The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

French New Wave

DIRECTOR

Jean-Luc Godard

WRITERS

Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol

STARS

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg

BEFORE

1941 Humphrey Bogart’s performance in The Maltese Falcon provides the inspiration for the character of Michel in À bout de souffle.

AFTER

1964 Owing much of its style to À bout de souffle, Richard Lester’s Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has a huge influence on British movies.

1967 Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde introduces the French New Wave style to mainstream US cinema.

Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless) marked a turning point in cinema. Not everyone liked its hectic cutting, loose plot, and disdain for conventional morality. But even Godard’s critics were struck by his innovation, and directors such as Scorsese and Tarantino have acknowledged their debt to him.

In the movie, petty thug Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a policeman. He hides in the apartment of American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), who is unaware of what he’s done. Eventually, Patricia turns Michel in to the police, who shoot him in the street.

Before he began directing, Godard was a critic for the radical movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and he pays homage to earlier movies again and again in À bout de souffle. For example, Michel idolizes Humphrey Bogart and has a giant poster of him on his wall.

But for all his references, Godard and the other young filmmakers of what came to be known as the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, were determined to overthrow what they saw as cinéma de papa (dad’s cinema)—studio-bound productions with little to say about modern life. Rather, they saw themselves not simply as directors but as auteurs, who would create a new, personal style of cinema, filming on location and tackling tough social issues.

"Godard has spent his life confronting issues central to the future of cinema."

Derek Malcolm
The Guardian, 2000

A gun and a girl

Godard was adamant that a movie did not need a well-constructed plot. “All you need for a movie,” he famously said, “is a gun and a girl.” The story of À bout de souffle is loosely based on the real-life story of Michel Portail, who shot dead a motorcycle cop in 1952 and who, like the character of Michel in the movie, also had an American girlfriend, but Godard wrote the script as he filmed.

He was deliberately chaotic in his shooting method, filming on busy Paris streets, snatching shots on the run, and improvising dialogue. To work in this way, he needed to shoot with a handheld camera and in low light conditions, and this is partly what gives the movie its high contrast monochrome look. It also led to a distinctive new cinematic technique: the jump cut.

“I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.”

Patricia / À bout de souffle

Jump cuts

Previously, one of the requirements for a well-made movie had always been complete continuity between clips shot from different angles or on different days. However, Godard made no attempt to make a smooth transition between shots, splicing them together in a fast-moving montage. In one scene that follows Patricia driving in a sports car, the background jumps instantly from one place to another as different shots are spliced together. The jump cut has now become a staple of filmmaking, but at the time critic Bosley Crowther complained that it was a “pictorial cacophony.”

It was not just the movie’s jump cuts that created controversy, but also its coolness. Its young hero’s self-obsessed detachment and disdain for authority became hallmarks of movie for the new generation. As the 1960s began, filmmakers and audiences embraced rebellion over the self-sacrificing heroism portrayed in previous decades.

À bout de souffle was the first movie of the French New Wave. Its bold visual style and break from the classic studio style were implied in the movie’s poster.

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930. In his early 20s, he joined Paris’s ciné-club scene and took up film criticism. Encouraged by François Truffaut, another young critic turned filmmaker, Godard began to make his own movies. His first major movie, À bout de souffle, took the world by storm with its new style. But Godard’s work soon became even more radical, both in look—with movies such as Contempt, Band of Outsiders (1964), and Alphaville (1965)—and politically, in movies such as A Married Woman and Pierrot le Fou (1965). In the late 1960s, Godard walked away from commercial cinema completely, but continued to make movies that pushed the boundaries of the medium.

1960 À bout de souffle

1963 Contempt

1964 A Married Woman

What else to watch: The 400 Blows (1959) ✵ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) ✵ Jules et Jim (1962) ✵ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) ✵ Band of Outsiders (1964) ✵ Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ✵ Pulp Fiction (1994)