Emmanuel Macron on Jean-Luc Godard’s death: France lost a ‘national treasure’

Jean-Luc Godard, a legendary French filmmaker, died at age 91. His partner Anne-Marie Mieville told news agency ATS that Godard died peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle, on Lake Geneva, on Tuesday.

Remembering Jean-Luc Godard, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote in a social media post that the country had “lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius.”

Also Read: Jean-Luc Godard: Avant-garde filmmaker’s revolutionary stances

“It was like an appearance in French cinema. Then he became a master. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art”, Macron said in his tribute.

Other French politicians also remembered Jean-Luc Godard. Maud Petit, a member of the French National Assembly, wrote, “The New Wave recalled its most emblematic representative from the other side of the shore. Jean-Luc Godard leaves us an incredible legacy, a national treasure.”

Cannes Film Festival Director Thierry Fremaux told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he was “sad, sad. Immensely so” at the news of Godard’s death.

Godard made a string of films, often politically charged and experimental, which pleased few outside a small circle of fans and frustrated many critics through their purported overblown intellectualism.

Godard was launched into the French film industry in 1960, after the release of his first major film Breathless. The movie stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the role of a broke thief who models himself on Hollywood movie gangsters. 

Also Read: Adieu Godard: The French filmmaker’s India connection

Jean-Luc Godard was known to take a public stance on a variety of social issues, which were depicted in films ranging from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

His lifelong advocacy of the Palestinian cause also brought him repeated accusations of antisemitism, despite his insistence that he sympathized with the Jewish people and their plight in Nazi-occupied Europe.