Breathless

Breathless Directed by Jean-Luc Godard At Film Forum May 28-June 10

It took 60s years to correct the English title of Proust’s masterwork from Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time and now the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s equally legendary Breathless deserves the same emendation. Critics routinely translated the title À bout de souffle to mean “Out of Breath” but a few years ago I was standing next to new French tourists who noticed a flashy American automobile and cried “À bout de souffle!” I immediately reflected on Godard’s colloquial intent: His debut film—an homage to Hollywood genre—was titled like the exclamations in studio-era trailers: BREATHTAKING! And 50 years after its debut, that’s still Breathless’ effect: a breathtaking reboot of American genre tropes.

In a 1970s reassessment of Jean- Luc Godard’s 1959 debut feature, critic William S. Pechter proclaimed: “Breathless exists! Breathless exists so that the Siegfried Kracauers of the world can hold their breath. Breathless exists!” Pechter was celebrating a movie that employed cinematic theory as a practical, elating fact. All imaginable advances that came into popular culture following the appearance of Breathless—when commercial cinema and television imitated and trivialized the formal inventions of ’60s European art cinema (such as Godard’s casually innovative use of the jump cut)—are facts that we now take for granted.

A certain kind of nonchalance has come from living with Breathless for almost 50 years, and watching it in poor prints, faint VHS copies, squished TV broadcasts. The excitement of discovery is almost gone, meaning it’s time for rediscovery. First-time viewers might yet find Godard’s rigorous technique a challenge—perhaps even intimidating given how the once-novel jump cut, the hand-held camera, on-location shooting and use of natural-lighting have become routine and meaningless parts of visual media vocabulary. But what never ceased to be compelling about Breathless is the tragic love story between Parisian bum Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and American adventuress Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg).Their mismatch might be the most revolutionary aspect of Breathless, revealing that Godard’s technical experimentation was integral to modernizing a timeless romantic archetype.