Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard dies aged 91

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, who pioneered the Nouvelle Vague cinema movement with the 1960 film Breathless, has died aged 91.

Godard died “peacefully” and “surrounded by those close to him” on Tuesday in his home in Rolle, Switzerland, his family and producers told Agence France-Presse.

French newspaper Libération, which first reported the death, published a story citing sources close to the family who said the director was not ill and had chosen to die with medical assistance as is permitted under Swiss law.

“He was a breakout star of French cinema,” President Emmanuel Macron said in a tweet. “Then he became a master. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic film-maker of the New Wave, invented an art that was resolutely modern and intensely free. We have lost a national treasure, the vision of a genius.”

Critics have hailed Godard as one of the great postwar film directors who, during a particularly productive stretch in the 1960s, produced 15 features that challenged the visual style and narrative conventions of Hollywood. Handheld cameras, jump cuts, and sometimes wandering dialogue became the trademark of Nouvelle Vague, a movement that influenced generations of filmmakers.

Godard was born in Paris in 1930, the son of a doctor and a banker’s daughter. He was raised in Nyon, Switzerland, and returned to Paris for university. He started out as a film critic in the Latin Quarter where he and a group of friends that included future cinema greats such as François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer would watch several films a day. Godard wrote for the Cahiers du Cinéma journal that helped shape the New Wave movement.

With his first film Breathless, Godard made a star of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who played a criminal on the run, and furthered the career of the American actress Jean Seberg in the role of his girlfriend.

Godard and his work were often radical and tinged with political ideas pulled from Marxism and anti-imperialism in vogue on the left in the 1960s and 1970s. Later in his career, he would criticise the ever-growing role of television, saying it was an inferior art.

“Cinema is a forgetting of reality,” he told Le Monde in 2014.

He went on to make films throughout his life, and theorised and wrote about film history. In the eight-part video documentary Histoire(s) du cinéma released from 1988 to 1998, Godard created an impressionistic collage of quotes, interviews and sequences that showed his essence as a cinephile.

Godard influenced many filmmakers including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. American director Jim Jarmusch said he had been inspired by Breathless when he made the film Stranger Than Paradise to turn the constraints of having little money into an artistic advantage.

Figures from across the film business paid tribute to the director. French actress Brigitte Bardot, who starred in Godard’s 1953 film Contempt, posted a black-and-white photo of them walking down a set of stairs together. “By making Contempt and Breathless, Godard joined the firmament of the last great creators of stars,” she said.

Antonio Banderas, the Spanish actor and director, tweeted: “Thank you monsieur Godard for expanding the boundaries of the language of cinema.”

Calling Godard the “Picasso of cinema”, Gilles Jacob, a critic who headed the Cannes film festival from 2001 to 2014, said the film world had been orphaned by the director’s passing. “Ahead of his time, he played with words, images, sound, and colour,” he said.

As a young man Godard was no fan of the Cannes film festival, leading a march to disrupt the event to support the May 1968 student protests that were then raging in Paris. “We should be demolishing the structures of Cannes,” he said, according to an AFP report at the time. “I’m talking to you about solidarity with the students and workers and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!”

Godard did go on to win awards at Cannes, for two of his late-career films, and also won an Oscar for his lifetime achievements.

Godard was married twice, to two actresses who appeared in his films — Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky — and is survived by his partner Anne-Marie Miéville.