Latest news with #Àboutdesouffle
New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Richard Linklater and the new wave of new wave
This isn't a documentary, but a drama that recreates the Paris of 1959, the streets and the cars and the cafes and the clothes, all shot in black and white, just like the masterpiece of iconoclastic indie film-making itself, the one that defined the new wave of this film's title. Sometimes, it's like they make the movies just for you. Who else would possibly enjoy this? I wondered, as I sat there in Cannes' main temple of cinema, the Grand Theatre Lumiere, dedicated to those founding brothers of the movies, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, watching a film all about the making of another film, the one that practically reinvented cinema: Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle. Directed by American indie stalwart Richard Linklater and shot entirely in French, Nouvelle Vague could come across as indulgent and niche. I hope so. The more indulgent, the nichier the better, say I. But if you love French cinema and love Paris and love À bout de souffle (and let's face it, if you do the two former, it's probably due to the brilliance of the latter), then you'll love Nouvelle Vague. I settled into my seat and realised I was in the sweet spot of my happy place. If you don't know the many stories behind À bout de souffle, Linklater's effortlessly amiable film will fill you in. He describes it as: 'The story of Godard making À bout de souffle, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made À bout de souffle.' So there must be some licence taken even if I think everything here is true, or at least it feels that way – which, as Godard himself might say, is all you need for a movie. Using mostly unknown French actors, Linklater introduces us to the main instigators of this zeitgeisty mid-century moment, including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin) and JLG himself (a superbly accurate Guillaume Marbeck, swathed in cigarette smoke and dark glasses) as well as actors Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, fabulous). Then there are what one might term the lesser-known creatives such as cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier (Franck Cicurel), whose images were equally instrumental in defining the era. So, yes, it's a sort of faux documentary at times: whenever the characters are introduced on screen, they pause for a couple of seconds and stare at the camera in a composed tableau, as if posing for an old-fashioned still photograph, while their names come up on the screen. There's a whiff of Wes Anderson whimsy here, but the film is nothing like Anderson's archly American The French Dispatch. Linklater is immersed in the moment, in the spirit of '59, the better to make us feel the fun of it all, the breezy joie de vivre that's still instantly conjured up whenever you think of À bout de souffle. So the film takes us through the agonies of Godard's jealousy watching his fellow film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma make their film debuts, and his conversations with producer Georges de Beauregard before he launches into the 20-day shoot of À bout de souffle, writing by hand the day's pages in a cafe every morning (there was never a script), ending the day's filming when he's run out of ideas, making it up on the spot, smoking, smoking, smoking, and cutting, cutting, cutting. But, under Linklater's worshipful gaze, it all feels like the biggest, boldest adventure, illuminated by the playful machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the stylish beauty of Jean Seberg's gamine star quality. Linklater re-creates famous lines and scenes from the film, but shoots them from a reverse angle, from Godard and the camera's point of view, thus throwing new light on images we might have seen many times before, now appearing as fresh as they day they were printed. There are oodles of cinephilic in-jokes, too, including cameos from contemporary luminaries Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), Robert Bresson (Aurelien Lorgnier), who was making Pickpocket at the time, Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Messier) and Juliette Gréco (Alix Benezech). There are quips and quotes, there are delicious movie-making moments capturing how Godard directed his actors and how they moved to his strict instructions. You don't have to be an expert in French cinema to love this, though it probably helps. I am, unashamedly, so I don't know or care, which is why I say I felt like they were making it just for me. Maybe that (Cannes-do?) spirit of self-starting and rule-breaking appealed to me because, as some of you might know, I'm about to make my first movie as a producer (A Waiter in Paris, based on the memoir by Edward Chisholm), due to be shot partly on the streets of Paris, on a film partly inspired by all this nouvelle vague coolness. The first night I arrived in Paris to live for a year, as a language assistant in 1991, I went to watch À bout de souffle, for the very first time. My life changed that night, or at least shifted into a different gear. I fell in love, with Paris and with movies. So now, watching Godard, his crew and his contemporaries take to the streets in their various contraptions – shopping carts and wheelchairs adapted to get their handheld shots and sense of movement – it rang out again, pushing me into another new gear with what felt like a challenge and a validation, that every now and then cinema can and must be reinvented, injected with fresh visions and personality, the prevailing order given a right run for its money until it is literally out of breath. And that I can do this, go from critic to film-maker. I'm not directing my movies and, somewhat worryingly, the only guy that looks a bit exasperated in Nouvelle Vague, is the producer character, George de Beauregard, forever fretting that no one's shooting, or that there's no script, to the point that he and Godard come to blows and a full-on grapple match on a cafe floor. Is that what I'm signing up for? Worth it for the creation of a classic, I'd say – plus Beauregard went on to produce Cléo de 5 à 7, Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou… I'd take that, if it means I have to roll with the punches. Then there's all the music Linklater uses, not just some of the famous Martial Solal soundtrack to Breathless, but also other jazz and French sounds of the time, such as Sacha Distel, Dalida and I'm sure I heard Michel Legrand's work with Miles Davis from Legrand Jazz, which came out in 1958… then again, I always hear Miles Davis's trumpet when I see Paris on screen, whether it's there or not. And a word, too, for Deutch, the only American actor here (she previously starred in Linklater's campus film Everybody Wants Some from 2016), playing Jean Seberg and capturing all her American-accented French so perfectly, as well as her haircut and her walk, that jaunt up the Champs-Élysées shouting 'New York Herald Tribune,' all her style, dressed in Chanel and exuding the magical, diva quality that made producer Beauregard fork out half the budget on hiring her (see, producer's instincts are everything). I don't usually focus on one film from Cannes, but Nouvelle Vague, playing in Competition, struck me as something special, something new. I didn't catch them all, this year. For the last 25 years or so, I've seen all the Competition films, fearful that I might miss the Palme d'Or winner, but with producing duties taking over this year, I had to do meetings with financiers, listen to co-production and tax credit panels and sit down with sales agents, very important people at Cannes, no doubt. But as Nouvelle Vague shows, when the history of cinema is told, when they recount the legends of making movies to pass on the baton to a new generation, such as Linklater does here, on screen there are critics, costumiers, cinematographers, actors, writers, script editors, the assistant director. There's a producer and, briefly, the marketing guy. But there are no sales agents or financiers. One might wonder where all this ancestor worship fits in Linklater's own ever-growing and mutating oeuvre. Now 64, he's always been a flag bearer for indie film, since his loose-limbed breakthrough Slacker helped define the golden era of '90s American movie making, compounded by Dazed and Confused and the rather brilliant Before trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy across the years, with my favourite being the achingly romantic Before Sunset, taking place in Paris. But he's also had the big hit of School of Rock, as well experimental animation work, and the mighty yet subtle achievement of Boyhood, spanning decades. He ticks off the styles and the stats with a Godardian appetite, reflecting on the passing of time (his films can take place in a day, or over long periods), ambition (or lack of it) among young people, and the act of artistic creation. His films are often about just hanging out with a bunch of characters, so Nouvelle Vague is right up his boulevard I'd say, as if he's actually totally disappeared into À bout de souffle while showing it at one of his famous Austin Film Society nights, like the characters in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. (Allen himself recently fulfilled a dream of making a film entirely in French, Coup de Chance, though it may prove his last). Nouvelle Vague is a 'hang out' movie, a chance to transport yourself to a Cahiers editorial meeting, or to the Cinematheque, to a new wave film set, and to the cafes and streets of 1959 Paris, to smoke and drink coffee, to be reminded of youthful arrogance, even if these tweedy French intellos do look a bit like university professors than punk-like rebels. Let's remember that film critics can become great film-makers, because we all love movies after all. Let's keep cinema sexy and daring, it says, let's aim high to match the best. Let's remember what Godard said: 'You don't make a film, the film makes you.' And let's ride that wave.
Time Magazine
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Richard Linklater's Breathless Tribute Nouvelle Vague Is an Inside Baseball Movie for Everyone
Some days it seems we live in a horrid world where the majority of humans couldn't give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 66-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for anyone who doesn't speak French, requires the reading of subtitles? Yet here comes a comet: Richard Linklater's sensational Nouvelle Vague, an agile, witty, elegant picture about the making of a movie that possibly only film lovers and bona fide old people care about— Jean-Luc Godard's cannon-shot of a debut, 1959's Breathless —may end up being appreciated by only about 2.6 percent of the general population. Who would make a picture like that? Only someone who cares. Nouvelle Vague, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, is the ultimate inside-baseball making-of movie. But even more than that, it's a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don't fully understand. It's both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It's all about the bold, muscular act of caring. Jean-Luc Godard was just 29 when he made À bout de souffle —the movie that would come to be known among English-speakers as Breathless —and yet he felt he was lagging behind his peers at Cahiers du Cinéma, the movie journal whose critics became, almost magically, some of the era's greatest filmmakers. Critics as filmmakers? Beware: it's a lousy idea. Yet Godard's Cahiers colleague François Truffaut had already made The 400 Blows, a picture Godard loved, and envied. Ambitious, bratty, and brilliant in a playing-behind-the-beat way, Godard wanted to make his own movie. But who would give him the money? Nouvelle Vague tells the story of how the enigmatically charming yet sort-of-a-jerk Godard—played, marvelously, by Guillame Marbeck—wheedled his way into making Breathless, shot in just 20 days, guerrilla-style, largely on the streets of Paris. He already had ideas for several films, and in an early scene, he pitches them excitedly to producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürsft). But Beauregard will hire him only if he shoots a script that Truffaut (played here by Adrien Rouyard) has already written. That script, inspired by a real-life story Truffaut had seen in the newspaper, followed a raffishly alluring French layabout, Jean Paul Belmondo's Michel Poiccard, who steals a car, shoots a cop, and is ultimately betrayed by his American journalist girlfriend, Jean Seberg's gamine femme fatale Patricia Franchini. Godard gets to work finding his cast. He wants his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to play Michel: he goes to the boxing gym where the amiable, loose-limbed actor is working out, joining him in a jump-rope session as he makes his pitch. Can he get Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutsch), already a star, to play Patricia? Boldly, he makes his move, first approaching her husband, François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noe), who's managing her career. She doesn't like the idea: she doesn't want to work with this newcomer; she thinks the whole thing will come crashing down; and even after shooting begins, she threatens to quit. Somehow, she sticks with it, at times following Godard's capricious lead but just as often challenging him. He finds a DP he likes, the gentle giant Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat). There's a persnickety script girl, Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), who tries to tell her boss Godard that for continuity's sake, he can't remove a cup from a table in one of the small flats the crew has commandeered as a set. 'Reality is not continuity!' he says, just one of the many bossy, spontaneous, maddeningly delightful pronouncements he will make as he and his friends—all of them under 30, most of them with virtually no idea what they're doing—launch into the adventure of making a moving picture. Don't know who any of these real-life characters are, or what they look like? Linklater's got you. He has filled his cast largely with unknowns, seeking actors who closely resemble their real-life counterparts; most of these aren't faces you'll recognize, playing people from the past you may never have heard of. But Linklater introduces each player with his or her name neatly emblazoned at the bottom of the screen, similar to the way characters (and often the actors playing them) used to be identified in silent movies, so audiences could get their bearings quickly. It's easy to follow along, and before you know it, you're surfing this nascent New Wave with the people who helped create it, held aloft by the buoyancy of Godard and his ramshackle—yet perfectly chosen—team of accomplices. Godard would start each day of shooting with fresh ideas. When he ran out of them, sometimes after shooting only one or two scenes, he'd quit for the day. Some days, on a whim, he'd call off shooting altogether, causing Beauregard to materialize seemingly out of nowhere in an understandable huff. To shoot on the street without attracting attention, they obtain a postal cart and put the camera—as well as Coutard—inside. Every five minutes or so, Godard blurts out a favorite aphorism. You may already know some of them, like 'All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.' But so many of them flow from his lips that they become a running gag. He quotes Gaugin ('Art is either plagiarism or revolution'), Duke Ellington ('I don't need time, I need a deadline'), Leonardo Da Vinci ('Art is never finished, only abandoned'). Marbeck, peering out at the world through dark glasses, shaking his pipe at his cast and crew as he spins out his sometimes puzzling directives, captures the impish magnetism of the young Godard. You want to slug him; you also adore him. And to watch him, his cast, and his friends make this thing—a movie we freely call a masterpiece, though that's too snoozy a word for the blast of cool energy that is Breathless —is a particular kind of bliss. Nouvelle Vague is filled with lore: Godard has hired a stuntman to film a somewhat complex scene in which a pedestrian is hit by a car. In the end, he decides to shoot just the aftermath of the accident, getting his friend and fellow filmmaker Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) to lie down in the street and play dead. Deutsch, with her ragamuffin-chic blond pixie cut, is a perfect Seberg. To hear her speak in French, perfectly capturing the way Seberg's dang-flat midwestern vowels insinuated themselves even in that most beautiful of languages, is a delight unto itself. (Seberg was born in Iowa, though she's buried where she belongs, in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.) And as Belmondo, Dulling gives a performance of spectacular physicality, whether he's scrambling in his pocket for chicken feed to buy a small café meal, or, after being shot, staggering and stumbling down a Paris street in a half-tragic, half-funny promenade, with Godard and his camera crew trailing behind. Watching Breathless, we see Belmondo's jagged ballet from behind. In Nouvelle Vague, we see Dullin-as-Belmondo's face as he swerves and zigzags toward his demise. Passers-by look alarmed; he tells them not to worry. 'It's for a movie!' he says cheerfully, channeling the essence of Belmondo's rubbery charm. Nouvelle Vague was filmed in Paris, but required extensive digital-effects work to make it look accurate for the period. This is filmmaking as leap of faith: Nouvelle Vague may seem glowingly modest, but unlike Breathless, it couldn't be made on the cheap. At the same time, its layers of details are gorgeous and priceless. Pascaline Chavanne's costumes, especially Seberg's wardrobe of minute cardigans and jaunty silk scarves, strike every note perfectly. (And I'm dying to know what Derek Guy, the eminently knowledgeable wag behind the social-media account Die Workwear!, will think of Marbeck-as-Godard's gently rumpled jackets and scuffed-just-right loafers.) Cinematographer David Chambille gives the images a lustrous, pearly depth. The soundtrack is a buffet of rapturous period jazz, some of it silky, some of it vibrating with skittery energy, much like Martial Solal's score for Breathless itself. You'll hear songs you maybe don't know, like Zoot Sims' version of 'My Old Flame,' and if this is the first time it reaches your ears, I envy you the discovery. Cannes is obviously the place to premiere a movie like Nouvelle Vague. That 2.6 percent of the population that cares about Breathless? Ninety-eight percent of them are here. But from things he's said about the film, it seems Linklater doesn't think of it as niche. And really, isn't that the only way to go? According to the movie's press notes, when an apprehensive financing executive asked him who he thought this film was for, he said, 'Like all my films, this one is for young people.' It is, after all, about young people making their first movie. He said that if he did his job right, young people would walk out of the theater thinking, 'I can do this too! In fact, I'm going to do it!' But even if you will never in your life pick up a movie camera, Nouvelle Vague is film as invitation—the best kind of film. If you don't know Breathless —what are you waiting for? And if you do know it—even if you've seen it a dozen or a hundred times— Nouvelle Vague will make you see it anew. Is there a difference between loving a movie and being in love with one? Maybe the distinction is subtle. But when a movie that makes you want to weep with joy, you know something is happening. There's no resisting the gangster of love.
BBC News
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains': Jean-Luc Godard on the film that changed cinema
Stylish and experimental, Breathless heralded a new era of film-making when it was released 75 years ago. In 1964, its director told the BBC why he broke every rule he could. Jean-Luc Godard was crystal clear about what he planned to do with his feature-length film debut, Breathless (À bout de souffle), which was released 75 years ago this month. He wanted to blow up the whole idea of what cinema was. In 1964, the director told the BBC's Olivier Todd: "It was a film which took everything the cinema had done – girls, gangsters, cars – exploded all this and put an end once and for all to the old style." Stylish and semi-improvised, Breathless seemed revolutionary when it hit French screens on 16 March 1960. With its fragmented editing, offbeat dialogue and nonchalant approach to storytelling, it helped rewrite the language of modern cinema. As renowned US film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential." On its surface, Breathless's plot resembles that of a hard-boiled crime thriller. It tells the story of amoral, impulsive petty criminal Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his doomed relationship with the enigmatic Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student living in Paris. The film's plot plays out as Michel tries to evade arrest after murdering a policeman: he struggles to collect the money necessary to fund his escape and to convince the ambivalent Patricia to flee with him to Italy. But its director was not so much concerned with its crime narrative as he was with shattering cinematic conventions. Born in 1930 to wealthy Franco-Swiss parents, Godard had spent the decade preceding Breathless's release immersed in cinema. At the beginning of the 1950s he had begun working as a film critic for the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. When he started, French cinema was dominated by studio-produced literary adaptations which valued polished storytelling over innovation. Godard, along with his fellow cinephiles at the magazine, railed against these films, arguing that they failed to capture any real emotion or show how people really behaved. At the same time, US films that had been banned during the Nazi occupation were being shown in French cinemas. Following the Second World War, France had signed the Blum-Byrnes agreements which had opened up its markets to US products in return for eradicating its war debt. This led to a flood of US films that were enthusiastically embraced by these young French critics. They especially admired westerns and detective thrillers – genres they regarded as critically underappreciated. It was Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank who coined the term film noir or dark film. The Cahiers du Cinéma writers also revered film-makers who could stamp their own unique creative visions onto Hollywood productions, such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. They regarded these directors as the true "auteurs" or authors of those films, rather than the studio which produced them or the stars who appeared in them. Throughout the 1950s, these critics would debate and discuss the shortcomings of French cinema while developing their own ideas of what it should be. Many of the writers Godard worked alongside at Cahiers du Cinéma, such as François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, would also end up becoming directors and leading proponents of the influential movement that would become known as La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave). With Breathless, Godard saw his chance to put the ideas he and his friends discussed into practice. He explained to the BBC in 1964 that he purposely set out to break rules he felt were holding back cinema. "Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains, just as the debris is collected after an explosion. And when there is nothing useful left, we can start from scratch on fresh ground," he said. Out in the streets The film's story was written by Truffaut, who based it loosely on a 1952 news article about a Paris criminal, Michel Portail. However, when Godard came to filming, he would pretty much abandon Truffaut's script. Instead, he got his actors to improvise scenes, or he would feed them lines from behind the camera while filming. This gave the dialogue a spontaneous and personal feel. But it meant that much of Breathless needed to be shot sequentially, so Belmondo and Seberg would know what had happened earlier in the story. Due to its limited budget, Godard's plan was to make the cheapest film possible. So instead of shooting in a studio where he would be able to control the lighting, the sound and the set, he took to the streets of Paris with his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who filmed on location using a lightweight handheld camera and relying on natural light. The camera, while portable and effective at filming in low-light conditions, was both noisy and unable to record synchronised sound. This meant that nearly all of the improvised lines of dialogue needed to be written down as Belmondo and Seberg ad-libbed, and then dubbed in post-production. This resulted in the later recorded dialogue often not matching the actors' lips, leading to debates that continue to this day about what the characters are actually saying. Because much of Breathless's guerilla-style filming was done without permits or permission, random people going about their everyday lives in Paris's bustling streets and cafes were often captured in shot, lending an authenticity to its depiction of life in the city. Coutard had been a war photographer, and his reportage style of filming captured an immediacy and intimacy that made the film seem, at times, documentary-like. His camera moves restlessly around, capturing small everyday moments as the characters meet, talk and hang out. Sometimes the camera almost seems to be a participant in the action, sitting in the passenger seat of the car Michel has just stolen while he talks to it as if it were a friend. Breathless's lack of a conventional film crew added to its inventiveness. One of its most famous scenes, where Michel and Patricia are seen walking down the Champs-Élysées chatting as she advertises a newspaper, was achieved by Godard pulling Coutard along in a wheelchair while he filmed the actors walking towards him. "The freedom of shooting on the Champs-Élysées, Jean Seberg walking down the curb with her unforgettable chanting, 'New York Herald Tribune'. It was like the invention of a mythology for me," the Italian director of Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, told the BBC's The Film Programme in 2009. But Godard wasn't trying to convince audiences that they were seeing unfiltered reality. He had been influenced by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a story could so absorb an audience that they became passive and unthinking. So, to keep viewers critically engaged, Brecht would remind them that they were watching a play and not real life. Godard embraced this idea, using a range of stylistic devices to make it impossible for viewers to forget that they were watching a film. Characters regularly break the fourth wall, addressing their dialogue directly to the audience. Often, they comment on their own situation, shaking the viewer's feeling of being an unseen spectator. And while a typical film's soundtrack subtly suggests the mood of a scene, in Breathless the music starts and stops suddenly, often disconnected from what is happening on screen at the time. No easy answers But it was Godard's rejection of the usual cinematic editing rules that would become the signature of the film. "I was incredibly passionate about the style, the language of À bout de souffle," Bertolucci told the BBC. "There were these jump cuts, for example. At school they were always telling you how to avoid jump cuts which were considered mistakes, and the movie was full of jump cuts." Breathless's use of jump cuts – abrupt transitions forward in time within the same scene – came about partly by accident. The finished film turned out to be much longer than intended, and Godard needed a way to cut it down to a manageable length. But instead of dropping whole scenes or sequences, the director chose to condense its running time by cutting out sections within takes. Often, he removes material from a continuous shot of movement or dialogue while making no attempt to match the edits, breaking the viewer's immersion in the film and giving it an energetic, skittish rhythm. This jittery editing style lent Breathless a feeling of unpredictability, grabbing the audience's attention and forcing them to be aware of the film-making process. Godard also did this by referencing other films, while at the same time subverting the very conventions that make those films work. Otto Preminger's 1950 film noir thriller Whirlpool is playing when Patricia enters a cinema in an effort to lose the police trailing her. In another scene, when she looks through a rolled-up poster at Michel, the shot mimics a scene in the western Forty Guns (1957) which is seen through a gun barrel. The admired French director of gangster films, Jean-Pierre Melville, has a cameo appearance playing a fictional celebrity author, while Godard himself crops up as a bystander on the street who recognises the fugitive Michel from the newspaper articles. In another homage to Godard's influences, the protagonist, Michel, dresses like his hero Humphrey Bogart and practises trying to emulate his onscreen mannerisms. At one point, while gazing at the poster for Bogart's last film, The Harder They Fall (1956), he whispers "Bogey" in admiration. But Michel's behaviour, unlike that of a Bogart hero, comes across as neither heroic nor courageous. He displays no conscience over his crimes or remorse over his actions. His girlfriend, Patricia, who goes on to betray him to the police, could be seen as a classic femme fatale character, but instead of being driven by passion, their relationship seems oddly detached and her motives remain opaque. The meaning in Breathless is never simply spelt out for its audience, and its freewheeling plot and morally ambiguous characters provide no easy answers. The film leaves it to the viewer to come to their own interpretations and judgements. More like this:• How Easy Rider revolutionised Hollywood• The classic western that made Clint Eastwood a star• The cult erotic film that became a global hit With its distinctive storytelling, imaginative camerawork and photogenic young leads, who imbued it with an effortless sense of cool, Breathless was an immediate critical and commercial hit. It seemed to capture the mood of the times and people flocked to see it. "They were in a sense ready for it," Professor James Williams told Kirsty Lang on the BBC's Last Word in 2022. "I mean, people wanted something new and different." It would go on to win Godard the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 1960 Berlin International Film Festival. For the aspiring directors who saw Breathless, its effect was electric. "As a potential film-maker, it was like just being free, it was like being on a drug or something. It was just amazing," Get Carter's director Mike Hodges told the BBC's The Film Programme in 2006. "It broke all the rules – and rules of film-making are quite frightening in many ways. You've got to get the angles right, and you have lines that you don't cross. This was in the classical tradition. So in a sense, cinema was very like the classical painters, whereas when you saw Godard's film, it was like the impressionists coming to life, but on the screen." Breathless's impact would be felt in many of the US films that followed its release, with Godard influencing the Hollywood studios that had so affected him. Breathless's characters' moral ambiguity and its abrupt shifts in tone could be seen in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), its innovative camera angles and examination of relationship uncertainty were reflected in The Graduate (1967), and its low-budget filming techniques and improvised dialogue were embraced in Easy Rider (1969). The Bob Dylan of cinema In the 1970s, a slew of young directors inspired by the French New Wave, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, would put their own singular "auteur" visions of cinema on the screen. The director Quentin Tarantino, who named his production company A Band Apart, after Godard's 1964 film Bande à part, has long acknowledged the effect the director had on him. He told Film Comment in a 1994 interview that "Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms". Part of Breathless's continuing influence on film-makers is in persuading them that it is possible for the viewer to do just what Godard did. As Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright wrote after Godard died in 2022: "It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting." -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
