Jean-Luc Godard - Film Criticism and Early Filmmaking

Film Criticism and Early Filmmaking

After attending school in Nyon, Godard returned to Paris in 1948. It was there, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, that ciné-clubs (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave, André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He has said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread – but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope ... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."

His approach to film began in the field of criticism. Along with Éric Rohmer and Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal, Gazette du cinéma, which saw publication of five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded the influential critical magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, was among the first writers. They, along with several other writers for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, started making brief forays into film direction.

Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building, Opération béton (1955). As he continued to work for Cahiers, he made Une femme coquette (1955), a ten-minute short; All the Boys Are Named Patrick (1957) another short fiction film; and Une histoire d'eau (1958), which was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut.

In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules, a homage to Jean Cocteau.