Sept. 13 (UPI) -- Iconic French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard has died.
French newspaper Libération reported Godard's death Tuesday. Godard, whose works defined the French New Wave moment, was 91.
French president Emmanuel Macron confirmed Godard's death in a tribute on Twitter.
"It was like an apparition in French cinema," Macron wrote. "Then he became one of its masters. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave directors, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We lose a national treasure, a genius outlook."
Godard was born in Paris in 1930. He began attending film society clubs as a young man and was a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma during its heyday of the 1950s.
The director released his debut feature film, Breathless, in 1960. The crime drama starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival that year and marked the triumph of the French New Wave.
Godard went on to direct such films as A Woman is a Woman, My Life to Live and Alphaville in the 1960s. Many of his films featured his first wife, Anna Karina, and his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky.
His later works included his "trilogy of the sublime" -- Passion, First Name: Carmen and Hail Mary, released in the 1980s -- which explored femininity, nature and religion.
Godard received an honorary César in 1987 and 1998, and an honorary Academy Award in 2010.
