— Ch. 1 · Paris And The Cinémathèque —
Jean-Luc Godard.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Jean-Luc Godard was born on the 3rd of December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. His father Paul Godard worked as a Swiss physician while his mother Odile came from a wealthy Protestant family with deep roots in banking and theology. Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, the family moved to Switzerland where he spent most of World War II. He attended school in Nyon before returning to France in 1949 to study anthropology at the University of Paris without attending classes.
In the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs gained prominence throughout Paris. Godard began attending these film societies including the Cinémathèque Française and the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. These venues became his regular haunts where he met fellow enthusiasts like Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. At the Cinémathèque founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936, Godard discovered a world nobody had spoken to him about. They told them about Goethe but not Dreyer. They watched silent films in the era of talkies.
Breathless And The Jump Cut
Godard's Breathless released in 1960 starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. It distinctly expressed the French New Wave style through innovative techniques such as jump cuts which were traditionally considered amateurish. The film employed character asides and breaking the eyeline match in continuity editing. Another unique aspect was the spontaneous writing of the script on the day of shooting which contributed to the documentary-like ambiance.
From the beginning of his career Godard included more film references than any of his New Wave colleagues. In Breathless citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart from his last film The Harder They Fall whose expression Belmondo tried reverently to imitate. Visual quotations appeared from Ingmar Bergman Samuel Fuller Fritz Lang and others. An onscreen dedication honored Monogram Pictures an American B-movie studio. Quotations from literature included William Faulkner Dylan Thomas Louis Aragon Rainer Maria Rilke Françoise Sagan and Maurice Sachs. The film also contained citations to composers J.S. Bach Mozart and painters Picasso Paul Klee Auguste Renoir.