Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1959)
‘…a certain kind of cinema had ended, so let’s add the finishing touch, let’s show that anything goes.’ Jean Luc Godard
Jean Luc Godard directed Breathless or A Bout De Souffle in 1959, Michelangelo Antonioni directed Blow Up in 1966, Bernardo Bertolucci directed Last Tango In Paris in 1972. They are all historical documents now; their impact and influence a faded remnant of films distant past. We’ve decided to go back to the sixties and reinvestigate these celluloid ghosts. What was going on back then? What ideas were informing the artist? What dreams were being projected in the darkness of the movie theatre? In recent times the top two movies on the planet earth were Kill Bill (Cinema), and the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Not Cinema). What do these kill fests say about the collective unconscious? What ideas were in the air then and what are we thinking now? Has the nightmare replaced the dream? Are we still looking to knives and swords and chainsaws to break the tedium of yet another gunfight? Let’s journey back forty four long years and see where the beginning of the end of the beginning began.
‘When we were at last able to make films, we could no longer make the kind of films which had made us want to make films.’ Jean Luc Godard
Jean Luc Godard directed his first feature, Breathless in 1959. The story involves a cheap hood who kills a cop and then runs around Paris where he meets a girl who eventually betrays him and he dies. Sorry to give away the ending. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, the wannabe gangster. He acts strange: talking to the camera, looking in mirrors, impersonating Humphrey Bogart. In the end he reaches out and closes his own eyelids. He knows damm well that he’s in a movie and takes full advantage. His love interest, Patricia Franchini, played by Jean Seberg, is an American girl studying in Paris. Her movie keeps intersecting with Michel’s movie as she partially fulfills her love interest duties until finally tiring of the masquerade and turning her counterpart in. Both of them are walking, talking clichés that display certain affection for the cars, cigarettes, movie stars, love scenes, B gangster movies, and other rote behaviour that belongs solely to the history of the cinema. The beauty of it is, they seem to be saying: you don’t have to think when you realize you’re a thought.
‘I wanted to try to film a thought in action – how do you do it? We still don’t know.’
Godard was a critic who decided to film his criticisms instead of write them. On one level he was suffocated (‘A Bout De Souffle’), by the non-adaptive cultural imperialism of classical Hollywood narrative, and the pedantic rigors of conventional storytelling; on the other hand he was exhilarated (‘Breathless’), by what an artist or intellectual or person could do with a camera, Paris, some actors and some time. Let’s make a movie about movies. Let’s simultaneously mock and parody and worship these iconic images that have already shown us what a movie is supposed to look and act like. Here’s a tutorial on how movies work. Here’s an opportunity to write old verses onto new thoughts and vice-versa. Here is a film that was made to be watched, but forces you to ‘read’ if you’re inclined to make sense of it.
‘Such is the nature of dialectic in the cinema; one must live rather than last. It is pointless to kill one’s feelings in order to live longer.’
Breathless is rarely watched today but it is studied relentlessly. The French New Wave, cinema verite, jump cuts, meta-narrative, cultural references, the auteur theory, deconstruction, post modernism – Breathless joined Citizen Kane as justification for the invention and propagation of film schools everywhere. It helped kick start the sixties as other filmmakers, musicians, writers and free thinkers decided they could reinvent the world from the invented world too. When Roberto Rossellini, the Italian neo-realist director, first saw Chaplin’s A King in New York he said: "It is the cinema of a free man." Breathless was made when Godard felt like a free man. His statement, "Everything remains to be done", still strikes me as the appropriate mantra for any generation.
If you’re too young to have seen Breathless, take a look at his first film and see, feel, think for yourself. You might be disappointed but first dances are often that way. Umberto Eco said: "All movies are genealogical and have no memory" – it’s not always easy to appreciate that our grandparents taught us how to move.
