Jean-Luc Godard, one of the leading exponents of the Nouvelle Vague, dies at 91

Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential exponents of the nouvelle vague, revolutionary of the cinema of the 20th century, director of classics such as ‘Live your life’, ‘At the end of the escape’ or ‘Pierrot, the madman’, He died at the age of 91. As reported by his relatives to the Liberation media, the director died on Tuesday, September 13, of natural causes.

“I make films to pass the time”

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930 and after his studies at the Sorbonne he began working as a film critic for magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma, where he will coincide with François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. In 1959 he began shooting his first film, ‘At the end of the escape’, that his friend Truffaut had written. Shot freehand and with a cutting-edge editing style, the film was already a revolution and won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Shortly after came titles such as ‘A woman is a woman’, ‘Living his life’ or ‘The little soldier’, the latter played by what would be his first wife, Anna Karina, and who in France is been banned for 3 years.

He was one of the fathers of the new French wave that emerged in the late 1950s, but he was also an off-screen revolutionary. He put his cinema at the service of the French movement May 68 and declared himself akin to Maoist ideology. Other titles of his great filmography that we cannot fail to mention are ‘El contempt’, ‘Banda parte’, ‘Week End’, ‘Todo va bien’, ‘Pasión’, ‘Ti salute, María’ or ‘King Lear’, but there are many other works of his that will mark the history of cinema.

He has also directed documentaries such as “Sympathy for the Devil”, which show the process of creating this song by the Rolling Stones, “Here and elsewhere” or the series “Histoire (s) du cinéma”, a conceptual work in which he would give his own vision of the history of cinema. During her career she has won 8 awards in Berlin, two in Cannes, two César and seven in Venice; Additionally, the United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an Oscar of Honor in 2011.

His latest projects are very recent: in addition to several short films, in 2010 Godard directed ‘Film socialisme’, ‘Goodbye to language’ in 2014 and the documentary ‘The Picture Book’ in 2018, which won the special Palme d’Or at Cannes.