Breathless
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- :This article is about the film. For the song, see Breathless (The Corrs song). For the 1983 remake, see Breathless (1983 film).
Breathless (originally released in France as À bout de souffle, or "out of breath") is a 1960 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard's first feature-length film is one of the inaugural and best-known films of the French New Wave. He wrote it with fellow New Wave director, François Truffaut, and released it the year after Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Together the three films brought international acclaim to the New Wave.
Breathless shocked contemporary audiences with its bold visual style and editing—much of which broke the rules of classical Hollywood cinema. Most notable of its innovations were jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.
Synopsis
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a young thug who models himself after Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car, Michel shoots a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. The ambiguous Patricia agrees to hide him and the two spend their time evading the police and dallying in her apartment, while he tries to raise money for a trip to Italy. Eventually, she betrays him and phones the police. They shoot him in the street and, after a protracted death run, he dies there. With his last breath, he calls death a "louse", but the police tell her that he called her a "louse".Awards
- 1960 Prix Jean Vigo
- 1960 Berlin International Film Festival: Silver Bear for best director
- 1961 French Syndicate of Cinema Critics: Critics Award for Best Film
Other versions
Godard's own Pierrot le fou was virtually a remake.A rarely seen 1976 film by Amos Poe, featuring a cameo by Blondie singer Deborah Harry (playing a woman named Blondie) called Unmade Beds was an homage to and parody of the original.
The film was remade in an English-language version in 1983, starring Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky, directed by Jim McBride. The location for this version was California.
Self-referentiality
The film is very self-referential; it is, in a sense, more about film itself than anything else. For example, Michel is nothing more than a Humphrey Bogart copy; Patricia comments on this when she tells him that he is only an image and should say more about himself.Moreover, the film includes references to many other films. In one scene, "Bob the Gambler" is mentioned, which is an apparent reference to Bob le Flambeur (1955). A few American film posters are seen in the streets, including Humphrey Bogart's The Harder They Fall and Ten Seconds to Hell with Jack Palance.
Michel's constant lip-rubbing is a direct homage to Bogart, who is once again referenced in the film when Patricia tries to hide from a detective in the movie theatre; audio from The Maltese Falcon can be heard in the background.
Michel's depth consists in his relation to other films, rather than any individual traits. At the time this was very new, and was a precursor to many poststructuralist notions. This self-referentiality would become a New Wave theme.
See also
- Cinema of France
- List of French language films
- Clarinet concerto in A major (played in one of the final scenes)
External links
- [Discussion of Film 'Breathless'] — Podcast of Hubert Dreyfus' lecture in Phil 7: Existentialism in Literature and Film
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