Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France’s New Wave cinema, died on Tuesday aged 91, newspaper Liberation and other French media said.

Godard was among the world’s most acclaimed directors, known for such classics as “Breathless” and “Contempt”, which pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after his 1960s heyday.

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.

For many movie buffs, no praise is high enough: Godard, with his tousled black hair and heavy-rimmed glasses, was a veritable revolutionary who made artists of movie-makers, putting them on a par with master painters and icons of literature.

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“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to,” Godard once said.

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.

Read more: Reuters