Opération béton (Operation Concrete) (1954)
By Jean-Luc Godard
Operation Beton is the very first film by Jean-Luc Godard, former ethnology student at the Sorbonne. Having immersed himself in film at the Cinematheque – where he encountered Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol (and Bazin), with whom he would later form the core of the French New Wave – the member of the staff of the recently emerged Paris-based magazine of film criticism, Cahiers du Cinéma, set out on a journey to South America, where he shot his very first footage. After returning to Switzerland, Godard went to work as a manual worker at a dam building site, using the money he earned to buy a camera, and making a short documentary about the building of the dam. An endurance test of material. Under the intensifying pressure, the block of concrete for building the dam at Val des Dix crumbles and breaks. The scientific experience of material takes place not only in physical space, it also in a psychic domain, a train of thought, for breaking up the matter means beginning to look for the ultimate cause. Operation Beton is the start of Godard´s monologue – even though before making this film, his texts addressed issues of cinema – that has gone down in cinema history as the journey…
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