Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless
(À bout de souffle, 1959; 89 mins.)

actor	role
Jean Seberg	Patricia Franchini
Jean-Paul Belmondo	Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs
Daniel Boulanger	Inspector Vital
Henri-Jacques Huet	Antonio Berrutti
Roger Hanin	Carl Zumbach
Van Doude	Journalist
Liliane	Robin Liliane
Michel Fabre	Police Inspector
Jean-Pierre Melville	Parvulesco
Claude Mansard	Used car dealer
Jean-Luc Godard	Informer
Richard Balducci	Tolmatchoff

Director	Jean-Luc Godard
Producer	Georges de Beauregard
Production Companies	Impéria Films, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie
Screenplay	Jean-Luc Godard, based on an original treatment by François Truffaut
Director of Photography	Raoul Coutard
Camera Operator	Claude Beausoleil and Jacques Maumont
Assistant Director	Pierre Rissient
Composer	Martial Solal; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622
Sound	Jacques Maumont
Editor	Cécile Decugis
Assistant Editor	Lila Herman
Technical Advisor	Claude Chabrol

Director

The director, producer, writer, actor, editor, and cinematographer Jean-Luc Godard has been one of the most influential figures in post–World War II movie history. Born in Paris in 1930, the son of affluent, middle-class Swiss parents, he was naturalized as a Swiss citizen during World War II. Although in 1948 he began studies in ethnology at the Sorbonne in Paris, Godard was, by self-definition, a cinéphile, or lover of film, and his passion for movies motivated the education that meant the most to him. In this pursuit, he was essentially self-taught, seeing an estimated one thousand films a year at the Cinémathèque Française, discussing them with his friends, going to European film festivals, founding the short-lived journal Gazette du cinéma, writing reviews for the longer-lived journal Cahiers du cinéma, and, eventually, writing short scripts and completing a few short films. Godard and his friends—François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer—founded the nouvelle vague, or New Wave (discussed further below). Breathless (À bout de souffle, French release: 1959; American release: 1960), Godard's first feature film, was successful with critics and the public and proved to be a cornerstone of the French New Wave.

The next phase of Godard's career spanned the years from 1960 to 1968, a period marked in France, as in the United States, by student unrest and political upheaval. Godard was energized by this movement, whose efforts were largely directed against European and American capitalist values as well as the U.S. war in Vietnam, and he responded by producing his most substantial body of films. They included The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat, 1960 [released 1963]), A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme, 1961), My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962), The Riflemen (Les Carabiniers, 1963), Contempt (Le mépris, 1963), Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964), A Married Woman (Une femme mariée, 1964), Alphaville (1965), Crazy Pete (Pierrot le fou, 1965), Masculine/Feminine (Masculin, féminin, 1965), Made in U.S.A. (1966), Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, 1967), La Chinoise (1967), Weekend (Le week-end, 1967), and The Joy of Knowledge (La gai savoir, 1968).

This astonishing period of creativity—twenty-six films in eight years—concluded in the midst of the violent clashes between protesters and police in Paris in May 1968. Godard then joined forces with activist Jean-Pierre Gorin and formed the Dziga Vertov Group, named for the Soviet revolutionary filmmaker who was dedicated to the use of cinema for strictly political aims. This organization produced Godard's films between 1968 and 1973, profoundly political but also personal works such as A Film Like Any Other (Un film comme les autres, 1968), Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One, 1968), Pravda (1969; based on a play by Bertolt Brecht and the writings of Mao Tse-tung), Wind from the East (Vent d'est, 1969), and Vladimir and Rosa (Vladimir et Rosa, 1970).

Breathless was innovative in many ways, including not providing traditional cast and crew credits at the beginning or ending. In the movie, only the film's title and its dedication precede the first shot. However, a list of credits is provided on pp. 31–32 in of Breathless: Jean-Luc Godard, director, ed. Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), as well as in the Breathless entry in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) at www.imdb.com. The list of credits here is based on those sources.             

Since 1973, Godard has produced some fifty films, marked by his wide-ranging and restless imagination, abundant creativity, and constant desire to experiment with the conventions of both cinema and video. Generally cerebral rather than emotional, later works such as Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut, 1979), Passion (1982), First Name: Carmen (Prénom Carmen, 1984), Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie, 1985), King Lear (1987), Alas for Me (Hélas pour moi, 1993), Origin of the 21st Century (L'origine du XXIème sìecle, 2000, commissioned for the 2000 Cannes Film Festival), and In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'amour, 2001) engage our active, not passive, attention. Their cinematic language rejects continuity, smoothness, even logic. Godard changes moods, tones, and styles without warning, often shooting "wild" (without synchronous sound) and encouraging actors to improvise. For French television, he produced his very personal Histories of Cinema (Histoires du cinéma, first aired in 1989 and greatly expanded in 1998). For cinematic release, he produced the memoir JLG by JLG (JLG/JLG, 1995). In addition, he published an edition of his immense body of critical writings. 

Cinematic Source: The French New Wave

ORIGINS

The origins of the nouvelle vague can be found almost ten years before the 1959 release of its two founding masterpieces: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) and Godard's Breathless. After World War II, the interaction of French art, politics, and society provided a fertile ground for cultural change, and the New Wave reflects the influences of specific thinkers, three of whom were among the most exciting intellectual figures of the time: Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and André Malraux. André Bazin, known as the father of the New Wave, was the film theorist who synthesized their ideas into a coherent model for a new kind of cinema. His extraordinary personal magnetism helped Bazin profoundly influence the critics and filmmakers associated with the New Wave.

Jean-Paul Sartre was the leading figure in French philosophy after World War II and the dominant moral presence in Paris during the years in which the New Wave developed. His existentialist views helped shape the new French cinema's depiction of modern human beings; his Marxist views, its interpretations of society and history. Sartre, like Teilhard and Malraux, believed that contemporary artists should rebel against the constraints of society, traditional morality, and religious faith; should accept personal responsibility for their actions; and should thus be free to create their own world. Teilhard, a Jesuit philosopher, theologian, geologist, and paleontologist, believed that humanity evolved through its social and cultural revolutions and that contemporary society would also create a social consciousness appropriate for the postwar world. These ideas inspired Bazin's evolutionary view of the development of cinema, which he often expressed in geological metaphors (a technique made familiar by Teilhard). In much the same vein, Malraux, an adventurer, novelist, and aesthete, believed that the history of art (which included the cinema) is punctuated by the achievements of solitary geniuses whose style transforms the status quo of their generation. This view also contributed to Bazin's evolutionary interpretation of film history, and he encouraged the French cinema establishment to support directors who would create a more personal cinema. Between 1959 and 1969, Malraux was France's cultural minister, and his faith in cinema's ability to meet the cultural needs of the time significantly shaped this most fertile period in French film. 

The evolution of the New Wave also owed much to Alexandre Astruc and Henri Langlois, who were concerned specifically with the cinema. Astruc was important to the New Wave movement in several ways. In 1948, he introduced his most influential idea: he declared the times an age of the caméra-stylo, in which the filmmaker, using his camera as personally as he would use a pen, could express himself as freely as the novelist. Langlois, the legendary director of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, revived French interest in the history of world cinema with public screenings that provided cinéphiles with the primary materials in which to test these various theories. 

Thus influenced by these men, Bazin cofounded Cahiers du cinéma, which became the leading French film journal of the time. In his capacity as editor, he became the intellectual and spiritual mentor of a group of young contributors, many of whom would become directors and eventually transform French cinema, particularly Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. Bazin nurtured them with a body of consistent ideas. (Although Bazin encouraged both Godard and Truffaut, he was much closer personally to Truffaut, whom he virtually adopted.) Bazin encouraged everyone on the staff to accept his evolutionary view of film history—his belief that great films result when the artist finds the appropriate style for his or her time. For him, the most distinctive nature of a movie was its form rather than its content. Stressing the idea of the auteur, or director-as-author, he encouraged his followers to see as many films as possible, looking particularly at the relationship between the director and his or her material. In viewing these films, great and otherwise, the young critics and would-be filmmakers developed a particular fascination with those Hollywood films that seemed to prove what Bazin, following Astruc, was saying about the director-as-author. They recognized that the directors of most Hollywood films had little control over most aspects of production, but they believed that through the handling of mise-en-scène (see chapter 3), a great director could transform even the most insignificant western or detective story into a work of art.

In "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," one of his most influential essays, Bazin emphasized the director's role by stressing that everything we see on the screen has been put there by the director for a reason.[1] Bazin's primary interest was "realism" within the image, not editing that linked images, and thus he placed major emphasis on those "plastic" (malleable) elements within the image: space, composition-in-depth, settings, costume, makeup, lighting, framing, performance, and sound. He rejected traditional editing (découpage and montage, to use the French terms) and favored handling cinematic time and space through the long take, deep-space composition, and deep-focus cinematography. 

Taking its cue from Bazin's writing, Truffaut's 1954 Cahiers essay "Une Certain tendance du cinéma français" articulated the auteur concept, starting a critical controversy that has not yet abated.[2] All of the Cahiers critics extolled those directors who made highly personal statements in their films: Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker, and Max Ophüls in France, and Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann in Hollywood. Later, as film directors, they paid homage in their films to the directors and films they loved. 

STYLE

Stylistic influences on the New Wave included Italian neorealism and the British "free cinema," both of which encouraged narrative films that told real stories about real people. The nonfiction film was also undergoing changes that affected these filmmakers: cinema verité appeared in France in the early 1960s, soon to be followed in the United States by direct cinema; both advocated using lightweight, portable filmmaking technology that gave new mobility and flexibility to filmmakers. The films had a rough look, intimate and fresh, that often reflected the filmmaking process. Filmmakers appeared onscreen, cameras jiggled, framing was often poor, scenes were generally unscripted, and continuity was provided primarily through lots of close-ups and sound tracks that continued under the shots. Such stylistic innovations characterize many New Wave movies.

Indeed, in the cinema of the 1960s, especially the French New Wave movies, style seemed to be more important than anything else. Cinematic style was indistinguishable from the idea of the auteur; it set apart, say, Truffaut from Godard and both of them from Chabrol or Resnais. The New Wave was as much a matter of individual style and of attitude as it was a matter of principle. New Wave directors generally seemed to agree that movies excel at manipulating our perceptions, that (therefore) an aesthetic and psychological distance should exist betweena movie and its audience, and that cinematic form is more important than content. Their films were often self-reflexive, calling attention to themselves as cinema as well as to their cinematic techniques and thus diverting attention away from their narratives. While the New Wave movement no longer exists, the surviving original members continue to make films: recent examples are Resnais's Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson, 1997), Chabrol's Nightcap (Merci pour le chocolat, 2000), Rivette's Who Knows? (Va savoir, 2001), Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke (L'anglaise et le duc, 2001), and Varda's The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000). Each of these films is different from each other and from their directors' earlier works.[3]  

BREATHLESS AND THE NEW WAVE

While Godard's films stand out for their opposition to cinematic conventions, particularly those that manipulate audience reactions, generalizations about the director's style must acknowledge that "style" is a convention he appears to reject by constantly changing what he does and the way he does it. Breathless offers a comprehensive catalog of New Wave stylistic traits: rapid movements, use of handheld cameras, unusual camera angles, elliptical editing, direct address to the camera, acting that borders on the improvisational, anarchic politics, and an emphasis on the importance of sound, especially words. In light of Godard's later work, however, Breathless can seem rather more conventional in style than its reputation as an "experimental" film suggests, a paradox that demonstrates the extent to which Godard's language has entered all realms of filmaking, including the mainstream. In fact, the originally startling look of Breathless did not long characterize Godard's work; it probably made its last full appearance in his third film, Une femme est une femme (1961). It had served its purpose by enabling a young, inexperienced director to plunge into low-budget production, to avoid many of the difficulties imposed by standing conventions and studio pressures, and, like the early filmmakers, to have the fun that comes with doing something for the first time. "What makes Breathless a quintessential New Wave film," Dudley Andrew explains, "is not a particular technique or techniques but the energy with which it speaks."[4] Thus Godard's "style" is characterized primarily by displays of artistic freedom and imagination. Nonmainstream filmmaking allowed (and continues to allow) him a freedom from the "constraints" that come with larger budgets.

Of course, Godard was neither inexperienced nor naive; he had been around filmmaking in various capacities for almost ten years, had made several short films, and, most important, knew what he wanted to achieve. To Breathless's conventional crime story, for example, Godard applied two twists: discontinuity and contrast. He aimed to free himself from the traditional formal elements of narrative cinema—unity and continuity—and to create a new narrative form that was, in the words of Noël Burch, "based on a 'collage' of disparate elements as well as on discontinuity of tone, style, and materials." Thus the story provides the anchor around which the film's discontinuity can become a kind of structure, with "fragments of the subject appearing and then disappearing in accordance with a rhythm that is quite essential to the discontinuous structure of the film."[5] In addition, Godard contrasts the cinema verité look of the film with its indifference to naturalism. For example, people in the street stare at the camera, making us aware of it and the filmmaker behind it, but they don't stare at Michel as he dies in the street. In altering some of the ways in which cinema verité used the camera, Godard brought new life to the cinematography of Breathless. He experimented with the roles that could be assumed by the camera-participant or passive spectator—as well as with the ways in which the director could serve as "ringmaster" or dictator of the action. Godard told Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer of Breathless, to strive for the simple look that comes with using natural light; only two scenes in the film were made with artificial lights. But Coutard, who had a major impact on this and many other films by Godard and other New Wave directors, achieved much more than a simple look, for his camera is "as sensitive and flexible as the human eye."[6] In the scene in which Michel shoots the policeman, the cinematography's poetic style (suitable to Michel's attitude) contrasts boldly with the violence of the action.

Responding to Bazin's idea that every director should develop a style appropriate for the times, Godard was certain that modern life had to be depicted with "speed, boldness, and ingenuity . . . No film so joyously and cavalierly disregards finesse and technical competence in the pursuit of direct expression."[7] According to Burch, art and life are the same thing for Godard.[8] Thus Godard's "pursuit of direct expression" is closely linked to the notion of the auteur; indeed, Breathless virtually defines what is meant by an auteur film. It is a stylistically audacious movie that asserts Godard's personality and ideology. About his role as a director, Godard remarked, "The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page."[9] In fact, he "signs" his first film by appearing in it as the man who points out Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to the police, thus signaling his control of the closed space by betraying his own hero. As we will see below, his avoidance of traditional editing devices and use of unconventional ones also demand our attention, further reminding us of Godard's control. 

Following Bazin, Godard called his work a cinema of "reinvention," meaning that he generally kept all kinds of cinematic language in mind as he created his own language. Thus by employing the iris-out Godard not only offers an hommage (French for "a token of esteem or gratitude") to early filmmaker D. W. Griffith but also reminds modern audiences about a long-forgotten mode of cinematic punctuation. Dedicating the film to Monogram Pictures (one of Hollywood's "B" or "poverty row" studios), Godard evokes the Hollywood film noir through allusions, direct and indirect, to tough films with tough leading men, such as Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), with Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat (1949), with James Cagney; Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel (1945), with Dana Andrews; and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), with Ralph Meeker, and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), with Jack Palance. He also pays homage to French film director Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influence on the New Wave, by casting him as Parvulesco, and draws on the lead character in Melville's Bob the Gambler (Bob le flambeur, 1956) in creating Poiccard. Finally, Godard includes allusions to writers (Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, William Faulkner, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas), composers (Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), painters (Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre Auguste Renoir), and even cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, whose name becomes an alias for Poiccard. On his use of allusions, homages, and "quotations," Godard said, "Breathless was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about. Anything people did could be integrated in the film. As a matter of fact, this was my starting point."[10] This broad range of intertextual reference, or pastiche (making one artwork by mixing elements from others), enabled Godard to link his low-budget film noir with the works of some of the greatest artists of all time. Punctuating the work, Godard's references enliven its tone and potentially affect its meaning.

NARRATIVE

À bout de souffle (ah-boo de soof-luh) means "out of breath," and the phrase refers to Michel, a petty thief who is always on the run from the police. In the late summer of 1959, Michel is driving a stolen car from Marseilles to Paris. Along the way, showing the lack of control that marks most of his actions, Michel shoots a motorcycle cop who tries to arrest him for speeding. Michel flees the scene and continues to Paris, where he moves in with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student and aspiring journalist who hawks the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune on the streets. He persuades her to hide him until he can find the man who owes him money, which he will use to take her to Rome. Meanwhile, the newspapers have revealed his crime, and an informer (Godard) spots him on the street. The police blackmail Patricia into helping them hunt him down.

François Truffaut wrote the original treatment of this story and, after his own great success with The 400 Blows (1959), made a gift of it to Godard, suggesting that he submit it as the idea for his own first film.[11] The story was based, as legend has it, on an article Truffaut read in a Paris newspaper. "I don't really like telling a story," Godard has said. "I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas. But I do generally need a story. A conventional one serves as well, perhaps even best."[12]  Here, he followed Truffaut's treatment closely, but greatly expanded the scene in Patricia's bedroom.  

Michel and Patricia represent a collision not only between characters but also between cultures. Michel cares only about the future. He is full of contradictions: a thief who lends money; who says he has a feeling for beauty, but who can kill a policeman in cold blood; who is full of life but doomed to die; who is violent and charming at the same time. On one hand, Michel is the stereotypical French playboy, taking what he can get from women; on the other, he wants to fall in love. By contrast, Patricia, a working student, cares about society and its values. Michel chooses his violent life and therefore his destiny, without recourse to objective standards or morality, and he condemns Patricia as a "bitch" for turning him in. According to Godard, the script emphasized an umbrella of death over Michel that Patricia, for whatever reason, is unable to share.[13]

EDITING

Collision between and among images was one of the goals that Soviet director Sergei M. Eisenstein established in his theory of editing. In Breathless, Godard, working in the radical tradition started by Eisenstein and his contemporaries, consciouslyand deliberately manipulates the images with such editing techniques as jump cuts and nondiegetic inserts. The editing (by Cécile Decugis and her assistant Lila Herman) makes apparent Godard's "reinvention" of cinematic conventions. The director's approach to editing consists of two distinct techniques, one negative and one positive: he avoids the traditional sequence—made up of an establishing shot, long shot, medium shot, and close-up, generally in that order—to set the time and place of an action, and he uses quick cuts and, most distinctive, abrupt jump cuts. British film directors Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar have succinctly described Godard's editing style:

One thing seems clear: he makes films with rare fluidity . . . [but] they are not smooth in the conventional sense. He uses frequent jump cuts [and] . . . cuts abruptly from one scene to another with little warning and no attempt at smoothness. His ruthlessness with parts of the action in which he is not interested is more thoroughgoing than ever before in the cinema. He makes no concessions to the spectator who would be glad of a dissolve to help him across the hours or the miles. He will have no truck with inherited rules about general-shots [establishing shots], medium-shots and close-shots. At first sight he appears never to have heard of the dangers of boring or offending the audience. . . . Above all, there is no comfortable morality propounded by the editing style.[14]

An analysis of the opening scene of Breathless (Fig. 1) confirms that Godard both avoids and uses most of the traditional techniques for establishing a scene and character. Within a conventional film, the first shot might have been a LS (or XLS) of Michel sitting at an outdoor café along a harbor quay. Instead, Godard uses a MCU of the front page of the Paris Flirt newspaper, which conceals Michel's face and the Marseilles location, offering instead a photograph of a woman in a swimsuit. Despite the lack of a traditional establishing shot, we can recognize from the weather and clothes in the subsequent shots that the time is summer, but we would be hard-pressed to know from any outward signs that the location is the port city Marseilles in southern France. However, the location is not as important as Michel's self-description: "All in all, I'm a dumb bastard. After all, if you've got to do it, you've got to."[15] Next, when a couple get out of a big American car, a woman signals Michel, who hot-wires and steals the Americans' car and drives away. Godard uses a dissolve, that most conventional of devices, to get us from the city to the countryside and the open road.

In this opening scene, Godard achieves the fluidity that Reisz and Millar mention—the sequence moves forward coherently and with continuity—without being smooth or using the conventional grammar of continuity editing. What, then, produces this fluidity? First of all, we are immediately interested in Michel because of his striking face, arrogant dress and behavior, evocative imitation of Humphrey Bogart, and blunt definition of himself as a "dumb bastard." Furthermore, his deliberate, daring crime of stealing the American car in broad daylight provides a thrill for us. Finally, even though the woman serves as his accomplice, he dismisses her abruptly ("See you later, alligator"), preserving, for her at least, the possibility that he might return. Within minutes, we have learned most of what we will need to know about this "tough guy" for the rest of the movie. While the shots might not deliver their content in the manner of classic Hollywood movies, Godard plays on our familiarity with genre and character, counting on our desire for vicarious adventure as he invites us to piece together this variation on standard forms. Audaciously, he then "rewards" us for putting all the pieces together by providing the very conventional dissolve, complete with violin music.

After a few shots of Michel on the highway show us that he's happy on the road but careless about traffic laws and speed limits, the following scene helps establish his amoral character (Fig. 2). By speeding to pass a truck, he attracts the attention of two motorcycle policemen, whom he tries to elude by pulling off the highway. So far, we have a conventional pattern of continuity: a broken traffic law results in police chase. But one of the policemen turns off the highway and approaches Michel's hiding place. Up to this point, even Godard's deviations from standard continuity haven't presented us with any difficulties. The screen direction of the chase is not constant, for example, but the police go across the screen one way and then the other without losing us for a moment. Do we care what happened to the truck that Michel passed, which we see in shot 4 but not in shot 5, an identical setup? Do we wonder how Michel gets so far ahead of the two policemen? Is Godard's failure to show us when Michel removes his jacket simply a "blooper," a directorial mistake? Reisz and Millar conclude:

All these things, at first sight . . . are obstacles to conventional smoothness and logic. Yet they are perfectly efficient in the sense that they create an impression of confusion, flight, fear, restrained violence, imminent danger, etc., while staying within the bounds of possibility. Their status, in other words, is this: that they could be scenes from an authentic chase, but they are not linked together in a deliberate attempt to contrive the illusion of continuity as would normally be the case.[16]

Thus the deviations in screen direction, the absence of traditional cross-cutting between the pursuers and the pursued, the failure of Michel to get sufficiently far ahead of the policemen to turn off the highway without immediately calling attention to himself, the lack of conventional alternation among long shots, medium shots, and close-ups, the absence of music to differentiate the "bad" guy from the "good" guys or to underscore the drama of the chase—all prepare us for Michel's unpremeditated yet unhesitating murder of the cop. In fact, the killing is recorded in a shot of such short duration, so unsympathetically, that it seems even more brutal than it is. Godard's style alludes to the conventionally unconventional, hard-boiled tactics of the Hollywood "B" crime movies that he loved. Thus, just as there is a strange, loving lyricism in the film's very first shot of Michel's face, so, too, the camera lingers lovingly on Michel's hat, face, arm, and gun in this scene. Godard's choice of shots and their internal pacing both romanticize the killer and produce in us an unfamiliar, even uncomfortable feeling of incongruity.

The most distinctive and memorable aspect of the editing, here and throughout the film, is Godard's use of the jump cut. In one shot, Michel shoots the policeman and the policeman falls; then Godard cuts to a far longer shot in which Michel runs across a field. As in the early scene in which Michel visits a young woman, who is so distracted by getting dressed that she is not aware that he is stealing money from her purse, the jump cut underscores Michel's view that life is a game to be played with whatever rules one invents. (This woman is important to him only as a source of cash, so getting through the scene as quickly as possible is understandable, in terms of both his motivation and of the story's priorities. Contrast this scene with the later one in which Patricia discovers Michel asleep in her apartment, a lovely scene filmed mostly with long takes, in real time.) Although Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkim, 1925), contains jump cuts more disorienting than any in this film, Godard nonetheless claimed to "have invented this famous way of cutting, that is now used in commercials."[17] Of the several explanations for Godard's deliberate use of the technique in this movie,[18] the most convincing is Godard's assertion that the contract specified a running time of one and a half hours, requiring him to shorten a film that originally was about an hour longer than that. Within the narrative, however, Godard's primary purpose in using jump cuts was to achieve temporal ellipses, rhythm, and mood. Since the jump from shot A to shot B is invariably made within a plausible and continuous scene, we relate the cut to the content of the scene. That is, the restless rhythm of the editing is perfectly suited to the restless mood and indecisiveness of the movie's two major characters, as well as to Michel's reckless behavior. Together with the intimate cinematography, the laid-back acting, and the moody jazz score, the editing involves us in this crazy world. Things happen randomly, and the scenes move swiftly from one location to another.

Does the editing indicate how Godard wants us to feel? Yes, in that the rhythms and moods it establishes affect our feelings as viewers; no, in that we're left not knowing how to judge Michel and Patricia. In the transient, existential world of Breathless, Godard's central characters remain free to make their own choices. This sense of freedom, enhanced by the editing, is the true meaning of Breathless.

 

FOR FURTHER READING

Barr, Charles, [et al.]. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Praeger, 1969.

Bellour, Raymond, ed. Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.

Dixon, Wheeler W. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Kreidl, John Francis. Jean-Luc Godard. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Lesage, Julia. Jean-Luc Godard: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.

MacCabe, Colin. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Mussman, Toby, comp. Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1968.

Roud, Richard. Jean-Luc Godard. 2nd rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Farocki. Speaking about Godard. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature from Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Sterritt, David. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Temple, Michael, and James S. Williams, eds. The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.

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[1] Among Bazin's essays, students should know "The Myth of Total Cinema," "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," and "Theater and Cinema," in André Bazin, What Is Cinema? sel. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–71), 1:17–22, 23–40, 76–124.

[2] See François Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berekley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–37.

[3] Those interested in pursuing the issue of style in more depth might start with Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice trans. Helen R. Lane (1973; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

[4] J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 18. This case study draws liberally on Andrew's excellent introduction to the film, which includes the full shooting script, Truffaut's original treatment, and other materials.

[5] Burch, Theory of FilmPractice, 149–50, 149.

[6] Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Focal Press, 1968), 346.

[7] Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 6–8.

[8] Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 134.

[9] Jean-Luc Godard., Godard on Godard: Critical Writings, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972), 76.

[10] Godard, Godard on Godard, 173.

[11] The treatment is reprinted in Andrew's, The Major Film Theories, 153–60. In 1983, Jim McBride took this process of transmission one step further, adapting Godard's narrative in a remake of Breathless starring Richard Gere.

[12]Godard, qtd. in Richard Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Filmmakers (New York: Viking, 1980): 436.

[13] Andrew, The Major Filmmakers, 14–15.

[14] Reisz and Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 345–46.

[15] Indeed, we might relate Michel's tough-guy posturing and the picture of the woman to Godard's famous comment "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." Girls are always on Michel's mind, and the gun, which makes its appearance within minutes, will be his undoing.

[16] Reisz and  Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 351.

[17] Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1980), 34.

[18] See Richard Raskin, "Five Explanations for the Jump Cuts in Godard's Breathless," p.o.v.—A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 6(December 1998): 141–53.