French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Gord has died at 91

 Film director Jean-Luc Godard at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. He was a major figure in French New Wave cinema. According to French media, he died at the age of 91.

The influential critic and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard passed away peacefully at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, his family announced in a statement. A family statement said Goddard, 91, had been suffering from multiple ailments and died by suicide.

A leader of the French New Wave

The director of the French New Wave and sometimes "horror" helped revolutionize popular cinema in the 1960s, and spent the rest of his career pushing boundaries and recreating the cinematic form. Gord's first feature, the 1960 crime drama Breathless, greeted audiences with a flurry of new.

American actress Jean Seberg opposite the then-unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo with a cigarette dangling from her lips. He played a penniless young car thief who models himself in a Hollywood gangster film. After shooting a police officer, he flees to Italy with his pregnant girlfriend, Seberg, who seems indifferent to him.

He was a Tinseltown archetype, regarded as cool material by a director who was a big fan of Hollywood movies.

As a critic, Goddard championed directors Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and in Breathless he has a poster of what Humphrey Bogart Belmondo would do. But with jump-cut editing, disjointed narration and actors interacting with the camera, the filmmaker was positioning himself as a new form of storytelling – full of experimentation and rejection of accepted technique.

Jean-Luc Godard, iconic French film director, dies at 91

The Liberation of France reported Goddard's death on Tuesday. Goddard, who defined the French New Wave, was 91 years old. French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed Gourd's death in a tribute on Twitter.

"It was like a carnival in the French cinema," wrote Macron. "And then he became his master. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconic of New Wave directors, invented a completely modern, profoundly free art. We're losing a national treasure, a genius."

Ce fut comme une apparition dans le cinéma français. Puis il en devint un maître. Jean-Luc Godard, le plus iconoclaste des cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague, avait inventé un art résolument moderne, intensément libre. Nous perdons un trésor national, un regard de génie. pic.twitter.com/bQneeqp8on

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) September 13, 2022

Gord was born in Paris in 1930. As a youth, he began attending film society clubs and was a film critic for Cahir du Cinéma in his prime in the 1950s. The director released his first feature film in 1960. The crime drama starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival that year and marked the victory of the French New Wave.

Goddard directed films in the 1960s such as She's a Woman, Living My Life and Alphaville. Many of his films featured his first wife, Anna Karina, and his second wife, Anne Vyazemski. Her later works include her "trilogy of excellence" - Passion, original name: Carmen and Hail Mary, released in the 1980s - which explore feminism, nature and religion.