{"id":374294,"date":"2025-08-26T06:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T06:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/374294\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T06:51:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T06:51:10","slug":"kleptomania-family-feuds-and-europes-tallest-dam-the-strange-story-of-jean-luc-godards-debut-film-jean-luc-godard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/374294\/","title":{"rendered":"Kleptomania, family feuds and Europe\u2019s tallest dam: the strange story of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s debut film | Jean-Luc Godard"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s debut feature, Breathless<\/a>, exploded on to cinema screens in 1960, it was heralded as an instant classic. However, his directorial career did not start with Breathless, but rather five years earlier with Operation Concrete, a remarkable documentary with an even more poignant backstory.<\/p>\n

In 1953, when Godard\u2019s mother, Odile, sent him to work as a labourer on the construction of the Grande Dixence dam in the canton of Valais, Switzerland<\/a>, it represented a desperate last throw of the dice for her wayward 22-year-old kleptomaniac son.<\/p>\n

Godard had returned to Switzerland to avoid being drafted into the Indochina war, but quickly found himself in trouble again. \u201cHe had this long period of repeated adolescent bad behaviour that his family had indulged but which eventually got him thrown in jail in Switzerland,\u201d says Prof Ginette Vincendeau, co-editor of The French New Wave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Uncertain whether he needed to be punished or cured, his father had placed him in a psychiatric clinic. Thanks to his mother\u2019s intervention he was freed to work on something like a military camp in a remote south-west corner of Switzerland, on what would become Europe\u2019s tallest dam.<\/p>\n

The potential for a documentary about this epic construction project crystallised as Godard began working his punishing shifts. The highly publicised example of the Hoover dam, which helped lift the US out of the Great Depression, had set in train a wave of similarly monumental postwar projects in Europe. Godard\u2019s film, Operation Concrete, would (as with so much of his later work) give an American story a European flavour.<\/p>\n

After a year in purgatory, Godard used family connections to move to an office job, borrow a camera and attract the attention of management. The aim was to make a spectacular promotional film that could also be sold to television. In disgrace, Godard was finally seizing his opportunity. All you needed to make a film was a glacier and the world\u2019s largest gravity dam.<\/p>\n

Gives an American story a European flavour \u2026 Operation Concrete. Photograph: Gaumont<\/p>\n

On the face of it, Operation Concrete belongs to a genre of celebratory industrial cinema, a cinema that sought to fuse technological and aesthetic ambition. \u201cDocumentation of a major construction or engineering enterprise is a recurring genre within industrial film,\u201d says Patrick Russell, senior curator of nonfiction at the British Film Institute. \u201cAlthough mainly peopled by highly talented specialists, industrial film-making has also provided a training ground for film-makers such as Robert Altman, Lindsay Anderson and even Christopher Nolan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conditions were extremely tough. The film relays how construction had to be done against the clock; for most of the year the weather was too cold for the concrete to set. Bursts of building had to be squeezed into short summer months. This elongated process also made for a peculiar project: Operation Concrete would be finished and in circulation six years before the dam was finally completed in 1961.<\/p>\n

Operation Concrete is also a film that could only have been made in the early-mid century. Its excited ambience belongs to the world of Unit\u00e9 d\u2019Habitation designed by Le Corbusier \u2013 another giant Franco-Swiss figure. This was a time when concrete was still imbued with \u201cgood\u201d qualities, when it was celebrated as a material for realising visionary architectural ambitions. There is a stark shift in tone between Operation Concrete and Godard\u2019s portrait of Paris\u2019s dismal concrete suburbs in Two or Three Things I Know About Her in 1967, 12 years later. Operation Concrete belongs to a time before the advent of \u201cthe concrete jungle\u201d.<\/p>\n

Visually, the film borrows from the kind of propaganda films that Godard watched as a young man in the arthouse cinemas of Lausanne: the works of Eisenstein, Turin, Dziga Vertov. Rather than beginning with a factual frame, Godard\u2019s film shoves its exposition in the middle and then surrounds it with intense and occasionally near-delirious sequences of imagery. There\u2019s no aversion to the poetic taking precedence over the objective.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can already see in the film some of what set Godard apart,\u201d says Prof Brian Jacobson, an expert on French industrial film and author of The Cinema of Extractions<\/a>. \u201cHe finds the machines that move and the men taking daring action, and he moves his camera to emphasise shifts in scale, and to inject dynamism into the more mundane parts of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

With hindsight, it\u2019s possible to perceive elements of Godard\u2019s mature style in embryo. As well as jump-cuts, contrapuntal <\/strong>audio and a cast of proto Jean-Paul Belmondos, Godard seems to conceptualise the construction site as working something like an enormous film shoot.<\/p>\n

The cast of \u2018proto Jean-Paul Belmondos\u2019 in Operation Concrete. Photograph: Gaumont<\/p>\n

But the self-consciousness and the Soviet envy are tempered by Godard\u2019s distinctive voiceover, a disarmingly sincere pean to the fact of the dam\u2019s construction. There is evidence of some reflection here; like a kind of diarist, Godard was recording the different roles he had played in the dam\u2019s construction, from labourer to telephone operator. Perhaps there was also some sort of redemption.<\/p>\n

The immediate psychological context that informed the film\u2019s production was even more important. In May 1954, Odile died in a scooter accident. When the call came through to the dam, Godard was reportedly working as an operator on the telephone. Estranged from his family, Godard was banned from the funeral on account of his history of stealing from friends, relatives and former employers. He wrote the outline of Operation Concrete with Jean-Pierre Laubscher, his mother\u2019s much younger lover, then worked at nights and weekends after Odile\u2019s death to complete the film by the end of 1954.<\/p>\n

With the money he was paid for this out-of-hours project, Godard was able to quit his job, return to Geneva, and begin working on a new short : A Flirtatious Woman, based on a Maupassant short story. While he would never make another formal documentary, his subsequent works often drew heavily on the traditions of photojournalism, made use of \u201creal people\u201d as actors, and freely sucked source material from the news media into his scripts.<\/p>\n

In making a film about the building of a dam, Godard had drawn a line in his life and career. From exile in the mountains, he returned to the city as an independent film-maker. The idea of recuperating in the fresh Swiss air is an old one, but in Valais, Godard really did catch his breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s debut feature, Breathless, exploded on to cinema screens in 1960, it was heralded as an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-374294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115093745523320836","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}