Jean-Luc Godard, godfather of French New Wave cinema, dies at 91

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave movement in cinema, died on Tuesday aged 91, the newspaper Liberation said, citing people close to the Franco-Swiss director.

Godard was among the world's most acclaimed directors, known for classics like 'Breathless' and 'Contempt', which pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after his 1960s heyday.

His movies broke the established conventions of French cinema in 1960, and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking — replete with handheld camera work, jump cuts, and existential dialogue.

For many cinephiles, no words are good enough: Godard, with his tousled black hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, was a veritable revolutionary who made artists of movie-makers, putting them on par with master artists and icons of literature.

"It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to," Godard once said.

Godard was not alone in creating France's New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) — a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers, including Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, and Eric Rohmer — most of them pals from the trendy, bohemian Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s. However, he became the poster child of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Brazil, Hollywood and, more improbably, in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.

"We owe him a lot," former French culture minister Jack Lang wrote in an emailed statement.

"He filled cinema with poetry and philosophy. His sharp and unique eye made us see the imperceptible."

Quentin Tarantino, director of 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Reservoir Dogs' in the 1990s, is often cited as one of a more recent generation of boundary-bending tradition that Godard and his Paris Left Bank cohorts initiated.

Earlier came Martin Scorsese in 1976 with 'Taxi Driver', the disturbing neon-lit existential-psychological thriller of a Vietnam veteran-turned-cabbie who steers through the streets all night with a growing obsession for the need to clean up seedy New York.

Godard was not everyone's idol. Wild-child Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who at 25 shared an award with an octogenarian Godard at the Cannes film festival in 2014, courted controversy every bit as much as Godard did, but called him "the grinchy old man" and "no hero of mine".

New Wave, new ways

Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris' plush Seventh Arrondissement. His father was a doctor, and his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank.

• Visionary British theatre director Peter Brook dies aged 97