#a bout de souffle
Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief.
Ā bout de souffle (Breathless) dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1960)
Revolutionary Cinema
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1959. Photo by Raymond Cauchetier.
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Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Coutard, and Jean-Paul Belmondo take a ride with the Gendarmerie nationale during the making of BREATHLESS (1960).
Photo by Raymond Cauchetier
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Jean-Luc Godard & Jean Seberg, avant-première d’A Bout de Souffle (Paris, 1960)
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- What is your greatest ambition in life?
- To become immortal… and then die.
À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960, Jean-Luc Godard)
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When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
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À bout de souffle (Breathless) - Jean-Luc Godard (1960)
I just started posting reviews and I noticed that if someone based my website on the first two films I reviewed they’d think I was super super lame, so I thought I’d pull up one of my favourite films of all time, Jean-Luc Godard’s classic.
Breathless is one of the greatest films ever made in my opinion.
The character development is so different than other films. Godard doesn’t use dialogue and character history to make us feel something for the character, he just let’s us watch them; let’s us observe them when they’re alone.
Belmondo’s character even breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, and it actually works really well. He’s a bit of a douchebag but I didn’t even mind, I still like him.
Godard breaks all of the conventions set for him by filmmakers at the time, and questions ’whyis the camera always supposed to be fixed on their face when they speak?’ and films however he feels will best suit his film. It’s like James Joyce’s use of punctuation and grammar towards the end of Ulysses. Godard was such a genius that he couldn’t even be subordinated by film conventions.
The scenes filmed in the public really were filmed in the public. As in, the supposed extras who are in the background are all looking directly into the camera, some stopping, pointing and looking at Belmondo and Seberg act. But it just adds a new, amazing dimension. Belmondo himself thought this film was so terrible, but it’s the fact that it’s different that makes it so fresh and calming.
I can’t even put into words how perfect this film is. Godard does not need a good plot line, he does not need film sets and perfect lighting and he does not need to follow the ‘rules’ of film. All he needs is a camera and to question why film had such conventions anyway.
There are some serious literary and artistic allusions, that were fun to pick up on too. Godard knows that the film has so many things that would be considered wrong and bad at the time, but he sees film outsider the boundaries of just being the same story with better and better sets. He is truly innovative. He focuses on so much over the plot that the film has such a unique dimension.
Entertaining,different (which I can never stress enough as being the key to a good film) and refreshing. Also you feel pretty damn cool watching it.
Five stars/Five
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statement
