Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the "Superbrats of Hollywood" to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968, he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of Andre Bazin, the...