Facets' College Corner: Feeling Breathless

Editor's note: As one of their assignments in Introduction to Film at Oakton Community College, students were asked to watch a French New Wave film outside of class and apply what they learned about New Wave aesthetics to their movie selection. The students had not seen any New Wave films prior to taking the class, so the material and movies were new to them. Magdalena Wiech viewed Godard’s masterpiece Breathless, which, after 50 years, still looks astonishingly modern, and offered a solid account of the ways in which the film was radically different from what had come before.


The French New Wave: Breathless

The French New Wave was an artistic movement of French filmmakers from Paris who began their careers as critics in the 1950s then turned toward directing. Their work advanced and influenced the way movies are made. Some of these directors were Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, and others. Influenced by film scholar Andre Bazin, many of the group wrote for the groundbreaking critical film journal Cahiers du Cinema. Cahiers promoted the auteur theory, which advocated the idea that the best films reflect a director’s personal artistic expression and should project his individual style and vision.

Breathless, a movie from 1960 directed by Jean-Luc Godard, is a story about Michel, who is fascinated with Humphrey Bogart’s star image as a criminal. Michel impulsively kills a policeman. Wanted by authorities, he turns to Patricia, an American journalism student at the Sorbonne. Michel is trying to get money owed to him so that he can escape to Italy. At the same time he is trying to seduce Patricia and convince her to go with him. Eventually, Patricia finds out that the police are searching for Michel, and she turns him in. Later she tells him about it, but Michel doesn’t want to hide anymore; he is tired of running away. Unfortunately, just as the police come, the man who owed him money throws him a gun. Michel gets shot down by the police, and he dies.

Some of the groundbreaking techniques associated with the French New Wave films include the use of a non-heroic protagonist, abrupt shifts in time and tone, abrupt endings, the love of hommage to other films and art forms, jump cuts, location shooting, natural lighting, direct sound recording, hand held camera, freeze-frame, and direct address to the camera. Many of these techniques are used in Breathless.

The main character in the movie, Michel, is a non-heroic protagonist. (Note from the editor: The formula for a heroic Hollywood protagonist finds the hero to be attractive, insightful, the moral center of the film, and able to obtain the goal or resolve the problem presented by the narrative. The writer here is measuring Michel against that archetype.) Although Michel is not ugly, his attractiveness is debatable. It is also arguable if Michel is insightful. He doesn’t really seem like he knows what he is doing. He pretends to be tougher then he is, constantly imitating Humphrey Bogart’s gangster-like persona. Even when he kills the policeman, it seems that he does it by accident because he finds a gun in the stolen car. In addition, he gets killed in the end because he is holding someone else’s gun, while his initial intention was to give himself up. Michel certainly doesn’t have a moral center. He is a small-time thief who is self absorbed. Finally, he definitely doesn’t solve the problem presented by the film’s narrative, although in some ways, he achieves his personal goals. Michel seduces Patricia—she is even pregnant with his child—but for some reason they don’t really make a big deal out of it. Also, the man who owed him money does show up in the end to pay back the money he owes Michel. However, neither of those personal goals ultimately matter because Patricia gives Michel away to prove to herself that she doesn’t love him, and what is more important, he dies in the end of the movie. Final proof that he is not a heroic protagonist is offered by his own words: “After all, I’m an asshole.”

Another characteristic technique of the French New Wave that was used in the Breathless was frequent jump cutting. According to Godard, who can’t always be trusted in interviews and comments about his work in retrospect, the jump cuts weren’t intended. The final version of the movie was too long, so supposedly Godard cut the film where he thought it wouldn’t disrupt the story. True or not, there are countless jump cuts in the movie. One of the examples is in the scene with Michel driving in the car with Patricia. He is describing the physical features that he likes about her. As he names parts of her body, the camera cuts to close-ups of Patricia’s face, particularly, the back of her head. The jump cuts add to the dynamic flow of the scene. They underline everything he says.

Another feature of French New Wave movies is direct address. In the beginning of the movie while Michel drives a stolen car, he looks straight into camera and addresses the audience. He acknowledges the camera. By doing this, Godard reminds us constantly that we are watching a movie. Another example of employing self–reflexive techniques was the alias name that Michel used, Laszlo Kovacs. Laszlo Kovacs was a Hungarian cinematographer who would later become famous for his work on Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. There is also scene in which fellow New Wave director Jean–Pierre Melville masquerades as a writer being interviewed by Patricia, and Godard himself appears in the film as an informer. The constant referring to film reminds us that we are watching one.

Breathless makes references to other films and to other art forms. Michel’s constant lip rubbing and chain smoking is an hommage to Humphrey Bogart. There is a scene where Michel is standing in front of the movie theatre, staring at the lobby cards with Bogart. He says to himself, “Bogie.” At the hotel room, Patricia hangs a reproduction of a Pierre Auguste Renoir painting and reads William Faulkner. The painter was the father of Jean Renoir, who was an internationally acclaimed screenwriter and director. William Faulkner was an important American novelist but also a screenwriter. For Godard—and by extension, other New Wave directors—everything is somehow linked to the movies.

During a scene in the hotel room, viewers can hear jazzy music, and then after Patricia and Michel make love, they hear loud modern music. Patricia seems more educated then Michel, because he asks if Faulkner is one of her lovers. These scenes show us the collision between popular and high culture. Plus, Jean–Luc Godard is plugging his influences of art and literature into Breathless.

Godard shot the movie on location in and around Paris and often used natural lighting. Both of these techniques were characteristic for the French New Wave films, and they added to the realism of the movie. They made the movie look more like documentary.

With its rejection of the classic narrative style, which had been the standard mode for western filmmaking for decades, Breathless was very innovative when first released. It was not only a milestone of the French New Wave, but it was also a landmark in moviemaking history. It was definitely a challenge to watch Breathless; it’s not an easy film to watch. Patricia and Michel seem a little bit detached, and, with the offbeat pacing of the movie, it is hard to engage in their story. And, the ending is truly bizarre: While Michel is dying, he makes faces.

Earlier in the film, Patricia had told Michel: “I want us to be like Romeo and Juliet.” Well, Michel certainly ends up like Romeo.