Breathless
Breathless
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
At Film Forum
May 28-June 10
It took 60s years to correct the English title of
Proust’s masterwork from Remembrance of Things Past to In
Search of Lost Time and now the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc
Godard’s equally legendary Breathless deserves the same
emendation. Critics routinely translated the title À bout de souffle to
mean “Out of Breath” but a few years ago I was standing next to new
French tourists who noticed a flashy American automobile and cried “À
bout de souffle!” I immediately reflected on Godard’s colloquial intent:
His debut film—an homage to Hollywood genre—was titled like the
exclamations in studio-era trailers: BREATHTAKING! And 50 years after
its debut, that’s still Breathless’ effect: a breathtaking reboot
of American genre tropes.
In a 1970s reassessment of Jean- Luc Godard’s 1959 debut
feature, critic William S. Pechter proclaimed: “Breathless exists! Breathless
exists so that the Siegfried Kracauers of the world can hold their
breath. Breathless exists!” Pechter was celebrating a movie that
employed cinematic theory as a practical, elating fact. All imaginable
advances that came into popular culture following the appearance of
Breathless—when commercial cinema and television imitated and
trivialized the formal inventions of ’60s European art cinema (such as
Godard’s casually innovative use of the jump cut)—are facts that we now
take for granted.
A
certain kind of nonchalance has come from living with Breathless for
almost 50 years, and watching it in poor prints, faint VHS copies,
squished TV broadcasts. The excitement of discovery is almost gone,
meaning it’s time for rediscovery. First-time viewers might yet find
Godard’s rigorous technique a challenge—perhaps even intimidating given
how the once-novel jump cut, the hand-held camera, on-location shooting
and use of natural-lighting have become routine and meaningless parts of
visual media vocabulary. But what never ceased to be compelling about Breathless
is the tragic love story between Parisian bum Michel Poiccard
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) and American adventuress Patricia Franchini (Jean
Seberg).Their mismatch might be the most revolutionary aspect of Breathless,
revealing that Godard’s technical experimentation was integral to
modernizing a timeless romantic archetype.