In 1953 Odile Godard sent her 22-year-old son to work on the Grande Dixence dam in Valais, Switzerland, after repeated juvenile offences and to avoid Indochina conscription. Godard experienced jail and a psychiatric placement before his mother secured release to labour on the remote dam site. While working punishing shifts he recognised the potential for a documentary about the monumental construction. The Hoover Dam's publicity influenced a wave of postwar projects, and Godard aimed to make a spectacular promotional film that could also sell to television, using family connections to move into an office role and borrow a camera.
In 1953, when Godard's mother, Odile, sent him to work as a labourer on the construction of the Grande Dixence dam in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, it represented a desperate last throw of the dice for her wayward 22-year-old kleptomaniac son. Godard had returned to Switzerland to avoid being drafted into the Indochina war, but quickly found himself in trouble again.
He had this long period of repeated adolescent bad behaviour that his family had indulged but which eventually got him thrown in jail in Switzerland, says Prof Ginette Vincendeau, co-editor of The French New Wave. Uncertain whether he needed to be punished or cured, his father had placed him in a psychiatric clinic. Thanks to his mother's 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's tallest dam.
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's film, Operation Concrete, would (as with so much of his later work) give an American story a European flavour.
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