Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker who for years has been an icon of the Novelle Vogue movement or film noir movement, died aged 91 on Tuesday. Godard was known for cult films like Breathless, Contempt, and Weekend which disrupted the established conventions of French cinema in the 1950s in a manner that revolutionized world cinema.

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He, along with the other directors of the French New Wave, established a new way of filmmaking with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue. Godard was also a writer in the French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema and this magazine served as a manuscript for young budding filmmakers.

Film noir seeped into French cinema through the New Wave and the new style of filmmaking came to be called the ‘cinema of the disenchanted’. Cynical heroes, stark lighting, use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and underlying existentialist philosophy are all characteristics of film noir. Jean Luc Godard was one of the biggest exponents of noir style filmmaking.

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Breathless (1960)

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, the film starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. This is regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made. Breathless was largely based on the American film noir style. Breathless is about an American car thief who commits a traffic violation while driving back to Paris. He kills a young police officer and persuades an American girl Patricia to flee with him. Iconic track-shots were used that captured post-war Paris, and jerky camera movements perfectly captured the encounter between cops and robbers.

Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville is a French New Wave neo-noir film that weds science fiction with film noir. Directed by Jean Luc Godard, the film was shot in real locations of Alphaville in Paris and the film highlighted the presence of future events. A continuous 4-minute unedited sequence was kept at the beginning of the film and the use of existentialism was a characteristic feature of this film.

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Weekend (1967)

Weekend is one of Godard’s most influential films and one that gave his Marxist philosophy the greatest expression. The film is about a bourgeois couple, Roland and Corinne Durand, who have secret lovers and conspire to kill each other. Weekend captures the French countryside in all its glories and features the adventures of this roguish couple. The film centers on the violence and hatred that Godard observed in post-war France and he explores the them through the attitudes and indifferences of the couple. The destruction of the relationship reflects the sabotage of French society.