Jean-Luc Godard, French New Wave director, dies at 91

Jean-Luc Godard, the influential French New Wave writer-director who broke new ground in cinematic expression in the 1960s with films such as “Breathless,” “Contempt” and “Weekend” and became a guiding light to fellow filmmakers throughout his more than six-decade career, has died. “Godard was one of the inventors of the auteur theory and perhaps the most rigorous of the New Wave filmmakers in putting that idea into practice,” film critic David Sterritt told The Times in 2006. Godard had already directed several short films when, at 29, he captured international attention in 1960 with his first feature film, “Breathless,” a boldly innovative homage to American gangster B-movies. While watching Godard’s movies as a film student in the ’60s, Scorsese said he was taken with the “sense of freedom, of being able to do anything — there was a kind of joy that burst into me when I saw the movies.” Another well-known fan, director Quentin Tarantino, named his production company A Band Apart after the French title for Godard’s 1964 film “Band of Outsiders” and heeded one of Godard’s maxims when he filmed “Pulp Fiction”: “A movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” The late director Bernardo Bertolucci put it simply: “We all wanted to be Jean-Luc Godard.” “There is no one like him in the whole history of cinema,” said Kinder. In 1961, Godard married Anna Karina, who starred in “A Woman Is a Woman,” “My Life to Live,” “Band of Outsiders” and other Godard films during the ’60s.