A Bout de Souffle notes
Film synopsis: A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he reunites with a hip American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.
Film synopsis: A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he reunites with a hip American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.
New wave: change in production, rejecting the practise of studio production and reinventing film form, using real locations and small crews.
The story of Breathless was originally written by Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol and passed on to Godard to adapt and direct.
Godard wanted to capture real spontaneous moments, he fed actors their lines from behind the camera, speech dubbed - establishes documentary style of filmmaking
Raoul Coutar (cinematographer) "we tried to film it the way news reports were shot i.e with a handheld camera and natural lighting" - Hollywood adopted this style of documentary film but used it as a tool to make fiction seem more real - highten suspense, gives camera physical presence - audiences point of view.
Godard "I don't think cinema influences youth, we should instead let youth influence cinema"
Jump cuts make film appear jagged, made cuts to single shots - caused scenes to skip from moment to moment, this is widely used today in popular culture to sustain pace by cutting out pauses or space fillers in videos.
Audiences are not watching reality but are instead viewing something constructed to resemble reality.
Abrupt starting and stopping of music throws us out of the film
Godard heavily influenced by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Godard: "It's very good to steal things. Bertolt Brecht said art is made from plagiarism"
Didn't want audiences to be absorbed in the story in a psychological way but rather an intellectual way, questioning what they are seeing
Godard's role in A Bout de Souffle gives him a physical presence on the plot - Auteur theory
Estimated budget of 400,000 francs – considerably cheaper than films produced for Hollywood Plot – simplistic – reminiscent of the film noir genre and heavily influenced from American cinema – directors such as Alfred Hitchcock
Filmed on streets of Paris was cheap and didn't require a permit, dolly shots were created by using a wheelchair
Breaking the eyeline match in continuity editing, jump cuts – which were previously viewed as amateurish
Conversations and dialogue are simple, doesn't resemble the structure of normal conversation but rather a collection of thoughts. Sentences are left unanswered and seemingly irrelevant - almost as though characters are just thinking out loud, this creates a feeling of distance and disconnect.
Camera is a visualisation of the characters
Discontinuity editing
"Godard emphasises the genius of the director and posits an inseparability of director and camera" - Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/06/film-jean-luc-godard-breathless-feature-philip-french-french-new-wave
"even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment."
"their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies."
"There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form."
"part of the special allure of movies, and “Breathless,” precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then. And yet even as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, record the sights and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are infused with an unmistakable nostalgia."
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html
Conversations and dialogue are simple, doesn't resemble the structure of normal conversation but rather a collection of thoughts. Sentences are left unanswered and seemingly irrelevant - almost as though characters are just thinking out loud, this creates a feeling of distance and disconnect.
Camera is a visualisation of the characters
Discontinuity editing
"Godard emphasises the genius of the director and posits an inseparability of director and camera" - Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema
Quotes
Patricia:
"I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy"
"It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're sleeping together, you're all alone."
"We look each in the other in the eye, and it's no use."
Michel:
"I told you being afraid is the worst sin there is."
"I always get interested in girls who aren't right for me."
"If you don't like the sea...and the mountains...or the big city...the get stuffed!"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053472/quotes/?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu
"We are constantly distanced in the manner of Brecht's alienation effect, told that what we are watching is a film, but also that movies, like our lives, are halls of mirrors."
"the camera is handheld, the editing is abrupt and inconsistent, Raoul Coutard's masterly monochrome photography is harsh, hard-edged, reliant on natural light."
Godard's methods of work on Breathless were purposefully chaotic. He admitted that he deliberately created confusion to achieve "a greater possibility of invention".
"He mocked the film business in Le Mépris, subverted the musical in Une Femme est une femme, questioned the very basis of marriage in Une Femme mariée, showed present-day Paris as a horrific, depersonalised city of the future in his bleak sci-fi film Alphaville."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/06/film-jean-luc-godard-breathless-feature-philip-french-french-new-wave
"even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment."
"their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies."
"There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form."
"part of the special allure of movies, and “Breathless,” precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then. And yet even as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, record the sights and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are infused with an unmistakable nostalgia."
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html
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