide-screen homage to the Hollywood musical “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), starring Ms. Belmondo’s central character in “Breathless,” a petty criminal who himself identified with the doomed romanticism of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the American films that Mr. And covering a 2000 revival screening of “Breathless,” the essayist and novelist Philip Lopate said he felt as exhilarated by the film as when he first saw it 40 years before. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Truffaut. Godard remained best known for “Breathless” and about a dozen films he made in quick succession afterward, ending with “Weekend” in 1967.University audiences identified with the doomed romanticism of Mr. Godard once observed, “A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

With “Breathless” in 1960, the filmmaker rode the crest of the French New Wave movement to liberate a hidebound movie industry.

Mr. One of Mr. Reemerging in the 1980s based in Rolle, Mr. In the meantime, Mr. “Breathless,” one of Mr. At his best, Mr. Much of “Breathless,” made on a shoestring budget, was filmed by handheld camera on the streets of Paris. The award revived a long-standing debate about whether Mr. Sontag wrote that Mr. Hollywood studios tended to look on movies as a collaborative effort organized by a producer, but Mr. Where a playfulness and exuberance pervaded his early films, Mr. These techniques and motifs set a template for much of his later work, with characters who stepped out of character to wink, wave and mug at the camera.

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard -- a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s and 60s ...

"It was like an apparition in French cinema," Macron tweeted. Godard's first feature film, "À bout de souffle" ("Breathless") in 1960, was a celebration of the nonchalant improvisational cinematography that became synonymous with his style. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave directors, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art.