All All. Sign In. French New Wave Filmmakers. List activity. Jean-Luc Godard. Director Writer Editor Band of Outsiders Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, , the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. In he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in ethnology.
He wrote a number of articles for the journal, often using the pseudonym "Hans Lucas". After Godard worked on and financed two films by Rivette and Rohmer, Godard's family cut off their financial support in , and he resorted to a Bohemian lifestyle that included stealing food and money when necessary. Later that year he traveled to North and South America with his father and attempted to make his first film of which only a tracking shot from a car was ever accomplished.
In he returned to Paris briefly before securing a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film in about the building of the dam called Operation Concrete Later that year his mother was killed in a motor scooter accident in Switzerland.
Later that year he took unused footage of a flood in Paris shot by Truffaut and edited it into a film called A Story of Water , which was an homage to Mack Sennett. In he worked with Truffaut on the weekly publication "Temps de Paris".
Godard wrote a gossip column for the journal, but also spent much time writing scenarios for films and a body of critical writings which placed him firmly in the forefront of the "nouvelle vague" aesthetic, precursing the French New Wave. It was also in that year Godard began work on Breathless In he married Anna Karina in Switzerland. However, French censors banned it due to its references to the Algerian war, and it was not shown until In March Breathless premiered in Paris.
