In 1967, at the peak of his global fame, a young French director ended a film with a title card declaring the end of cinema, then kept making movies for more than fifty years. This episode traces the evolution of Jean-Luc Godard from a wealthy Protestant childhood spent safely in Switzerland during World War II, through the smoky Latin Quarter film clubs where he and Francois Truffaut studied silent films to decode the pure mechanics of the medium, to his years as a critic championing Hitchcock over prestigious French costume dramas.

We follow the detour after his mother's death that took him to a Swiss dam project as a construction worker and switchboard operator, where he shot a documentary and sold it to his own employer, and the 1960 breakthrough of Breathless, with its handheld newsreel cameras, wheelchair tracking shots, lines whisper ...