JEAN-LUC GODARD Biography - Filmography - Poster Gallery Jean-Luc Godard (born 3 December 1930) is a Franco-Swiss filmmaker and a leading member of the "French New Wave”. Known for stylistic innovations that challenged the conventions of Hollywood cinema, he is universally recognized as the most audacious, radical, as well as the most influential of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. His work reflects a fervent knowledge of film history, a comprehensive understanding of existential and Marxist philosophy, and a profound insight into the fragility of human relationships. see also articles on: Top 10 Godard Movies || French New Wave History || French New Wave Film Guide || Godard's Politics

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard during the filming of 'Sympathy For the Devil' (aka 'One Plus One'). (Photo by Larry Ellis/Express/Getty Images) get this image as a framed premium photographic printa

A Happy Childhood

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. His father, Paul Godard, a Swiss doctor, moved the family to Switzerland four years later. His mother, Odile Monod, was from a wealthy protestant French background. Her father, Julien Monod, was one of the most prominent bankers in France, and a well-connected figure in literary circles, whose closest friend was the writer Paul Valery. The couple had three other children: Rachel, born January 1st 1930, Claude, born in 1933, and Véronique, born in 1937.

The family settled in Nyon on the shores of Lake Geneva. Paul Godard worked in a private medical clinic nearby. The family was prosperous and cultured – Godard later described his childhood as being like “a kind of paradise.” During World War II, the family remained in Switzerland, though they would make occasional trips across to the French side of the lake to visit Julian Monod’s estate. Young Jean-Luc was already an avid reader who, by the age of fourteen, had graduated from children’s adventure stories to works by authors such as André Gide and André Malraux. He was also a keen sports fan who played tennis, skied and enjoyed football.

The Black Sheep

In 1946, Godard went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris, where he intended to study advanced mathematics with the intention of entering engineering school. Instead, he became hooked on the ciné-club boom in the capital and began watching movies day and night. The result was that he failed his baccalaureate exam in 1948 and returned to Switzerland where he studied at a high school in Lausanne and lived with his parents. Relations between father and son were strained so Godard spent most of his spare time hanging around with other cinema enthusiasts in Geneva. He also tried his hand at painting after becoming interested in modern art.

After finally passing his baccalaureate, he returned to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1949. He took courses in ethnology but soon abandoned his studies, applying to become a student at the city’s leading film school, IDHEC, but he was rejected. Instead he studied film by watching movies at Henri Langlois’ Cinématheque Francais and the Ciné-club Quarter Latin. It was here that he first became friends with two other film fanatics, Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. It was standard practice for them to see three or four films per day, or to spend an entire day in a single theatre. As Godard later wrote, “the cinema screen was the wall we had to scale to escape from our lives.”

What Is Cinema?

Post-war Paris was a place of great philosophical and political debate. The dominant intellectual figure was Jean-Paul Sartre, a prolific writer and advocate of “existentialism” who poured forth novels, plays, philosophical essays, literary criticism, and political commentary, becoming a famous public figure in the process. He believed it essential, after the experience of the war, that writers become engaged with politics, taking sides if necessary. In his case, that meant siding with the far left. As a keen filmgoer and commentator on cinema himself, Sartre was opposed, along with most of the left, to the great influx of American films that flooded Paris after the war, seeing it as a sign of American cultural imperialism. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was one of the films he criticised for abandoning the “realist naiveté” of pre-war Hollywood, accusing Welles of making an abstract, intellectual film not rooted in the concerns of the masses.

One critic who opposed this view was André Bazin, who, in an essay entitled “The Technique of Citizen Kane”, praised the film for its artistic richness, arguing that Welles reinvented the artform with his use of deep-focus technique to tell the story. Bazin, who believed passionately in the “objective reality” of the film image, believed that long takes and the use of deep focus, as opposed to the use of editing and montage, produced a more faithful vision of the world. His emphasis on film technique and the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of cinema put him in opposition to the left who were more concerned with a film’s social message.

While both these thinkers influenced Godard, a younger critic proved even more of an inspiration. Maurice Schérer, born in 1920, was a teacher and film enthusiast. He had made his name as a critic with three articles for the magazine La Revue du cinema in which he attempted to formulate an ambitious and comprehensive theoretical definition of the cinema. In these articles he rejected Bazin’s emphasis on the depiction of uninterrupted three-dimensional space, instead arguing that it was the way a director placed objects within that space, including actors, which gave it meaning. He also commended the use of actor’s speech and gesture as a crucial element in bringing the filmed image to life. Having read these essays, Godard began attending the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin where Schérer was the main presiding figure, often introducing the evening’s films and then presiding over the energetic debates that often followed screenings. Towards the end of 1949, he began publishing a magazine called La Gazette du cinema writing under the pseudonym of Eric Rohmer.

La Gazette du cinema lasted for only five editions before it folded. Godard contributed to almost every issue. Still only nineteen years old, he was already writing complex articles and reviews, which revealed an assured and original view of cinema. In his longest article entitled “Towards a Political Cinema”, he argues that cinema is not just a representation of reality, but becomes part of the reality itself – that cinema and reality are one. In another piece, he states: “At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” Cinema had become for him a transformational experience in which the distance between the viewer and what occurred on the screen no longer existed. By watching films you were already part of them.

A Bohemian Life

But it wasn’t enough for Godard and his friends to simply watch and write about cinema; they wanted to make films themselves....

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As Director:

Major Acting Credits:

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