Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, has died "peacefully at home" aged 91, his family told BBC yesterday. The French-Swiss filmmaker found fame in the late 1950s as one of the leading figures in the French movement known as the New Wave, going on to direct dozens of films in a career lasting more than half a century. Here are nine things to know.
All you need to make a film, Godard once wrote, is a "girl and gun". He proved it with his 1960 debut ‘Breathless (À Bout de Souffle)’.
The girl, Patricia, is involved with a petty criminal, Michel, who is on the run for shooting a policeman. She betrays him and the police shoot him dead in the street.
It had an instant impact, winning acclaim and a huge profit on its meagre budget.
Nearly 60 years on, it is widely acknowledged as a classic and its energy still startles.
One of the most radical elements of ‘Breathless’ was the prominent use of the editing technique known as the jump cut.
Filmmaking both before and after Godard's debut largely favours smooth editing to give the illusion of continuous time.
By contrast, in ‘Breathless,’ Godard would cut within the shot, making time appear to jump forward.
It is jarring, as Godard surely intended it to be. At the very least it grabs the viewer's attention, but it has also been interpreted as reflecting Michel's boredom or as an attempt by Godard to force his audience to reflect on the nature of the cinema.
Throughout his career, Godard would play with the grammar of filmmaking.
There were other innovations. ‘Breathless’ was filmed on location, using handheld cameras, with Godard writing the script on the day, feeding lines to his actors as they filmed.
This was another break with tradition, with expensive studio-led films depending on tight scripts, large crews and storyboarding.
The technique used by Godard gives Breathless great spontaneity and a documentary-like feel.
Before becoming a director, Godard was an avid cinemagoer, sometimes watching the same film several times in one day at the clubs he and other New Wave figures attended.
His films are littered with references to other works and even as he sought to push the medium forward he could not help but look back.
‘Breathless’ alone would have secured his place in film history, but his has been a prolific career. The IMDB lists more than 100 works, including shorts, documentaries, TV series and more than 40 feature-length films.
The 1960s saw his most celebrated and widely watched works, from what he called a "neorealist musical", 1961's ‘A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme)’ to the 1965 dystopian science-fiction ‘Alphaville’ to 1967's black comedy, ‘Weekend, featuring Emily Bronte being set on fire.
After ‘Weekend’ he embraced political radicalism, making a series of Marxist-themed films that culminated in 1972's All's Well (Tout Va Bien).
There is no getting away from it - Godard's films range from the challenging to the near incomprehensible.
He has enjoyed commercial success but later works saw limited releases despite critical adoration.
Godard was a voracious reader on top of his love of cinema and the sheer weight of references can be bewildering, ‘Barely 70 minutes long,’ ‘Goodbye to Language,’ for example, packs in nods to abstract painter Nicolas de Staël, modernist US author William Faulkner and mathematician Laurent Schwartz.
In many of his works, the lead can be seen as a proxy for Godard himself.
In 1963's ‘Le Mépris (Contempt)’, Michel Piccoli plays a French playwright tasked with reworking a film adaptation of 'Ulysses'.
The film explores the tensions between commercialism and creativity and portrays a disintegrating marriage, modelled on Godard's relationship with Anna Karina, the star of several of his films.
US critic Roger Ebert's assessment of Godard in 1969 described him as "deeply into his own universe", a good explanation of why Godard's films can be both so distinctive and so frustrating.
Not unjustifiably Godard has the reputation of being difficult both personally and professionally.
His two marriages, first to Anna Karina and then to Anne Wiazemsky, were stormy, something that spilt out into his films.
Angered by producer Iain Quarrier's recut of his 1968 Rolling Stones documentary Sympathy for the Devil, Godard punched him in the face when it was shown in London.
There was an extraordinary row with his friend, another great New Wave director, François Truffaut.
In 1973, Godard wrote to Truffaut attacking his latest film, ‘Day For Night,’ and asking for funds to make a response. Truffaut wrote a furious reply, accusing Godard of behaving "like a shit" and listing years of misconduct by Godard. Unsurprisingly, Truffaut refused to pay for Godard's film. The pair's relationship never recovered.
But the collaboration was an important part of his career too.
His early films would not be the same without Karina or Wiazemsky, nor Godard's surrogate Jean-Paul Belmondo.
He forged a close partnership with leftist thinker Jean-Pierre Gorin and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who said: "He can be a shit... but he's a genius."
Since the 1970s his most important collaborator has been his life partner, the Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville.
Film industries around the world saw their own New Waves. America's New Wave gave us works like ‘Bonnie & Clyde,’ ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Jaws.’
The work of Godard himself - whether personal, experimental, political or all three - has had a massive impact.
US director Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, a reference to Godard's 1963 film ‘Bande à part (Band of Outsiders)’. Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci included a homage to it in his film ‘The Dreamers’.
Godard's influence can be seen in the blurring of documentary and fiction by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami or in the thematically and formally provocative work of Denmark's Lars Von Trier.
Four Godard films made Sight and Sound's list of 50 greatest films ever - ‘Breathless,’ ‘Le Mépris’, ‘Pierrot le Fou’ and ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’.
