Jean-Luc Godard was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.
Why Godard died?
The family statement said the 91-year-old Godard had multiple illnesses and died from assisted suicide.
As a critic, Godard had championed directors Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and in Breathless, there’s a poster of Humphrey Bogart, to underline what Belmondo is going for.
Who did Godard influence?
“He comes along in 1960,” critic David Thompson told NPR’s David D’Arcy, “and says in effect, I have seen all the films ever made. I love them, most of them, but I abandon them because they’re all out of date. I am going to make a new kind of film, and I’m going to combine the energy and the novelty of ideas of a student, with the story forms of the old films. And for six or seven years, two films a year so we’re talking about a fair number of movies, he pulls it off.”