Iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard’s 91. died on

Jean-Luc Godard, the ingenious “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who revolutionized popular cinema with his 1960 debut “Breathless” and stood for years as one of the world’s most important and provocative directors. He was 91 years old.

The Swiss news agency ATS quoted Goddard’s partner, Anne-Marie Miville, and his producers as saying that he died peacefully on Tuesday at his home in the Swiss city of Rolle on Lake Geneva, surrounded by his loved ones.

French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Goddard as “the most iconic of New Wave directors” who “invented an utterly modern, deeply liberating art form.”

He continued: “We have lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius.”

Goddard defied convention over a long career that began as a film critic in the 1950s. He rewrote the rules of camera, sound and narrative.

His films propelled Jean-Paul Belmondo to stardom and his controversial modern play “Hail Mary” made headlines when Pope John Paul II condemned it in 1985.

But Goddard also produced a series of films, often politically charged and experimental, that delighted some outside a small circle of fans and disappointed many critics through their perceived intellectualism.

Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremoux told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was “sad, sad. Very much” at the news of Goddard’s death.

Born on December 3, 1930 in Paris to a wealthy French-Swiss family, Godard grew up in Nyon, Switzerland, studying ethnography at the Sorbonne in the French capital, where he was increasingly attracted to the cultural scene that flourished in the Latin Quarter . Cine-Club” after World War II.

He became friends with future big-name directors François Truffaut, Jacques Rivet and Eric Romer, and founded the short-lived Gazette du Cinema in 1950. By 1952 he had started writing for the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

After starring in two films by Rivet and Romer in 1951, Goddard tried to direct his first film, traveling with his father to North and South America, but never completed it.

Back in Europe, he took a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. He used the payment for his first full film, 1954’s “Operation Concrete”, a 20-minute documentary about the construction of the dam.

Returning to Paris, Goddard worked as a spokesman for an artists’ agency and made his first feature in 1957—”All the Boys Are Called Patrick,” released in 1959—and continued to improve his writing.

He also began work on “Breathless”, based on a story by Truffaut. It was Goddard’s first major success when it was released in March 1960.

The film stars Belmondo as a penniless young thief who models himself on the Hollywood film Gangsters and who, after shooting a police officer, flees to Italy with his American girlfriend, played by Jean Seeberg.

Like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, released in 1959, Goddard’s film set a new tone for the French film aesthetic. Goddard rejected the traditional narrative style and instead often used jump-cuts that mixed philosophical discussions with action sequences.

He accomplished this in terms of Hollywood gangster movies, and in terms of literature and the visual arts.

Goddard also launched what was a career-long involvement in collective film projects, contributing scenes for “The Seven Deadly Sins” with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He also worked with Ugo Gregoretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini in the Italian film “Let’s Have a Brainwash”, in which Goddard’s scenes portray a disturbing post-apocalyptic world.

Goddard, who would later go on to achieve a reputation for his staunch left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he created “The Little Soldier”. The film, full of references to the French colonial war in Algeria, was not released until 1963, a year after the conflict ended.

His work turned more political by the late 1960s. In “Week End”, his characters tease out the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, even as they demonstrate the comic futility of violent class warfare. This came to the fore a year earlier when popular anger in the establishment rocked France, culminating in the prestigious but short-lived student unrest of May 1968.

Goddard harbored a life-long sympathy for the various forms of socialism depicted in films from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. In December 2007, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Film Academy.

Goddard took potshots at Hollywood over the years.

In November 2010, he remained in Switzerland instead of traveling to Hollywood to receive an honorary Oscar at a private ceremony with film historian and conservationist Kevin Brownlow, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola and actor Eli Wallach.

His lifelong advocacy of the Palestinian cause led to repeated accusations of anti-Semitism, despite his insistence that he sympathized with the Jewish people and their plight in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Although the Academy received some complaints about Goddard being chosen to receive the award, Academy President Tom Sherk stated that the director was fully recognized “for his contribution to film in the New Wave era”.

In 2010, Goddard released “Film Socialism”, a three-chapter film that was shown for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival.

Goddard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina in 1961. She appeared in a series of films she produced during the remainder of the 1960s, all of them viewed as New Wave landmarks. Notable among them were “My Life to Live,” “Alphaville” and “Crazy Pete,” – which also starred Belmondo and was rumored to have been shot without a script. They got divorced in 1965.

Goddard married his second wife, Anne Wyzemsky, in 1967. He later began a relationship with the Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. Goddard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979, when he moved with Mieville to the Swiss municipality of Rolle, where he lived with her for the rest of his life.