Breathless / À bout de souffle
- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Released: 1960
- Writer: François Truffaut
- Featured Actors: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger
“…he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to buy a metro ticket, he was as destitute as the character he was filming….The miracle of Breathless is that it was made at a time in the life of a man in which he normally would not make a film. One doesn’t make a film when one is sad and destitute.”
Truffaut
The Making
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The budget was 85,000 dollars
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Godard’s conception
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No Tripod
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No Light (if possible)
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Travel without rails
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A need to escape convention & run counter to the rules of cinematographic grammar
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Used a fast Ilford film stock, not available commercially for motion-picture cameras, so they spliced together still camera film and spliced it together into rolls for their 35mm Cameflex
The Story
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Overall story structure is chronological
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Begins as if in mid-scene
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Beginning & end remain vague
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Style disrupts rather than clarifies Godard’s story
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Large scene-to-scene gaps that are mirrored by jump cuts
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For instance, after Michel shoots the police officer and runs across a field, he is next seen in Paris
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No attempt is made to explain how much time passed or how he got to Paris or whether the police have discovered the crime yet
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Godard presents incomplete shards of action
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He reduces the most significant narrative events
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Yet, he lavishes screen time and shots on events like watching Patricia brush her hair or seeing Michel walk around in a travel agent office
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The audience slowly learns about Michel’s past and Patricia’s concerns but does so without the usual flashbacks
The Cinematography & Editing
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Goal was to capture a rough documentary quality, following the characters as if Coutard (the cinematographer) were a reporter out to get a story
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Jump Cuts & Discontinuity
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Images show time is cut out
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While the dialogue or soundtrack remain constant
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Sound-space remains constant, while the visual is fragmented
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Soundtrack is emphasized as an artificial construction
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Dialogue is exclusively diagetic
The Acting
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Like the cinematography, Godard’s approach with the actors was similar
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He showed up with loose notes for the actors who were expected to improvise as the camera shot them from various angles
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He experimented to capture their loose performances
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The result would prove stunningly “unprofessional” to some & historically important to others
Characters
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Differences between Michel & Patricia are partly defined by their taste in art
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He like Bogart and only one Mozart violin concerto
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She likes Brahms, Renoir paintings and Faulkner
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They rarely speak about the same things with the same meanings
Michel
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Alternates between two goals
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Seducing the Patricia
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Locating the money the money through his friends
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Contradictions
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Michel exploits women, but is suddenly ready to give up money and sure escape for a chance with Patricia who has just betrayed him
Patricia
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Struggles to remain independent & pursue her interest in writing
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It’s unclear why she likes or loves a thug like Michel
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She becomes a satire of the American college woman abroad who is excited by the exotic and dangerous French man, but pulls back to a safe distance
Contradictions
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She loves art, but spends time with an uneducated thug
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She wants to remain independent of men but seems happy to depend upon and please men (and her family) to get by
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She tells Michel of her pregnancy to see his reaction, but never uses it as a motive for her actions
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She tells him she loves him, then turns him into the police