• Film director Jean-Luc Godard, an icon of French New Wave cinema, passed away. He was 91.

• Godard was among the world’s most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as ‘Breathless’, ‘Contempt’ and ‘Weekend’, which pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades.

• His movies broke with the established conventions of French cinema and helped kickstart a new way of filmmaking, complete with handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.

• Godard was born into a Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris. His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a Swiss man who founded Banque Paribas, then an illustrious investment bank. This upbringing contrasted with his later pioneering ways. 

• Godard fell in with like-minded folk whose dissatisfaction with humdrum movies that never strayed from convention sowed the seeds of a breakaway movement which came to be called the Nouvelle Vague.

• Godard was one of the most prolific of his peers, producing dozens of short and full-length films over more than half a century from the late 1950s.

• Godard already had directed several short films when, at 29, he captured international attention in 1960 with his first feature film, ‘Breathless’.

• Most of his most influential and commercially successful films came in the 1960s, including ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ (My Life to Live), ‘Pierrot le Fou’, ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her’ and ‘Weekend’.

• Godard was not alone in creating France’s New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), a credit he shares with at least a dozen peers including Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, most of them pals from the trendy, bohemian Left Bank of Paris in the late 1950s. However, he became the poster child of the movement, which spawned offshoots in Japan, Hollywood and Czechoslovakia as well as in Brazil.

• He became a guiding light to fellow filmmakers throughout his more than six-decade career.

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