Jean-Luc Godard dies aged 91

Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary French film director has died aged 91.

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most iconic directors behind the French New Wave cinema movements, died at 91 the French media have reported.

Goddard’s debut film was À bout de souffle (Breathless) with additional films as part of the director’s ouevre including Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) and Alphaville.

Starting his directing career in the 1960s, Godard directed over 130 films across his lifetime and inspired English-speaking filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright.

Speaking of the news, Wright, director of Hot Fuzz, tweeted, “Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential, iconoclastic filmmakers of them all. It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting.”

French President, Emmanuel Macron has said that the country has lost a national treasure and a genius.

Bande à Part, starring the late Anna Karina is still referenced to date by tourists who attempt to beat the record of running through The Louvre.

Karina, who married Godard in 1961 went on to appear in multiple films directed by the New Wave artist including Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman is a Woman) and portrayed a Parisian prostitute in Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live)

Godard and fellow director Francois Truffaut were both associated with the success of the French New Wave Movement of the 1950s that rejected traditional Western filmmaking techniques to create discussion and artistic reflection and came about after the directors spent time as film critics dissecting the conventions of filmmaking.

The French New Wave Movement gave birth to a lot of modern filmmaking techniques including the disjointed edit or allowing actors to linger in a scene longer than necessary to explore their emotions further.

Because this style of filmmaking was done with a limited budget, it to this date is a familiar technique used by amateur filmmakers as a way of telling compelling stories with limited recourses.