Director Jean-Luc Godard, who revolutionized film making in the 1960s as a pioneer of the French New Wave movement, has died at the age of 91, his wife and his producers said on Tuesday.
He died peacefully at his home among family. No official funeral is planned, they said.
Godard's lawyers said he had been suffering from several serious illnesses and opted to die by euthanasia, which is legal in Switzerland.
The Franco-Swiss director became an icon of French cinema for overthrowing conventional forms of film-making in favour of new narrative structures and techniques. Godard is the last leading director of the New Wave to die.
He completed more than 60 films, including "Breathless," "Contempt" and "My Life to Live." In his last years he made films that no longer told stories but used images in a collage-like way.
He was born in Paris into a Protestant middle class family and attended school in Nyon, in the Swiss canton of Vaud. He then returned to Paris and worked at the influential film criticism magazine Cahiers du Cinéma with other New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) talents like Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut.
Godard became an overnight success following the release of "Breathless" in 1959.
The crime drama starring Jean-Paul Belmondo was shot freely with a hand-held camera through the streets, outside of a studio. This, in addition to the editing of jump cuts, was highly unusual at the time, and Godard quickly established a reputation as one of the most innovative directors of his generation.
Godard continued to push the boundaries of cinema and was highly productive for the next decade. During these years he made "The Little Soldier," "A Woman is a Woman" and "Band of Outsiders," moving further away from realistic narrative cinema with each film.
He increasingly withdrew from the film world after a serious car accident in the 1970s. He lived a life of seclusion on Lake Geneva starting in the early 1980s.
But he continued to push the boundaries of cinema, eventually even turning away from the Nouvelle Vague. He addressed themes like war and war crimes, including Daish killings, in his later works.
His last film essay, the free-associative work "The Image Book," was awarded the Palme d'Or Spécial at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Politicians and film-makers paid tribute to Godard and his work on hearing news of his death.
French President Emmanuel Macron described Godard as a master of the Nouvelle Vague who had invented a modern and free art. "We are losing a national treasure, a brilliant eye," he said.
In Germany, Culture Minister Claudia Roth said: "The film world will greatly miss this extraordinary visionary of cinema."
