Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless: Defining the French New Wave
The French New Wave (FNW) style of filmmaking that reached its height during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s was a revolution in cinema that sought to redefine conventions and standards of classical Hollywood cinema. In James Monaco’s article “The New Wave”, he states:
The New Wave filmmakers were all – in different but parallel ways – involved in working out the relationship between the personal dimension and the historical dimension. It is this fascination with the forms and structures of the film medium that as they used it that sets their films apart from those that preceded them and marks a turning point in film history. (9)
The FNW used these forms and structures that defined cinema and elevated them to create a new stylistic advancement in film. Jean Luc Godard’s film, Breathless, is one of the defining movies of the French New Wave, a film that embodied all the elements of the movement and did so with mainstream success.
Breathless is in many ways the antithesis of the classical Hollywood cinema, which functions in specific ways to help satisfy audiences. Typically, classical Hollywood cinema includes such standards of filmmaking as continuity editing, highly motivated, character-driven stories and a coherent narrative structure. In his article “Godard and the Counter Cinema,” Peter Wollen writes about Hollywood filmmaking:
Narrative transivity is a sequence of events in which each unit follows the one preceding it according to a chain of causation. In the Hollywood cinema, this chain is usually psychological and is made up, roughly speaking, of a series of coherent motivations. The beginning of the film starts with establishment, which sets up the basic dramatic situation – usually an equilibrium – which is then disturbed. A kind of chain reaction then follows, until at the end a new equilibrium is restored. (501)
From its opening scene Breathless defies the “chain of causation” that Wollen describes. Michel, the main character in the film, is seen at the very beginning but given no introduction. He is simply standing outside reading a newspaper, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. There is a woman in the scene, whose name is never mentioned and never shows up in the movie again. They make continuous eye contact as if trying to communicate something to one another. It turns out to be some kind of scheme as she distracts a police officer in order for Michel to steal a car.
The scene ends with the woman saying goodbye to him, and she is never seen again. Hollywood cinema would rarely contain such a scene. In a Hollywood film, if a connection is established between a man and a woman early on, the film’s audience is almost always aware of the characters’ names, identities and motivations, and the couple will usually have interaction with one another throughout the course of the rest of the narrative.
Breathless strays even further from conventions of classical Hollywood cinema in the very next scene. This scene offers a good illustration of Monaco’s idea of “fascination with film forms and techniques.”(9) The scene consists of Michel driving in the car and making commentaries on what’s going on around him. He is often commenting on things as if he were being filmed in real time. He makes vague allusions about what he is doing (going to Paris, meeting a girl there) but his mission and motivations are never clearly defined. The scene calls definite attention to film technique.
First of all, some of Michel’s dialogue in the scene involves his speaking directly to the camera, looking straight into it. In doing this, Godard is calling deliberate attention to the filmmaking process. Classical Hollywood cinema strives for invisibility of the camera; it wants to tell a fictional story but wants the viewers to take it completely seriously without acknowledging that it is a film. By having Michel talk directly to the camera, acknowledges its presence and seems to relish it. He loves the presence of the camera, as well as the fact that he is onscreen.
Michel’s character seems to be an amalgamation of different movie characters. The idea is evidenced in a scene later on in the film. He is walking down the street past a movie theater that is playing a Humphrey Bogart film, and stops to stare at the poster with a deep sense of awe. He looks into the eyes of Bogart in the poster and quietly says the words, “Bogey,” to himself. He cocks his chin to try to mimic the expression of Bogey in the poster, as if he idolizes the man. Just as Godard is a student of cinema and wants to pay tribute to cinematic techniques, Michel is a student of movies and movie stars, and tries to act as though he’s a living interpretation of Humphrey Bogart.
The way Godard uses camerawork and editing in the film is another way that he uses forms and standards of cinema in order to deliberately call attention to technique. In Michael Marie’s article, “It Really Makes You Sick,” he writes, “Right from the beginning of the film, ‘Breathless’ ruthlessly violates the moribund codes of spatial and graphic continuity editing which were so scrupulously observed by editors in 1959. (163)” Marie refers to the way in which the editing exists in a free time and space. Editing in Breathless is not used to advance the storyline or show continuity between scenes, but to echo the rhythms of everyday life.
In one very famous scene Michel is driving in a car with Patricia (the female lead in the film). He is describing her beauty and the features that he likes about her, and as he gives each detail, the camera does a jump cut to a shot of Marie’s face. The jump cuts don’t add to the narrative or continuity of the scene in any way; they are just continuous cuts to the same shot. They exist as stylistic devices but they also add to the flow of the scene.
The edits flow with the rhythm of Michel’s voice, and serve to punctuate everything he says, making each word more noticeable than if the shot just held steady. This technique is also used earlier in the film, when Patricia has a meeting with a different male friend. He’s telling her a story about an old love affair, and there are jump cuts at every single break in the sentence to give his language a rhythm and a flow. In the same article, Marie writes, “This dynamic conception of editing first and foremost has a rhythmic function.” (161)
Other camera techniques are used in the film that helps give it a distinctive rhythm. During the scene when Michel first meets up with Patricia, they are seen walking down the street of Paris in a very long take, using a handheld camera. This is in contrast to the scenes with the jump cuts but remains a nice visual counterpoint. The jump cuts at different parts in the film allow for releases in tension when characters are sitting still and talking to one another. When Michel and Patricia walk down the streets having a conversation, the shaky handheld camera seems to be jittering around in rhythm with their footsteps.
The jump cuts and long takes, while different technically, both serve the purpose of giving the film a unique rhythm and flow.
Another startling thing about Breathless is the moral ineptitude of the main character. The driving point of the narrative is that Michel has murdered a police officer and is trying to meet up with a female friend in Paris so that he can get some money and flee the country. He shoots the police officer in cold blood and makes no excuses or apologies for his actions. He shoots the cop because he doesn’t want to be arrested for stealing the car. He is a liar and a crook from the very beginning.
Michel also, throughout several points during the film, expresses very negative attitudes towards women. One of his first lines of dialogue in the film is about how women are all bad at driving. Later on, when he first arrives in Paris, he goes through a woman’s apartment for the sheer purpose of stealing money, and when he fails to find any makes a remark about how women never have any money. His relationship with Patricia throughout the film is mainly based on sex and money, which are quite possibly his only interests. This character defies of most leading male characters not only in classical Hollywood cinema but cinema in general. He is rebellious, reckless, crude, arrogant, a thief and a murderer. Most characters in film wouldn’t have these qualities unless they are villains.
Godard accomplishes the impossible with Breathless by simultaneously making Michel a dastardly yet sympathetic character whose fate at the end of the film is tragic and fitting all at the same time. The style of the film helps elevate the character so that the audience feels sympathy for him. He is morally ambiguous but that makes him cool. The way the camera focuses on him, the way he acts, the way he handles his cigarettes, the way he casually walks through life void of rules, and the fact that his actions are almost always accompanied by smooth jazz on the soundtrack, help elevate him. Michel Poiccard might not have much substance, but he has a lot of style.
In Marie’s article he includes a quote from Francois Truffaut, who was also a French New Wave director and a friend of Jean Luc Godard’s. Truffaut states “Jean-Luc chose a violent end because by nature he was sadder than I. He was in the depths of despair when he made that film.” (qtd.in Marie 161). Truffaut reflects how a director can put his own, personal touch on a film. While Michel is a cool character who is lacking in morals, he comes to a very violent, tragic end. It is a statement on life by Godard, who was likely living a very similar life of decadence when the film was made, and got fed up with it. Godard makes the audience feel kind of embarrassed for liking Michel throughout the course of the film, by displaying the tragic way his life comes to an end.
It’s hard to argue that Michel didn’t deserve what was coming to him. Marie’s article contains a quote from Godard, himself: “A bout de SoufflÃ?© [Breathless] was the sort of film where anything goes, that was what it was all about. What I wanted to do was take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything that cinema had done. (Qtd. In Marie 160)” It is this attitude and approach to filmmaking that makes Breathless a film that stands as the benchmark for French New Wave cinema.
It’s a film that shamelessly defies traditions of narrative techniques, editing and camera work. It’s self-referential, self-reflexive and random. The film is nearly impossible to define in terms of storytelling but completely defined by a style. Godard is in his filmmaking as defiant as his main character. Breathless merges the conventional and unconventional, and in doing so helped create an entire film movement.
Works Cited:
Marie, Michael. “It Really Makes You Sick”
French Film: Texts and Contexts Second Edition, Routledge Publishing, Pgs. 160, 161 & 163.
Monaco, James. “Introduction to the New Wave”
The New Wave, Oxford University Press, 1976, Pg. 9.
Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema”.
Movies and Methods Volume 2, University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985, Pg. 501.
