Breathless (1960 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Breathless, the 1960 French film known in its original language as "À bout de souffle," arrived in French cinemas as the product of just 23 days of shooting, a hand-held camera, and a director who wrote his dialogue in an exercise book no one else was allowed to see. Jean-Luc Godard gave his two leads, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, their lines moments before the camera rolled. The result drew over two million viewers in France upon its initial release. American film critic Pauline Kael called it the most important New Wave film to reach the United States. Roger Ebert would later write that no debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 had been as influential. How did a low-budget, largely improvised film shot without permits on the streets of Paris become one of the most studied works in cinema history? And what did Godard actually think of its success?

• 2. A Story From the News

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  François Truffaut found the seed of Breathless in a newspaper article in The News in Brief about a real man named Michel Portail and his American journalist girlfriend Beverly Lynette. In November 1952, Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle officer named Grimberg. Truffaut wrote a treatment with Claude Chabrol, but they could not agree on the story's structure. The project drifted until Godard, then working as a press agent at 20th Century Fox, pitched it to producer Georges de Beauregard. Truffaut and Chabrol, by then celebrated directors, were at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1959 when they wrote to Beauregard endorsing Godard as the director. Their endorsement helped greenlight the film, though both would play only minor roles in the production itself. Godard later told Truffaut that the subject would be "the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn't." Truffaut believed Godard's decision to give the film a violent ending was personal, saying Godard was "by nature sadder" than he was.

• 3. Casting and Budget

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  Jean Seberg agreed to appear in Breathless in June 1959, for a fee of $15,000. That figure represented one-sixth of the entire film's budget. Belmondo, though his name was not yet known outside France, had already been cast in the male lead. Godard needed a prominent leading lady to broaden the film's commercial appeal, and he reached Seberg through her husband, Francois Moreuil, whom Godard knew personally. Godard gave Moreuil a cameo role in the film. Seberg privately had doubts about Godard's approach during filming, wondering whether the picture would find a commercial audience. She would go on to reprise her character, Patricia Franchini, in Godard's later film Le Grand Escroc. Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, called Belmondo the most exciting actor to emerge since Marlon Brando. For his part, Godard had originally wanted cinematographer Michel Latouche, with whom he had worked on short films. Producer de Beauregard instead hired Raoul Coutard, who was already under contract with him.

• 4. How It Was Filmed

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  Raoul Coutard faced a technical problem from the start. Godard envisaged the film as a kind of documentary, requiring hand-held cameras and almost no artificial lighting. Shooting under such low-light conditions meant Coutard had to use Ilford HP5 film, which was not available in motion picture film stock at the time. During development, he pushed the negative one stop, from 400 ASA to 800 ASA. The camera that could accommodate the photographic film's sprocket holes was the Eclair Cameflex, but it was too noisy for synchronized sound recording. As a result, nearly the entire film had to be dubbed in post-production. For certain street scenes, Coutard hid inside a postal cart, with a hole cut for the lens and packages stacked on top of him. In place of a dolly, Godard pushed Coutard in a wheelchair. Filming ran from the 17th of August to the 12th of September, 1959, and during those days Godard incorporated President Eisenhower's actual visit to Paris as a backdrop. Producer de Beauregard grew frustrated enough with the erratic schedule to write the crew a complaint letter. Coutard later claimed de Beauregard and Godard came to blows when de Beauregard found the director at a café on a day he had called in sick.

• 5. The Jump Cut

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  Cécile Decugis and her assistant Lila Herman edited the film at GTC Labs in Joinville. Decugis recalled that before its release, Breathless had earned a pre-release reputation as the worst film of the year. The jump cuts that would define the film's visual identity were not part of any original plan during shooting or early editing. Coutard himself said that "there was a panache in the way it was edited that didn't match at all the way it was shot" and that the editing produced "a very different tone than the films we were used to seeing." Critic Andrew Sarris later analyzed the jump cuts as existentially representing "the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions." Oliver Stone, in a 1972 essay, focused on the bedroom scenes as the core of the film, writing that with Godard, the rigid rhythms of cinematic bedroom conventions simply did not apply. The film's use of the 1958 ethno-fiction Moi, un noir as a key influence can be seen in its adoption of jump cuts, use of real locations rather than sets, and its documentary newsreel approach to filming.

• 6. The Final Words

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  Michel's dying words, mumbled as he collapses on the rue Campagne-Premiere, are four words in French: "C'est vraiment dégueulasse." The word "dégueulasse" had already appeared throughout the film in clearly comprehensible contexts, applied to things like a request for a loan or the music of Frédéric Chopin, where it unmistakably means "disgusting." But in French the word carries a range of additional meanings: it can function as a synonym for "bitch" or "heel," and it also carries connotations of nausea and the urge to vomit. Police Inspector Vital translates the dying man's words to Patricia as: "He said you are really disgusting." Subsequent releases of the film have rendered the line differently. The Fox-Lorber DVD from 2001 has Vital tell Patricia, "He said 'You're a real scumbag.'" The Criterion Collection DVD from 2007 and the 2010 restoration translate Michel's words as "Makes me want to puke." Patricia's question in response to each version remains a variation of the same puzzled inquiry: she asks what the word means, as though Michel, even in death, is speaking a language she cannot quite reach.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  Richard Brody recorded that Breathless opened not in an art-house cinema but across a chain of four commercial theaters, selling 259,046 tickets in the first four weeks. Bosley Crowther called it a "fascinating communication" that was "emphatically unrestrainedly vicious" and shocking in its "vigor of reportorial candor." He described Godard's editing as "pictorial cacophony" and saw Belmondo as "hypnotically ugly." Archer Winsten found it "a very fine piece of work," and though he thought the film too insubstantial to be remembered, he predicted the technique would linger. The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine has returned to the film in every decennial poll since 1992, when it ranked 22nd in the Critics' Poll; by 2012, it had climbed to 13th. Godard himself said the success of Breathless was a mistake, but qualified the statement. He described the pre-existing world of French cinema as a "secret cult only for the initiated," and said he did not regret making Breathless and "blowing that all apart." In 1964, he described his generation's arrival in cinema as barging in "like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV." In May 2010, a fully restored version was released in the United States to mark the film's 50th anniversary, and A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that it remained, even then, "a bulletin from the future of movies."