Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

Goddard’s early films revolutionized the language of cinema for everyone, from the Superbrats of Hollywood to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968 he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland during World War II, the postwar years saw Goddard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescrbed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of Andre Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Goddard – together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol – hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swpped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague.