Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard, an icon of La Nouvelle Vague—the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s—has died. He was 91. Breathless (1960), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965) are true masterpieces of the medium. From the New York Times:
A master of epigrams as well as of movies, Mr. Godard once observed, "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order."
In practice he seldom scrambled the timeline of his films, preferring instead to leap forward through his narratives by means of the elliptical "jump cut," which he did much to make into a widely accepted tool. But he never tired of taking apart established forms and reassembling them in ways that were invariably fresh, frequently witty, sometimes abstruse but consistently stimulating.
