Tonight’s your final chance to see on the big screen, a newly restored version of Breathless – the 1960 groundbreaking first film from French director Jean Luc Godard. KERA’s Rob Tranchin explains in his review why he views Breathless as an existentialist anti-hero of a movie.

Screening times today at the Angelika

Another take: An essay by Dudley Andrew from the Criterion DVD release.

KERA radio report:

Breathless stars a young Jean Paul Belmondo as Michel, a small time French hood who idolizes Humphrey Bogart, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend, Patricia.

Michel is on the run from the police, and Patricia is trying to figure out whether she loves Michel.  But the plot is only a pretext for making a movie, and Godard’s redefinition of what a movie could be made Breathless an international sensation and a landmark in film history.

For one thing, it’s the way the film deliberately quotes and then violates movie conventions in favor of delivering an intensely present experience.  The famous jump cuts in Breathless seemed heretical at the time, but they represent a simple idea—Godard simply removed the boring parts from a continuous shot.  That’s what makes the movie feel like jazz: it quotes the melody, but it’s the improvised departure from the melody that makes the music soar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyuK2mWwfP4
Another slap in the face of convention is the way Godard intentionally reminds us that it’s Belmondo and Seberg we’re watching, not Michel and Patricia. The fiction breaks down, but not our interest.

That’s because it’s not about the story.  Rather than deliver a drama about life, Breathless seems to deliver life itself.  As Belmondo and Seberg talk about choice and destiny, the world and a thousand questions about it press in from outside the edges of the frame: Mozart, Faulkner, movies, radio, sirens and sunlight all crowd their way onto the screen.

Breathless is fifty years old this year. The newly restored print showcases cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s sensuous black and white photography in sequences that capture the romance of Paris at night, the roguish glint in Belmondo’s eyes, the youthful glow of Jean Seberg’s luminous skin.

Godard has said he thought he was remaking Scarface but later realized he had remade Alice in Wonderland instead.  Like Alice, Breathless combines irony and self-consciousness with a poetic yearning for beauty that Godard proves can be found in the cinema.