"Breathless"/A Bout de souffle: Out of Breath: Two Negatives Make A Positive"
(Chapter Four from John Francis Kreidl, Jean-Luc Goddard. Boston: Twayne Publisher, 1980)
"Breathless" is a generational statement, the "film generation" of 1953's statement that they are not
going to make films the same way anymore. Urban suffocation can be cured through an escape into
fiction, says "Breathless", and the regaining of the personal can come through an escape into a
"fictitious" existence. If the purpose of "Breathless" is seen to be an escape and a gain in pleasure for
the suffocating, "Breathless", narcissistic ego via an escape into suprareal fiction, rather than an
existentially obedient facing up to real life, then we are on the way to understanding this remarkable,
Through the Looking Glass, film.
More than 1941's "Citizen "Kane"", which, radical though it may have been in compressing its narrative
viewpoint into one multi-faceted character, Charles Foster Kane, still remains a Hollywood first
generation film product, "Breathless" is a generational revolt into a new style film, and begins the
second generation of film-a type of film characterized by the elevation of the ego, the "I," the
self-conscious narrator, with all the artifacts and trappings of what later became the "I" generation,
personified by the Beattles, Dylan, and San Francisco. This kind of film was first thought up by the
film generation of 1953 and then made in 1958.
Personalism, glorification of the I who is telling the story, and urban survival are all neatly tied up in
"Breathless" into one Gordian knot. The film is thus both escapist and liberating at the same time.
Why this is so involves a thorough understanding of "Breathless", a task which this chapter undertakes.
If it is successful, the reader should see that a fiction can deal indignantly with both life and fiction and
be valid as both, thus acting as a bridge for the artist to escape life and then get back to it with a solution
for it, posited as fiction, but very helpful to a liver of life nonetheless. Never in the history of film has
a fiction had so much to do with real life as "Breathless".
There are three aspects of "Breathless", Godard's first feature, that make it a striking, legendary,
milestone film. (And we should note here that '`milestone" films generally either wrap up a genre or
open up a new avenue of filmmaking. By milestone, here, I mean the latter. "Breathless" opened up new
possibilities.) These three aspects that make "Breathless" spectacular are its generationalism, its unique
storytelling innovations, and its editing. Not only do each in their own right make the film interesting,
but they play into each other, for each other, and put the film into the viewer's experience like little that
happened before it.
Each of the three aspects alone is worthy of much comment. The generationalism of "Breathless"
represented the film generation of 1953 coming of age and to power. The central concerns of a group of
men, all born after 1928, represent the younger generation of France's (and, to some extent, the Western
world's) social viewpoint. These men, now in their late twenties, made "Breathless" represent their
point of view exclusively. The film makes clear cut their refusal to be like their parents, and it wishes
the replacement of their parents' cinema with their own. This "point of view" has variously been
described as "immediate," "nihilistic," "existential," "Belmondiste," the latter a term coined by the
French weekly l'Express to describe the Belmondo character's "negative" and "destructive" behavior to
free himself of rules. Today we would see that the film has more to do with a self-confident,
inner-directed brand of narcissism (not Lasch's other-directed New Narcissism), one that, to paraphrase
Godard, one does not need a mirror for, and which has little to do with nihilism. The adjective
"immediate" also applies to "Breathless" because it is there not only in the story (content) but in the
editing (form) of the film. This editing rhythm, disrupting our past expectations, makes it "immediate.'
There is little point in seeing the film as "existential" or "nihilistic" since the spirit of Sartre or of
Nietzsche does not make it into the film. It has no philosophical message. At the core, the makers of
"Breathless" were not action-oriented people. Yet, they were inner-directed and against the
other-directedness of the world which suffocated them (hence the French title of the film, A Bout de
Souffle, (an attack of suffocation). The film thus challenges people to become more inner and less other
directed, even while it does not call for action or direct protest. This is the film's social matrix. This
connects to the film's narrative matrix. "Breathless" is complex because of its second unique aspect, its
storytelling innovations. It is a film with both metanarrative plot (self-reflection) and a dual storyline of
incongruent stories. Further, one of the two stories is historic (self-referential) (the past) and is only a
cliché in the filmic present of the film. Thus the film is doubly divided, doubly doubled, if you will.
Yet it makes sense. Why? Because of editing, because of us, our skill in juggling our perceptions in
places and 1etting our guard down in others. It does not dazzle us so much as it permits us to dazzle
ourselves, use our mind freely and say, "Aha, this works!" Thus "Breathless" glorifies the viewer,
honors him, praises him, makes him feel good, as he is able to handle spectacle on a higher level. And,
of course, this leads to the fact that the feeling that comes from watching "Breathless" operate as more
than just a narrative tour de force is liberating, exhilarating, full of life and breath.
The third aspect of "Breathless", its editing, will be covered in Chapter 5, as it is as much responsible
for the exhilaration the film produces as the other two aspects. The claim of "Breathless" on our
attention, like that which "Citizen Kane's" partisans claimed for it, stems from its "radical departure"
from cinema norms. "Breathless", in my view, is more deserving of this sobriquet than "Kane".
Godard's film is a more radical departure from films that came before it than "Citizen Kane" (this is not
to disparage "Kane"), as "Kane" was not really a generational statement about art or even
truth-telling, nor was it quite so radical a departure from narrative convention as some hold. In an
analogous, technical way, "Breathless" opened up its narrative by using the same method of systematic
application of a technique that did "Kane", but it used it far more startlingly. Kane's optical tampering
created "depth," just as now Breathless's new editing pattern would create more immediacy. But if we
take the cinema of D. W. Griffith to be the first generation of film, then "Citizen "Kane" still belongs to
it. "Breathless" clearly, to me, begins the second generation of film, one in which the potential of film to
tamper with its narrative to create ontologies is realized. "Breathless" starts film off on a path where it
can become "anthologies or ontologies of fabricated experience,' rather than narrative dazzle, where it
can tamper with viewer viewpoint through structural innovations and give the viewer more than just
entertainment. It changed filmic narratology.
The claim of "Breathless" on our attention comes not, then, like "Kane", from its arsenal of optical
innovations. Its "advance" over "Kane" comes from how it manipulates our perceptions even while it
seemingly grants freedom to them. With "Breathless", film entered "a new order," one not entirely to the
liking of some spectators and one not entirely good for the evolution of the cinema. (Much has been
written about how Godard created a cinema that was impossible for other filmmakers to follow and
develop for the benefit of the viewer.) But nothing can or will deny that "Breathless" inaugurated a valid
form of cinema that at least told us how far the cinema could go in a direction that was neither a
formalistic violation of narrative (i.e., avant-garde abstract cinema) nor a mere rehash of conventional
cinematic storytelling methods. "Breathless" opened up a third way to cinema. This way, while it is
neither political nor message-studded, is concretely social and pretends to a quantitative sociology it
almost manages occasionally to achieve. Breathless' in its immediate, third way, fashion, is predictive of
life. With it, Godard discovered how to make a cinema that could "speak to the future."
"Breathless" is really composed of two parallel films which only intersect at rare moments. Despite its
being based on a conventional Hollywood-like, melodramatic script by François Truffaut, it is a highly
experimental film. Over the narrative also hovers a metanarrative, a playfulness of the power of the film
to just be its own tricks, and the two narratives play with each other.
To further complicate matters, there are two stories contained within the one narrative of "Breathless",
two orthonarratives, if you will. One story is the mythically told, self-referentially structured story of
Michel Poiccard, a French gangster who likes American movies; the other story, deconstructs this story,
and says Michel is making all this up. The parallel film is the realistically told, signifier-rich,
semiotically structured, spectated story of Patricia Franchini, an American girl in Paris who is a student
at the Sorbonne. But let's not consider this the exact state of affairs and fall in love with it, for Michel is
also an American gangster and Patricia is also a French actress. Each character plays two roles, one in a
social document of 1959, one in a complete fiction, i.e. in two different narrative modes of fiction.
There is neither unity, nor prior anticipation of a logic of storyline possible in "Breathless" (unless one
lies and makes one up!) The two chief characters, Michel and Patricia, are both not in each other's
stories, and falsely in them, thereby confounding a viewer's desire to firmly 1ocate them.
Why is this? Why is it so difficult to "force" logic onto "Breathless"? Because the unique way
"Breathless" is cut, is edited, does not allow the viewer--like in the normal Hollywood film viewing
experience--to set up a preconceived notion how to take a shot and assign to it meaning. Shots (and
characters) are cut in ways that confound anticipation the exact opposite of the way the classical
Hollywood film of the 1930s sets up each successive group of shots. Every act by the hero of
"Breathless", Michel Poiccard, seems as if he had just, on the spur of the moment, decided to do what he
did.
Part of this is deliberate, Godard's intention. Part of it came about due to a fortuitous accident. When
Godard finished shooting "Breathless", it was much too long, about one and a half hours too long.
Normally, in cutting down a three-hour film to a ninety-minute one, whole segments are cut out.
Godard's approach was to pare each shot down to the bone, and not leave out any. This
compression--done as a commercial expedient-- worked and set a new norm for the film industry. As is
obvious to those who view TV commercials, this style is the basis of most American TV commercials
today.
The spectator of the 1930s Hollywood film would find another "weirdness" about "Breathless". And that
is, instead of being a character in a film, Michel keeps commenting upon himself as a character in a
film, as if he were partly in the film partly outside of it. This violates all the rules. The Hollywood film
of the 1930s paid special attention to see that this would not happen. It not only invented stock
characters for us to identify with--younger brothers, sisters, types who don't get the girl, etc.--but went
further, inventing something now called "spectator inscription," a character with whom we identify
ourselves as spectator, who watches the film with us, like Thompson in "Citizen "Kane"". Hollywood
did this to cement the pact between us and the film. We signed up to watch an illusion; we got it.
"Breathless" reverses, disobeys, and casts aside this tradition. Michel Poiccard does not want us to
watch his story unless we want to. At times, he even tires of his story. This attitude was fresh in 1960,
in both senses of the word. It talked back to the Hollywood illusionistic style and it was novel, new,
different, and therefore amusing, daring, even compelling.
"Breathless" is thus made up of four stories, two of which are each other's doubles (Michel/Michel's
wish, Patricia/Patricia analyzed by Godard). We can, consequently, call "Breathless" a doubly doubled
film, one which expresses Godard's fear that Western mankind was entering a schizoid age, "L'age de
l'homme double sans mirroir."
It is Michel's doubled story which, however, makes up, takes up the majority of the film's time. Its
deconstruction, at the end, is the key to the film, as Michel "dies" filmically, and shows us the film is
self-referential, not realistic, but holistic in regard to its character's real understanding of where he came
from.
While, however, the dominant story of Michel belongs to the self-referential mode of the Godard canon,
that of Patricia does not. Confusing? Surprising that part of a film's narrative belongs to another
narrative mode? "Well, why not?" says "Breathless". It is possible, with a "saying" narrative, to connect
several "saids," including illogically connected ones. It is possible to do this in film better than in print.
And the film "proves" this. For it "covers" its "lies" better than print.
Patricia's story is linked to Michel's only by dialogue and by their images being linked together-they
walk hand in hand and "talk" in the same frame. But, in Godard's concept of it, in his plot, or idea, she
is far away from him. To show how Patricia is selfish, unaware, and manipulative, Godard studies or
spectates her. Briefly stated here (also see Chapter 5) the method he uses is to have Patricia ask Michel a
question that the spectator feels she should know the answer to. "What is a horoscope?" "What is the
Champs?" She, a college girl, a resident Parisian who sells newspapers on the Champs-Elysées, would
know what a horoscope is and she would certainly know that the Champs, on which she is standing
when she asks the question, is the Champs Elysées on which she is selling the Herald Tribune every
day.
Patricia's discourse -------implied questions
Patricia's answers -------------------Viewer must supply the questions
The questions seem to bring the spectator in contact directly with Patricia, with her behavioral code, with
her unawareness, her vagueness, which makes the spectator answer the question for her. It is backwards
from the usual process of film. It is as if the spectator, in supplying the answer, discovers the question.
These questions-- addressed to her external being her external semioticization her being coded as a
bundle of signifiers and not made up of the whole blood of psychologism--are more than excuses for
Michel to give her smart-assed and "meaningful,"characterological replies. They are there to call
something into question behind the semioticization. They are in themselves signifiers of the fact that
Patricia lives in a cultural vacuum, as many women do. These signifiers are those which Godard (not
Michel) wants to tackle and question. If Michel is a myth, Patricia is a sign. Both present different
kinds of signifiers which are exposed by the plot. And as for the storyline, what luck can a myth have if
he falls in love with a signifier?
How do we follow all this while we are watching the film? The answer is: we must try. We must try to
answer our questions of "where is the film going" while we are watching the film--as if it were a very
fast-moving novel. Failure to do so will result in our not understanding the film. Unlike "Citizen
"Kane"", which reveals itself during frequent viewings, "Breathless" is revealed not from frequent
viewings alone, but through our insight into what it is trying to do.
"Breathless" is a test given by "Dr. Godard" to see whether we can work out its meaning. Meaning can
only be worked out by finding a structure. "Breathless" literally begs us to ferret out its structure. In
short, Godard's "Breathless" confronts us with a schizoid story like Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and
asks. "Why are there two stories there that don't organically belong to the same story?'
We can now perceive in "Breathless", Godard's first excursion into the self-referential mode, a mix of
structures. From here, we can proceed to its meaning.
What "Breathless" is chiefly about is the presentation of the mythic, the story of Michel, who patterns
himself after American movies, as told by Godard. Into this story, Godard imbeds many American film
clichés, taken from his favorite American movies, and narrates a running commentary over them. Thus
"Breathless" is a kind of written piece of film criticism. The film's "saying" presents comment on its
"said."
For this reason, "Breathless" should be taken as a self-reference to the American cinema, and we should
see that Michel himself doesn't exist-he made himself up (as well as Godard made him up-he is like the
documentation of a myth) by copying Humphrey Bogart and taking all his attributes from Bogie; he is
part of the film's "said." This kind of character and story takes us right back to Lewis Carroll: "Treating
a 'null class' (a set with no members) as though it were an existing thing is another rich source of
Carrollian logical nonsense." "Breathless" doesn't assume Michel exists as a character; he is a bundle, a
composite of previously said film clichés. His behavior is totally determined by them. He exists only as
a filmic denotation. Therefore, on the level of a referent to reality what we should do with him-we are
justified in saying: he doesn't exist like the other characters, notably Patricia. This, of course, works
toward giving "Breathless" its tremendous feel of exhilaration, liberation. Michel can "fly" through the
storyline, through the obstacles, the cops, his facing death, as if "he weren't there." This, in short, is
why it's fun to have art imitate life.
Michel Poiccard is an amalgam, an American gangster carrying signs that makes him also a deeply
French, Parisian, middle-class play actor. Godard in fact asked Belmondo to point out that the film is
about con games. " Jean,' said Jean-Luc to Jean Seberg," Belmondo recalls, "Jean-Paul says to you, 'The
Americans are the greatest con artists because they like LaFayette and Maurice Chevalier, who are the
two biggest French con artists.' What is it that you'd answer him in real life? And Jean, most of the
time, went into herself and came up with the right reply."
Thus we can assume both from semiotic evidence and because it is clearly stated that Belmondo/Michel
is a con artist, that he is a play actor-a member of a null class, the French middle class-American
lower-class movie gangster, a set of people with no members (except, of course, Godard, the author,
himself). Belmondo's existence in the film is logical nonsense, designed only to call attention to itself,
the character, equally nonsensical, designed only to call attention to himself, his being there.
Thus, "Breathless" is not anywhere near the existential, freedom-seeking, nihilistic film some of the
pro-"Breathless" right-wing press made it out to be at the time; it is a tutorial, a film designed to teach
us how film works, which, in turn, gives us an aestheticized, artistic sense of wisdom, an intellectual
"high," a film in which essence precedes existence (Patricia) as well as existence precedes essence
(Michel), thus badly dividing the film between existential and nonexistential behavior, a film wherein
Sartrean Romance (Michel) has a fight with a victim of advertising and conservatism (Patricia), a fight
between Either and Or, a film with no victor or vanquished, for "Breathless" has no heroes, it is only
about heroes, about its being a film of doubles without a mirror.
"Breathless" is part of a body of films which can be studied by a critical attitude called searching out the
"meta-narrative," which, according to Kenneth Weaver Hope, "uncovers this sense of film":
The term "meta-narrative" is used here to introduce a way of looking at stories and storytelling,
particularly on film. Whenever, consciously or unconsciously, obtrusively or unobtrusively, a story is
about storytelling, or the broader aspects of narrative, or whenever the story may be interpreted to be in
some way about the processes by which it is made to exist, the medium in which it exists, or the
perception and communication which underlie it, then it may be called metanarrative. Meta-narrative, as
I conceive of the term, is often a subtle device within a solidly grounded traditional story pattern rather
than a self-consciously distancing device. It involves a pattern of motifs or images within a story that is
linked to the medium of expression. There is a tendency to express acting, performing, and pretense in
stories, and the told part of our lives as distinct from the immediately experienced....
Meta-narrative may be found and examined in such disparate films as Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane",
Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause," Vincente Minnelli's "Madame Bovary, "Michelangelo
Antonioni's "Blow-Up, "Arthur Penn's "The Left-Handed Gun," "Mickey One" and "Bonnie and Clyde,"
Ingmnar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers." Clearly, meta-narrative does not refer to a particular body of
film, but to a critical attitude which uncovers the sense of film.
Meta-narrative is a concept we posit--not a fact--to enable us to understand how a film works; it is, as
Hope says, a "critical attitude," a decoding device we use in order to search out a structure, something,
ironically, Godard is doing along with us in the film. We justify fabricating the term metanarrative
because without finding the structure of "Breathless", we can't find its meaning. And the meta-narrative
approach hypothesized by Hope makes good sense to me. Its use, applied to "Breathless", enables us to
learn and establish that "Breathless" is a self-referential film rather than an existential drama. It is a
film about narration. This sets "Breathless" well apart from all the other New Wave films.
The other New Wave films are not about narration but entirely about their authors' "I." That is why I
made the distinction earlier between Godard's Astrucian camera-stylo and Truffaut's camera ego, for the
former can lead to as seemingly self-effacing and author-absent a film as "Breathless" while the
camera-ego leads to the opposite: personal films in which the narrative serves only as a puny subterfuge
to hide the blatancy of the "I." Truffaut, who wrote in 1957 that the French cinema loves, thrives, on
false legends, fabricated one himself with The 400 Blows (1959) (incidentally, the only Truffaut film
Godard likes), in which Truffaut follows the form of transparent or disguised autobiography; that
director further recalls his childhood in Les mistons (1957) and his adolescence in Love at 20 (1962).
Which Godard film is ever so blatantly and certainly autobiographical? Other New Wave films recall
their author's military service (Claude de Givray's "Tire-au-F!anc") or their glory (Pierre Kast's "Le bel
age," 1960 and François Moreuil's--then Jean Seberg's husband--"La recreation," 1960). Surrogate "I's"
abound in most New Wave films, Jean-Pierre Leaud for Truffaut or directors playing themselves: Kast,
Doniol-Valcroze, J. Comolli, in their films. But not in "Breathless".
Or, the New Wave films are about "good" versus "bad" characters, Chabrol's "Le Beau Serge,"
"Les Cousins," "Les Godelureaux," or "Paris Belongs to Us," or they are Balzacian extensions, The
Human Comedy updated, in which characters "return," the five Antoine Doinel films of Truffaut, for
example. The "I" here is merely transferred to the "my" form, the character is the author's possession,
so that all this is autobiography again.
Only Truffaut's "Tirez sur le pianiste," of all the New Wave films, is close to "Breathless" in that it
doesn't present Truffaut's autobiography so much as it presents his temperamental disposition to narrate,
which is shown through a series of narrations, all of which, while they expose Truffaut, also copy
American film cliches. Tirez sur le pianiste is halfway toward "Breathless", toward narration.
Returning to "Breathless", we should now see how self-effacing it is, how much more concerned it is
with showing off its author's knowledge rather than his ego as such. "Breathless" says, "Look how
clever I am," rather than saying, "Here I am." It is hard to find Godard there (that question of authorship
again). Even his brief appearance in it is a "third-person one," that of a narrative figment, an "It," a
tattle-tale passerby who says to the police, "There is Michel Poiccard," reveals little of Godard as he
quickly falls back into place, resuming his role as a frame of film.
The storyline of "Breathless" is basic, simple, and adolescent.
Michel Poiccard, a French petty gangster, shoots a cop. He tries to get Patricia Franchini, an American
girl studying in Paris, to flee with him; although she lets him have her body, she betrays him to the
police. At first glance this hardly makes the film, which, according to Alain Resnais, "opened up a new
frontier for the cinema," sound like another "Citizen "Kane"" The enthusiasm for the film came not only
from Resnais, but from Jean Cocteau, from the press, and from the box office. Belmondo recalls,
"When we saw the film projected for the first time, we were reassured we had won. When at the
beginning of the film Michel stole the car and said: 'And now you lose, Alphonse,' the critics who
attended the private screening laughed. It was in the bag! I was expecting this". There was no chance for
"Breathless" to be a moderate success, Belmondo argues. " . . . Everything could happen or nothing
could happen. I was conscious that it wouldn't be anything in between". "Breathless" became Godard's
most popular, his most coherent, least metaphysical, least mystifying film, the one of his films that in
the view of film scholars has worn the best.
Thanks to François Truffaut, the film has a beginning, middle, and end (in that order). The scenario was
written by a twenty-five year-old Truffaut in 1957. It was shot by a twenty-nine-year-old Godard and
starred a twenty-four-year-old Belmondo and a twenty-one-year-old crew-cut Jean Seberg, an Iowa girl
who had been Otto Preminger's discovery in the early 1950s and who moved to France after Preminger's
"St. Joan" flopped. For the first time since the making of "Citizen "Kane"" by Orson Welles's whiz kids
in 1940--when people knew less about film than they did in l959--film history was made by a group of
people in their twenties. This alone makes "Breathless" the most anti-conservative of 1959-1962 vintage
films.
The very youth of its makers suggested that "Breathless" was going to shock or delight. The film
expressed artistically the hopes and fears of a small group of elitists who felt that they had every right
to make a film. The clash between feeling free and living in an ever more technical and restricting,
complex world was dealt with by Godard, Coutard, and company inventing ways to get around
production difficulties. "Breathless" reflects what Claude Mauriac called the dethroning of the "high
priesthood" of prescribed camera movements.
Yet the film resists what we would call its own beatnik tendencies either real (Kerouacian) or imagined
(Marcel Carné's 1958 ode to beatnikism, "Les Tricheurs"). It equally well resists the tendencies to
classicism that dominate the next ten Godard films. Were Godard only French classically trained and had
he never been stimulated by those hundreds of engaging upbeat American films he saw in Henri
Langlois's Cinematheque, our Beat Godard might have just made "Breathless" into a Jack Kerouac down
child opus, a slap-dash, on the road, diary film, such as we have from Wim Wenders ("Kings of the
Road") or Dennis Hopper ("Easy Rider").
Godard clarified why he felt drawn toward making an "American" film like "Breathless" in an
auto-interview in 1979:
During the era when the New wave began, I was in fairly good agreement with Truffaut on the above point one did defend a mediocre-middling French cinema which was not the elitist mediocre cinema of Delannoy, the photography of Roger Hubert, Carné or things like that . . . one did defend an other cinema, . . . one Godard defended in his own criticism.
I recall that one did defend the films of Carbonnaux, of Joannon and such; before we started at Cahiers I recall a cineaste with the name of Jacques Daniel Norman who made "The Red Angel "with Tilda Thamar, and which one did defend out of comradeship to Rivette who was regurgitating all that stuff back into circulation . . .
I find that the mediocre-middling American cinema is infinitely superior to the mediocre-middling French cinema, that a Scorsese, a Coppola, have the potential to make something better than Verneuil or Lautner.... Why? I don't know, because America is a more mixed-up, heterogeneous country, or there are just more people there.... They communicate better because it is larger, but it is not immense, like Russia, like China, which are lost in their own infinity.
In the USA, they have the right means, that is, the means just large enough not to exceed their limits, but they are too small to be able to avail themselves of the grandeur of space.
"Breathless" is Godard's mimesis of the mediocre-middling American cinema he always admired.
Jean-Pierre Melville had already pioneered such an "American middling" film successfully with "Bob le
flambeur" (Bob The Torch, [sic] 1955) but had Godard not realized from being a film critic for ten years
that the French public would now love an even more blatantly modernistic threnody for the
Americanization of the French cinema-"Breathless" would not have struck that "right" note that made it
into an overnight success. Had Godard merely repeated Charlotte and Her Jules, whose theme of a
lonely boy and an unresponsive girl repeats itself when a warm Michel re-encounters a cool Patricia in
the Champs-Elysées sequence, and increased the length from thirteen to ninety minutes, we wouldn't
bother to study "Breathless" so intensively today.
There is a good reason why we do study "Breathless" today. Like "Citizen Kane" a film novel in its
time, "Breathless" represents the breakthrough to a new mode of film, the film of self-reference, which
is, in turn, parallel to many of the other 1960s popular art forms in that instead of trying to avoid the
cliché, it welcomes the cliché and merely uses it again to create new forms. While on the one hand the
New York avant-garde cinema was trying to escape the cliché, the New Wave-and "Breathless"-felt this
impossible and undesirable and staked its making its artistic statement on accepting the clichés of film
history. There is some truth to the claim that there is a connection between Andy Warhol and Godard-
they are linked simply because neither fears the cliché and both justify the cliché because its very
recognizability in art conveys immediacy
"Breathless" avoids connotative symbolism almost entirely-and its denotative quality moves the film
away from the French poetic cinema, into the opposite corner of film, to the highly linear structure and
storyline Hollywood film, to the formulas Hollywood films used to follow whenever the studios were
frightened to do anything the viewer could misunderstand. "Breathless" unfolds schematically as if on
parade, or as would a newsreel about Michel Poiccard, using a forced logic on the viewer which the
viewer does not have to think much about due to the clarity, forcefulness and repetitiousness of the
film's clichés.
Thus, when Patricia imitates some of the clichés, such as when she takes off her glasses after Parvelesco
(a writer whom she is interviewing) does the same, she moves the film neatly into a double mimetic
structure where we watch mimed reflections of others' actions. She repeats Parvelesco's gesture of
lowering his sunglasses, a gesture which, typical in the Godard film canon, involves a seeing (e.g., eye
glasses) cliché which tells the viewer that Patricia learns her behavior and gestures from society like an
imitative child who blindly copies its elders' gestures.
It is in its schematic quality that "Breathless" most successfully imitates the American film. By
schematic, we mean a film where everything forces something else to happen. If Godard had deliberately
chosen to make "Breathless" as an exercise film in film school to prove he understood the basics of the
Hollywood film, he couldn't have made it any better; he would most certainly have received an A-plus
for it.
As Truffaut suggested, the American film is schematic, the French film, particularly the films of
Renoir-who brought to them neorealism-is "realistic," i.e. Naturalistic, and the merit of the American
film is that it achieves a fluidity because schematization can defy logic in the name of mobility and reject
probability. This schematization makes "Breathless" great fun to view and drives it like an Oldsmobile
88 Fluidomatic toward "illusionsville."
The fluidization of Breathless's narrative also raises big problems for the critic. When we actually look
at that narrative beyond the dazzle of its editing, we now see how schizoid the film is. Shots do not
belong with other shots as tenses and stories are scrambled. Not only is "Breathless" split between life
and art, it is split between story and plot. Its plot is actually quite basic and nouvelle vague: how it is
told (narrativity of the storyline) is American. Such is the stuff that eclectic art is made of. Its same bed
but separate plots for Michel and Patricia is New Wave in the same way that Le Beau Serge or other
New Wave film enigmatically more than existentially separate their characters into different universes;
its storyline, however, is peculiarly American due to its imitation of late 1930s Hollywood's schematic
quality.
Here it mimics the American male bonding films made by Howard Hawks in the way that Michel
Poiccard has four buddies: Minouche, Berrutti, Tolmatchoff, and Zombach, who all denote loyalty, and
whose only storyline functions are to say "hi" to Michel and denote for the viewer that Michel is true
blue, a prince among thugs. We're back in the universe of "Only Angels Have Wings."
Further denoting the schizoid quality of its narrative is that "Breathless", for a Paris-set film, bears a
remarkably strong resemblance also to Howard Hawks' genre film, "The Big Sleep"; its Parisian
characters share the restless Los Angeles, rootless quality of the Raymond Chandler people. To these
American types we can add a dose of pretend French existentialism. The male characters all "hang out"
nowhere; only Patricia, ever the Kierkegaardian female, seems to have made her hotel room into a
decorated home. Even the film's very un-Parisian-like policeman is in no better shape. Like the cop in
the Raymond Chandler novel on which "The Big Sleep" was based, or Dergarmo in "The Lady in The
Lake," Godard's Inspector Vital, Breathless's cop, is a type, badly dressed and the most violent man in
the film. As in "The Big Sleep" (especially Chandler's), the inevitability of the end of life in
"Breathless" ("What does it matter how you die, whether face down in a sump or high on a hill, when it
comes time for you to sleep "The Big Sleep" . . . ") is treated equivalently blandly in its evocation by
Godard in the way we see Michel-Belmondo die.
The comradeship of the Poiccard "gang" is stressed and praised and treated in a euphoric and Hawksian
fashion. Not l'Express's rootless Belmondisme but camaraderie unveils itself as Godard's, the film's
author's, inscribed romantic nouvelle vague antidote in "Breathless" to The Big Sleep's death trip. Thus
"Breathless" successfully reflects the moral if not the morale of the Hawks films. The schizoid quality
of "Breathless" thus reduces to the fact that there are French actors playing Hawksian film actors, and
we are never totally clear as to whether Godard gives a damn about his storyline or is just mimicking
Hawks. All we can be sure of is that the Hawks moral about stoicism in face of death that is found at the
end of the film is very much there, even though in a French context, and represents a symbiosis of
Hawks and Godard, a "writing" of Godard "on top of' Hawks, a new verse on top of an old one. The
super-imposition mania of the silent cinema has, in Godard, found new inspiration in "Breathless", in
the form of a narrative superimposition that Godard makes on top of an older "picture."
Yet perhaps the strongest self-reference to the American crime film genre in "Breathless" is not to
Hawks's "The Big Sleep" or even to his earlier Scarface (one has to work quite hard to find the
characteriological connections), but to Raoul Walsh's "The Roaring Twenties" (1939), a gangster
melodrama which at the same time is a summation of the genre and a remake of Scarface, one starring
both Bogie and James Cagney. In "The Roaring Twenties", the clichés of the Prohibition gangster film
that are displayed are all self-confidently relegated to ancient history by a happy post-Depression
Hollywood, and the two leads play the characters whose histories they themselves have created, as well
as some of the other great gangster roles--Cagney imitating Edward G. Robinson of Little Caesar and
Paul Muni of Scarface and in his good-bad, doomed hero dimension, the most similar of all to the type
Michel Poiccard plays in "Breathless". Both "bad-bad" Bogie and "good-bad" Cagney die in "The
Roaring Twenties", Bogie uncharacteristically shot to death by Cagney, who, in turn is fatally wounded
by Bogie's henchmen. He dies in the arms of Panama, his faithful floozie, while a cop leans over, asking
her who he was. (It is Cagney's death "Breathless" will mimic.)
The viewer of "The Roaring Twenties" is expected to know what will happen in this film, because he's
already seen it. The same is true--on a more exalted mental level--for the viewer of "Breathless". One
could say "Breathless" is the sophisticate's "The Roaring Twenties", and the difference between the two
films is best measured in terms of the increased spectator-awareness of "this movie about movies"
complexity over the earlier "The Roaring Twenties". (In McLuhanistic jargon one could say "the
audience was ready for the message "Breathless"" and so created the film.) The existence of a more
sophisticated audience is what surely tempted Godard to make "Breathless" with updated, more complex
self-reflexivity. The 1960 "art house" audience would have been bored to death with an exact remake of
"The Roaring Twenties"!
As "The Roaring Twenties" (1939) sums up the clichés of Scarface, so does "Breathless" then doubly
sum up the same clichés, both those of Scarface via "The Roaring Twenties" and of Scarface directly.
"Breathless" is in effect a second-hand mime of Scarface, which it semiotically demonstrates at its end.
It is thus self-referential to the entire history of the American crime sound film genre in the superior
way that it displays and redeploys its clichés. When we analyze "Breathless", beneath its surface
structure we find Hawks, Hawks, and Hawks again, as if the film were a school thesis film to prove to
some professor that the student knew how to make a Hawks epic.
There are at least three major, explicit American movie references to consider in "Breathless". There is
the famous one where Belmondo sees a Bogart poster, mugs Bogie, takes a drag from his cigarette, and
blows smoke at Bogie. Godard uses the same smoke on top of the next shot-the countryside of Bogie
seems to be exhaling smoke, same as Belmondo. The two images are thus linked even though they are
separated by life versus death, by poster versus flesh and blood and by the black spaces between the film
frames.
Then there is a marquee reference to Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool " (1949), known in France as "Le
mysterieux Dr. Korvo," after the sinister character played by Jose Ferrer. Preminger is a favored
Godard auteur director; he also was Jean Seberg's (Patricia's) first director and mentor.
The most audacious reference, however, is the third one. This occurs when Patricia and Michel go to the
Colisee Cinema to see a Western. What they see is Budd Boetticher's Westbound (1959), which
probably was playing while Godard was shooting, and inside, Michel and Patricia sit and kiss and look
happier than they do at any other time in the film. Then we hear Karin Steele tell Randolph Scott in
English that she thinks that something he said would really amount to an act of betrayal if she did it.
This is exactly what is happening and will happen in "Breathless". The foreshadowing is beautiful, but
the audacity comes from the fact that "Breathless" was made for the French, most of whom wouldn't get
the point, the subtlety. A lesser director would have just used any old dialogue, but Godard picks exactly
the right moment from Westbound to apply it to "Breathless", something that no more than 2 percent of
the audience could possibly have really understood. Godard was paying homage to the importance of the
English language; there's no other explanation.
"Breathless" is not, then, to be taken as a legitimate American crime film any more than Mick Jagger's
Southern black bluesman accent is to be taken as that of a native Louisianan. It is only the semblance of
one--Godard is obviously aware that resemblance versus uniqueness is a great ploy for the cinema to
play with. One never knows when or why Michel Poiccard will veer toward being Bogie and when he
will spout ultra-Parisian cliches, something which seriously offended "do it by the dictionary" type of
reviewers like John Simon, but which I find delightful.
Made by a French director who had never lived in the USA, "Breathless" belongs more properly with
those preposterous portraits of America such as the novels of Karl May or the tales of Zane Grey, and it
is only in its semiotics that it approaches being an American film-the very characteristic re-signification
we find in all the work of Godard--for its Hollywood-like repetitions of denotations--the stress of the
iconic over the symbolic--are very explicit copies of Hollywoodian method of making signs, producing
a string of signifiers which are very clear and concise in their significations of love, death, romance,
betrayal, etc. Each cliche in "Breathless" is familiar on a subconscious level to any practiced viewer of
1940s and 1950s American films. The film in fact contains more American film iconography and less
Godard poetry than any of his future features, which tend to move towards more ambiguity as they go
along.
Godard has justified the Modernist cliché-ridden, privileged author's narrativity of "Breathless" by
saying, "Criticism taught us . . . to make films from a certain perspective, and to know, that if
something has already been done there is no point in doing it again". The way around repeating the
Hollywood cinema ant at the same time avoiding making a new nonsensical avant-garde cinema was to
mix the old and the new. "We will write old verses on top of new ones". This meant, for Godard, using
old Hollywood cliches in new ways to serve new purposes, is a way away from being forced to be
original. Yet, "Breathless" was original in how it constructs time.
Given the adventurous advances of novels such as Ulysses, and the way they pointed to the destruction
of time, the Bergsonian concept of time as duration, these could not forever be delayed in coming to the
cinema. Cinema could always, in theory, have taken fragments of past and present and forced them
together, just as Godard was to do in "Breathless". But Godard was first to do it. His justification
echoed the very goal of modern film, a goal that, according to social historian Arnold Hauser, echoes the
basic goal of modern art. In Hauser's words,
The flight from plot [i.e. storyline] is followed by the flight from the hero. Instead of a flood of events,
Joyce describes a flood of ideas and associations, instead of an individual hero a stream of
consciousness and an unending interrupted inner monologue.
This justification enables Godard to mix up his character Michel, and Humphrey Bogart as one
amalgamated character built solely on associational linkage, controlled by his first person narrative.
The emphasis lies everywhere on the uninterruptedness of the movement, the "heterogeneous
continuum," the kaleidoscope picture of a disintegrated world.... The accent is now on the simultaneity
of the contents of consciousness, the immanence of the past in the present [my emphasis] the constant
flowing together of different periods of time....
Self-reference is a term that not only defines "Breathless" but the next three Godard films as well and
much of the New Wave so we had better define this term precisely. What exactly do we mean by
self-reference? By this we mean a high awareness of the fact that cinema is a kind of living language
which can be referred to, and that every film is about other films, about its own genre's history. The
self-referential film attempts by borrowing cliches and resemioticizing them to borrow some of the
forms of previous filmic art, and, by drawing on the history of film and on the history of the other arts,
to create new content with old forms by a process of redefining and representing certain historic film
cliches. History is "solidarity with the dead", especially for Jean-Luc Godard and the reuse of history, as
he practiced it, can faithfully bring to life certain lost traditions carefully developed in slower times.
Self-reference in the New Wave came, as part of directorial self-reflection, because of the accident that
the directors who had wanted to make American-like films found that those American films were then
(in 1960) obsolete. But they insisted on making them anyway, with the result that
The Nouvelle Vague in fact may be defined in part by this new relationship between fiction and reality,
as well as through nostalgic regret for a cinema which no longer exists. When we were at last able to
make films, we could no longer make the kind of films which had made us want to make films.
Godard perversely went ahead and made those kind of films anyway, evoking them through
self-reference by coding up his films with signs from the lost Hollywood films he admired. 'Why should
we be reproached for it," asked Godard.
For five years and ten films, Godard redeployed Hollywood clichés. The results were admirable: the
self-referential film always appears in a new and fresh historic context and can therefore be very
exciting. It is hard to believe, but Godard's redeployment of an art history book cliché about Velasquez,
a Spanish seventeenth century court painter no longer painting objects but what lay between the objects,
gave him the organizing device for "Pierrot le fou"! Edgar Allan Poe's "life is controlled by art" cliché
from The Oval Portrait gave Godard's "Vivre sa vie's" pimp cliché. Newsreels of the Spanish Civil War
(1936-39) showing, romantically, how one can't have romanticism anymore, gave him "The Little
Soldier." And ""The Big Sleep"", ""The Roaring Twenties"", "Scarface", "Shame of a Nation", and
"Little Caesar" collectively gave him "Breathless".
Godard, like others his age who had studied and experienced the American cinema for ten years first
hand, decided it was hopeless in the 50s to make avant-garde cinema in face of the societally powerfu
l influence Hollywood had had on world spectatordom. Hollywood already had caused people to behave
like it. Why not then milk this fact and "play it against itself, " thereby opening a door again, a door out
of which would emerge not a movie star in a dressing gown, but a New Wave director with a brand new
reputation for excellence, excitement and depth and yet with the certainty to capture the Hollywood
trained spectator by re-feeding him/her the familiar. "Yes, let us write old verses on top of new
thoughts". What Godard wrote he would do in 1952 he now put into practice.
"Breathless" in short is a willfully arrogant film proclaiming that Godard had assembled a hundred
American film cliches and built a "new" cinema out of them.
Yet, at the same time, he did not and could not abandon a peculiarly French accent. Taking some of his
American film clichés we find that he uses them out of their context and has put them to work in a
French "Existentialist" context, put them to work to show his character Michel Poiccard's pain at having
to live his life not on the screen but inartistically, down there in the streets of Paris 1959. The Sartrean
aspect of "Breathless" is very obvious. Even its title- in French, "an attack of suffocation"--evokes
Nausea, and harkens back to a line in Godard's short "A Story of Water "(1958), where the girl
hitchhiker tells the hero, echoing Godard, "But the drama of our time, I say, is that everything has
become serious. One can't breathe on the street. [my emphasis]. Today, it is true, everything is fucked
because art has become serious". The heaviness of this seriousness is what beclouds the hero of
"Breathless", and saddens him. This leads to our being given several sad, existential clichés in
"Breathless". The saddest Sartrean cliché of this type in the film is when Michel dies; he closes his own
eyes with his fingers. Usually in the cliché, someone else does this for the victim. On another level, of
course, there is a quite different meaning for this (which however does not negate its existential sadness)
and that it denotes that Michel never had life and therefore never really died because he never really
lived-he was a mythic filmic figment of somebody's (Godard's!) imagination: in the cinema, "we do not
think, we are thoughts".
As the film ends, the death of a seemingly French "existentialist" character dissolves, becomes suddenly
stripped of its metanarrativity, and reveals not the death of a filmic character but a Hollywood filmic
cliché of death. What we are given is a piece of film: the Hollywood ending to the story of an American
gangster obviously played by a Frenchman. We now see the film in focus. It opens with a self-reflective
statement, "I must play myself in the way the "B" film demands," fakes a story, and ends by returning
to a self-reflective tableau, which frames the film, and returns us to the film's prediction that it will be
only self-reflective. This is not all. "Citizen "Kane"" also promised and delivered its self-reflexivity.
What "Breathless" also contains (beyond its narrative-metanarrative relationship) is another "axis" of
narrative, paranarrative, if one wants to name it, that suggests the "viewer's film" to the viewer even
against the director's film. (The director's film says, "believe Michel as an American gangster"; the
viewer's film says, "don't.")
No American watching "Breathless"-even a freshman or sophomore college student of the 1980s-who
wasn't yet born when "Breathless" first appeared-can help but note that the film seems easier for an
American to understand than for a Frenchman. We Americans have no problem in recognizing our own
"B" movies again, however disguised. But what about Frenchmen? How was it that "Breathless" was
immensely popular; 260,000 first-run tickets sold, about one for every thirty Parisians, that spring in
1960? "Breathless" may have been creating, as Alain Resnais put it, "a new frontier of cinema," but its
success was due, as Godard put it, to the fact that every great film is successful because of "a
misunderstanding" on the part of the public.
We can only wonder what the average Frenchman made of the film, but we do have the contemporaneous
reviews to study. The Parisian critics were themselves somehow split between seeing the film as the
beginning of a new French existential, nihilistic spirit- Belmondisme, they called it, after the Belmondo
character's behavior-and as a continuation of a French filmic romantic loser tradition, a "Quai Des
Brumes" twenty years later. Both views turned out to be wrong in part. One can hardly blame the critics
for missing the point of "Breathless", for they had to get accustomed to Godard first, for "Breathless"
was, like "Citizen "Kane," the beginning of a kind of self-referential cinema that would not make sense
until one knew what it was referring to. Then, the pleasure of discovery would come. On a more
immediate level, critics such as François Truffaut have praised the film for being so rhythmic and
Marsha Kinder has praised it for being so speedy, which is perhaps saying the same thing in other
words. But this is not what attracted most critics at the time; it was the story.
Film critics then, and still, amazingly, to this day, persist in trying to report on storyline, not on who is
narrating. The film must tell a story. It doesn't matter to the critics that to understand each story part,
each must have an author. Every critic still feels it a sacred duty to ferret out storyline. Somehow, most
critics paid little attention to "Breathless's" third-person references to American cinema-one first needed
the self-referential critic to understand the self-referential film. They took the film as a first-person
story told by Godard, and in some cases, by Belmondo, who is often equated in the reviews with his
character, Michel. No one pointed out that the two stories of Michel and Patricia never really meet. No
one dealt with the mythic aspects of the film. Mostly, critics of the time felt the film was sociologically
true and about the nihilistic behavior of modern Parisian youth, and thus a realistic film. Thus Godard
was right when he felt the film was successful because it was misunderstood.
Today we can better comprehend why the film has such authority. First, the film is very clever. Godard
accomplished in it a monumental narrative trick, one worthy of the author of "Citizen "Kane"".. He
collected film cliches almost indiscriminately and from them recreated a first-person novel, a "written,"
idiosyncratic (personal), auteur film that shows in its authority of presentation none of the third-person
disguised narration of the newsreel but the self-confidence of the first-person novelist in manipulating
evidence and from it making new art. In form, "Breathless" is like a compilation film which is
assembled from disparate shots and edited into a full film, and is then reshot with fresh actors and
scenery. Or, in Godard's own words, with "Breathless", he "wrote new words on top of old verses" .The
prophesy Godard made in 1952, eight years earlier, as a young Cahiers critic was fulfilled. He made a
film that preserved the old and suggested the new.
How? Simply by surrendering to the viewer the filmmaker's right to truth-telling, Godard invited the
"viewer's film" to enter his film. "Breathless" differs radically from "Citizen "Kane"" in that there is
even none of "Kane's" serious pretense of self-investigation of fiction by an outside, impartial medium,
the honest newspaper reporter. Welles posits that there is such a reporter, the film itself. Welles took
metanarrative seriously. ""Kane"" hinted at the possible mediumistic use of the movie form to
investigate itself due to the desire on Welles's part to show ambiguity-to discover whether he, Welles,
liked power or not. "Kane", in part, seriously contradicts itself, and its filmic narrative was expanded to
accommodate this. "Breathless" goes even further along this line, but is much more playful and
distrustful at the same time, than "Kane". Its plays metanarrative against narrative but also vice versa!
The methods devised by the New Wave directors to make the film play with itself differ; for Godard, the
method is structurally playful. "Breathless" realized that self-investigation is also but a game, a device,
and asks the viewer to supply his paranarrative in reply. While ""Kane"" uses Thompson, an honest
newspaper reporter, "Breathless" uses Godard himself, a dishonest "reporter" who only plays a
"reporter" who points out the criminal, Michel Poiccard, to the cops. It is Godard who points out to the
viewer that a betrayer is required in this genre of film. Godard's appearance in the film as a passerby
who reads a newspaper, sees the "wanted poster" on page one, sees Poiccard, and runs to the nearest
Keystone Kop to "denounce" him, is, in fact, Godard "denouncing" the movie form; it is like Chaplin
complaining about being in a Chaplin film. Godard believes film is "something in between art and life"
and, therefore, is very dangerous because it always lies. Godard, at this juncture of his career, echoes
Jean-Pierre Melville, who repeatedly said that his films always lie, except that Godard says it in the
film.
How does Godard do this and still make "Breathless" so entertaining? How does he get away with
saying with film that films lie and still tell a truth? For we do not feel Breathless' claim that objective
reportage is a fraud to be so "heavy" and ponderous as "Citizen Kane's" message of same, and yet it is
the intellectually deeper film of the two. Somehow, "Breathless" is good, entertaining cinema even while
it is anti-traditional art.
Godard's methods and clichéd tricks in "Breathless" are fascinatingly simple and yet highly effective.
The first one is based on the fact that film is both a visual and a narrative art. By taking over a series of
disconnected images, one connects them. It is, in many ways, for several reasons that include
physiological ones, harder to disbelieve what you hear than what you see. "Breathless", like "Kane",
covers and bridges time and place by talk, talk, talk, and also by its music, a jazz theme which suggests
the film's tempo should naturally be the same. Knowing what you want to say and what music you want
to use enables you to "throw together" images. "Kane" and "Breathless" share a common ground in that
words are given priority over images and they tell us what the images are. Meanwhile, we see the images
for ourselves.
This necessitates a second trick. Godard uses very professional actors to play in his amateurish
situations. "Improvisation" doesn't exist, only the semblance of it. Thus the credibility of the chancy plot
is increased. The other way around-amateur actors in very believable situations-often rings false.
"Breathless" thus, even while it sociologically probes, totally uses the methods of fiction and none of documentation.
Thus we have a paradox.
The investigation of "Breathless", of itself, is playful; it is both truth oriented and
entertainment-oriented. The art is to balance the two so that neither predominates. Here is where Godard
shows his mania for eclecticism. The result is good, entertaining cinema even while it is anti-traditional
art.
The third feature of "Breathless", its third "trick," is also eclectic. Godard treats its action scenes and its
talk scenes with different forms. Action, in Godard, gets the montage treatment; talk, the long take.
While the overall film seems short, the talk scenes are very long and very much is said. The bedroom
sequence is even more clever. It is a "long take" broken up into shots, so we don't start watching when
the camera will cut and pay too little attention to the talk. Godard probably got nervous watching
Welles's long take in Touch of Evil and decided that would be no good, for the viewer starts to sense
that the logic of the action is predicated by the director's refusal to cut.
The overall expression of "Breathless" is artistic. The three "tricks" it largely uses give the film a quality
which is suprareal do for film what other tricks do for painting. "Breathless", in its Suprarealism, takes
us, takes the cinema beyond where Surrealism took painting and poetry in the 30s, and it foreshadows
the Fantastic Realism of the 70s. In another sense, this black-and-white film that says so much, taught
film how to use the shifting densities of narration that already were so dear to the 30s novel, and uses, at
the same time, all the visual advantages the film has over the novel-you don't have to say the sky is
grey, you just show it while you do something else-and thus "Breathless" "kills" the linear novel form
by replacing it with something better. The "death" of the adventure novel in the 70s is due to no small
part to films like "Breathless". Before a new adventure novel can again rise, we need new myths beyond
those that "Breathless" uncovered.
These three tricks make for a collage, one which was already typical of the coming 1960s styles. This
collage quality of "Breathless" is not to be found in "Citizen "Kane" which is a much more organic,
unified, centrifugal work. "Breathless" is centripetal and only held together by editing, and thus
anticipates the two most modernistic pop forms that became fashionable in the 1960s-the rock song and
the newspaper collage. That is why it spoke so strongly to the new budding film generation of which
Godard was a leader and founding member.
The avid filmgoers of the 1970s, who are members of a more conservative generation--some of whom
prefer "To Have or Have Not" to "Vivre sa vie"--would do well to remember that self-confidence (to the
point of self-consciousness about it) was the style of the subgeneration one generation older than
themselves, and that "Breathless" not only liberated the camera from its heavy mount and dollied
outdoors in a supermarket basket but it also opened a door into a world of egocentric shouting and
screaming "I," "I'm here," that characterized the 1960s for millions of middle-class Western people
under thirty. The "New Narcissism" of the 1960s differed from that of the 1970s in that it was born of
self-confidence and not of self; it had no career fear; it was inner-directed, rather than other directed like
the late 1970s new narcissism. The self-confidence of "Breathless" is narcissistic and self-confident, as
is a person who knows he looks good even if he has no mirror to check himself out. The narcissism of
"Breathless" is clearly revealed in that its characters hardly ever listen; they just speak.
Behind the personal brands of romanticism brought to the New Wave by the imaginative personalities of
its directors-the necrophilic romanticism of Truffaut, the perverse romanticism of Chabrol and Rohmer,
the desperate romanticism of Godard-which tempered- the New Wave, was the power of the American
export cinema, everywhere to be seen and felt in Paris throughout the l950s that the New Wave either
had to oppose, ignore, or incorporate. It chose to incorporate Hollywood cliches, for it liked them and
found them too important to ignore. Like apprentices who wanted to associate themselves with masters,
the New Wave directors, including Godard, felt at home with these clichés, camera movements, looks,
and points of view not only for their entertainment value, but liked them for the craftsmanship they
represented. It went no deeper than method and craftsmanship for most of the directors--they weren't
looking at Hollywood's visions, just its techniques. Godard, for example, never went so far as to
endorse any of the values of the American underworld that were depicted in the American gangster film.
He wasn't anticop. He simply admired how a whole film tradition had refined the language of the film
so well that it, Film, had become a world language like English or French.
Godard knew well that the sterile French cinema was not setting any standards in the 1950s for anyone.
The French classic cinema, to classicist or modernist alike, was ugly. America still equaled the movies,
movies to love, hate, or change. It was logical, then, if Godard wanted to remedy what he criticized, that
"Breathless" would present itself as a revisionist movie, a self-referentially alive one which addresses
the spectator with the Americanization of Paris-- the cars, the U.S. officers on NATO duty, the movie
marquees with their CinemaScope pies dubbed into French glaring at the passerby. This in turn was
merely the surface indication that the definition of a French made film, vintage 1959, had to take place in
reference to American movies. I defy anyone to say that "Breathless" wasn't made for viewers on both
sides of the Atlantic.
In 1959, this kind of filmic snub to French tradition, the making of an American film in Paris, was
momentarily easy to effect because Belmondo and Alain Delon weren't yet the giant stars they are today
(they were by 1962) and hadn't yet built up their French iconography. Thus there was the excuse to
exhume and resurrect Humphrey Bogart for the French cinephiles as if he were still living,the Bogie so
often seen on the Parisian screen that is the image of Bogie for the real Bogie was dead at the moment
Godard made "Breathless" with "him," dead of cancer from those very cigarettes he seemed perpetually
to smoke.
The revolutionary aspect of "Breathless"-in addition to its sycophantic Americanisms-its plus Americain
que l'Amerique quality-was its low-budget quality. Godard, for his first feature film, did the safest
thing for him to do: make a B picture, the model for which, of course, originated in America.
"Breathless" thus cleverly downplayed its being an ambitious, quality film, using the American B film
plot to cover for the fact that it had to avoid building sets, had to use natural lighting, postsynching, and
contained no helicopter, crane, or expensive tracking shots. Most of Breathless's moving shots are
filmed with a "hand-held camera, "i.e., a camera held in a special shoulder harness by the cameraman,
which sometimes became a camera cinematographer Raoul Coutard held on his lap in a supermarket cart
serving as a dolly, pushed by an assistant, followed by Godard, a scrap of paper in his hand.
The necessity for saving on equipment and given the tiny budget ($90,000) Godard had (compare this
with the $85,000 Chabrol spent for "Le Beau Serge") required that any film that Godard made at that
stage in his career have a narrative, and a low budget. As it was the American B film that suggested the
style in which low budget and excellence could be combined; this drove Godard to "borrow" the
American gangster film genre. Of course, Godard had no intention of bothering to create convincing
gangster characters-he owns up to this when he later admits that Paul Javal in Contempt [1963] is his
first really pyschologically drawn character
The other plausible explanation for the half-within/half-without genre Franco-American quality of
"Breathless" making it so interesting is that this is deliberate: Godard did not dare to intend the film to
be invalid for Frenchmen who wanted to see it. To have gone all the way in making another "Kiss of
Death" (1947) featuring Belmondo in the Richard Widmark role of Tommy Udo, would have caused him
grief at the box office. Choosing between "nothingness" and "grief-the internal Faulknerian coordinates
of the film-Godard chose compromise in structuring "Breathless".
Consequently, Godard only fakes the gangster genre. The obligatory gangster genre fifteen-minute night
club sequence is missing in "Breathless"-it is replaced by a daylight walk on the Champs and a daylit
bedroom scene at Patricia s, further evidence of the film's violation of the genre. The bed sequence is
evidence of the film's being part of the New Wave style, its favoring its own New Wave's cliches. The
twenty-minute frolic on Patricia's bed, which becomes, in a manner of speaking Michel's "night club,"
but not quite, is there to titillate Parisians with a dose of their own morality.
Another explanation for this Franco-American melange is historic: "Breathless" reflects the American
half of the French 1950s consumption of consumer goods as well as the French half of the pie. By
merely acknowledging American imperialism's control of some of the pie, Godard's "Breathless" is
political.
"Breathless" is thus not only an artistic revolt, it is also a political acknowledgment of social conditions.
Unlike the false, social films made by Elia Kazan, "On the Waterfront" and "Face in the Crowd", which
pretended to show a social reality, "Breathless" was real in what it did, not what it purported to show.
By not pushing the moral, film can be political in the spectator's mind. It can accomplish this by
showing the director's indignation. And, as Merleau-Ponty once said, all revolutions begin with
indignation. In film terms, "Breathless" is a queer duck, a film seemingly lacking in political character,
but thrusting such a quick, concrete quantitative sociology onto the viewer that his preconceived notions
collapse, and he is left with a feeling of exhilaration that is synchronously related to making him want to
act against some condition he saw in the movie. So unlike Brecht, yet so surely activating, "Breathless"
cannot leave a viewer in a state of complacency. For it is his film. The entire film speaks to what Harold
Bloom calls "the poet in the viewer," the viewer's vision, which transforms the film into the viewer's
version, his own film.