Just laid sumn down right quick. i feel like making beats

Prod Boggul

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. As a result 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, Godard returned to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1949. He took courses in ethnology but soon abandoned his studies and applied to become a student at the city’s leading film school IDHEC. The school rejected his application, so instead he studied film by watching movies at Henri Langlois’ Cinématheque Francais and the Ciné-club Quarter Latin where 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. Sartre 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 techniques such as deep-focus to tell the story. Bazin, wh

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