Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma

Born in Paris in 1930, Jean-Luc Godard grew up on the shores of Lake Geneva, and his first passion was painting. After the Second World War, which he spent in Switzerland, his family sent him to study in Paris, but Godard mainly attended film clubs and the Cinémathèque française. At the beginning of the 1950s, he attended the Ciné-club du Quartier Latin (Cinema club of the Latin Quarter) where he met Maurice Schérer (soon to be Eric Rohmer), François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, among others, with whom he took his first steps as a critic and embarked on the adventure of the Cahiers du cinéma. After directing a few short films, he moved on to feature films in the wake of François Truffaut by directing A bout de souffle in 1960, which contributed to the launch of the French New Wave. He will not stop shooting until the 2010s, constituting over the decades an exploratory work that has always pushed the boundaries of cinema.

Photo: ©Bertrand Carrière | Collections de la Cinémathèque québécoise