Cinema\u2019s original enfant terrible, one of the leaders of the

French New Wave, a key influence on the American cinema of the 1970s and

one of the few true auteurs still making movies: Jean-Luc Godard is all

of these and more. A maverick force from the beginning, when his debut

film A Bout de Souffle (1959) tore up the cinematic rulebook, Godard has

continued to inspire and challenge moviegoers throughout a career that

spans more than four decades.

Born in Paris in 1930,

Godard came from a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family, where he attended

school until his parents divorced in 1948 and he moved to Paris. A

contemporary of Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette,

Godard first became involved in cinema through literary criticism,

writing several articles under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. After supplying

funding to films by Rivette and Rohmer, with whom he had also founded a

\u2018Gazette du Cinema\u2019 for their writing, Godard\u2019s family withdr5