Breathless (50th Anniversary Re-Issue)

Written and Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard

Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg

Director of Photography: Raoul Coutard, Editors: Cecille Decugis and Lila Herman, Original Music: Martial Solal

    Talk to any college student who’s ever taken an Introduction to Film Studies course and most of them can tell you about the time the professor screened Jean-Luc Godard’s now 50-year-old film Breathless. I can remember my time vividly, not because of my own reaction to the film, but the reaction of the classmates. It’s a masterpiece! It’s a train wreck! It’s devoid of emotion! It captures our generation! My own opinion, somewhere in the middle of those lines—something that has always been true for me and Mr. Godard’s films—had been formed the first time I’d seen it. But what was I missing that launched this film into the canon of film history, putting it among the likes of Griffith, Eisenstein, and Welles?

    Breathless, in a new 35mm print from the ever reliable Rialto Pictures, returns this week to theaters (rolling out throughout the summer) for its 50th anniversary release. More than ever, Breathless continues to confound its audiences—something Mr. Godard did earlier this month when he brought his new controversial film Film Socialisme to the Cannes Film Festival, as it was met with more questions than praise (Mr. Godard, ambiguously citing “problems similar to the Greeks,” skipped the festival leaving only the film’s title card to stand in for his questions: No Comment). Breathless though, as many countless films Godard made in his period, still stands as his most important, as well as the film cited that launched the French New Wave, as a number of critics of Cashiers du Cinema dropped their pens and grabbed cameras instead.

    One of my favorite Godard quotes (and on cinema, he has quite a bundle) is that the best criticism of any film is another film. If anything is most appreciated in Breathless, it is Mr. Godard’s love of cinema and specifically the American cinema as a backlash against the literary adaptations and the so-called “tradition of quality.” Mr. Godard, working off a scenario by ally and fellow critic-filmmaker Francois Truffaut (a new documentary called Two in the Wave chronicles their artistic friendship), weaves a narrative around two cross starred lovers—a wannabe French gangster played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and an American in Paris played by Jean Seberg. Mr. Belmondo thinks he’s Bogart, copying his signature thumb lip. He shoots a cop at the beginning of the film, and then spends the rest of the film attempting to avoid being caught.

    However narrative and story is not Mr. Godard’s concern—as much as the film is celebrating cinema, its also being pushed in a new direction, one that still confounds today. What makes Godard’s cinema less revolutionary as it was in 1960 is simply that what made the director unique yesterday is now standard today. When Mr. Belmondo shoots that cop and Mr. Godard jump cuts the camera throwing us into discontinuity, we only need to turn nine years later to see the techniques copied in films like The Wild Bunch. Instead, the lasting effect on an audience today with Mr. Godard lies in the structure of the narrative. We’ve seen the long tracking shots done (and with more narrative focus) in Scorsese and Coppola, the location shooting more ambitious with Malick and Allen, and the narrative digression in Jarmusch and Altman. Which leaves Mr. Godard with little to his name to still credit his own singular name to, and us as an audience left watching blank characters fill a blank narrative.

    Yet moments in Breathless still seem to capture and enrapture. A visit to the cinema. Those beautiful shots of the Paris night line, right on the street. That final chase. The interview with Jean-Pierre Melville. And still most notable for anyone who watches the film, a twenty-four minute diversion in a bedroom that is full of philosophy, film, and conversation that remains as one of Mr. Godard’s most life-affirming moments in his cinema.

    And that last comment may be a matter of opinion. Mr. Godard’s films can be seen as brimming with emotion, but most of it being the camera itself than the actual characters. In films like My Life to Live and Pierrot Le Fou, Mr. Godard’s best moments are often when he lets his characters thrive in front of the camera. In Breathless, it is mostly his show, and for good reason—he’s reviving cinema, taking the ideas of those behind him (Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles) and pushing them forward to lay the ground of those ahead of him.

    I wonder what it would have been like, not knowing where cinema was going, to see Breathless on a 35mm print in 1960, seeing audiences divulge with their opinions as violently as my own class. Where would I be? Perhaps it may be worth my time to go pretend to try and relive that experience with the latest restoration of Breathless. Maybe I can break into what has always seemed like Mr. Godard’s impenetrable understanding of cinema, something almost intangible to even the director himself. Or maybe it will leave me in the way it has left me every time—confused, slightly annoyed, occasionally thrilled, and understanding less about cinema than I did before, prying to know more.