Watch: Jean-Luc Godard's Long Lost Short, One of the World's Rarest Films, Has Just Surfaced

Five years before he stormed the gates of cinema history with his debut feature Breathless (À bout de souffle), a 25-year-old Jean-Luc Godard made his first foray into narrative filmmaking with the 9-minute short Une Femme Coquette. According to the AV Club, the never-distributed film had only a half-dozen screenings, and "has often been listed as lost by biographies and film history books."

An adaptation of The Signal, a short story by 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant, the film was shot in Geneva, Switzerland, with Godard as the sole crew member, using equipment borrowed from Actua-Films, the company that distributed Godard's first short, Opération Béton. Coquette stars Roland Tolmatchoff, a long-time associate of associate of Godard's, as well as a woman who has been credited over the years as either Marie or Maria Lysandre, though almost nothing is known of her aside from this film. Godard himself makes a cameo about two minutes in. He would later reuse the Maupassant story for the parodic film-within-a-film in his 1966 feature Masculin Féminin (which, fittingly, played with Coquette on a double bill at one of the short's few screenings).

Opération Béton was an industrial documentary short about the Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland, where Godard had been employed—first as a laborer, then as a telephone switch operator. But while the documentary has long been available, the discovery of Une Femme Coquette, previously rumored to exist as a single print in the hands of a private collector, is a real coup for film fans, and especially devotees of Godard. It's an invaluable glimpse at the start of an iconoclastic career that's still going, seven decades later: in his time behind the camera, the now 86-year-old Godard has directed 43 feature films, as well as countless shorts and other projects. His last feature, Goodbye to Language, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2014. 

Source: A.V. Club