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Breathless

Breathless

À bout de souffle

Jean-Luc Godard


  • Country: France
  • Year: 1960
  • Language: French
  •  
  • Runtime: 90 min.

Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, propulsive and poetic ode to Hollywood B-films and macho fatalism is one of the key films of the modern cinema (if not the key film), jettisoning the conventional methods of "professional" filmmaking—seamless editing, psychological realism and audience "suspension of disbelief"—to create a new aesthetic based on rupture, discontinuity, and a constant awareness of the film as a film.

Cinematheque

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official description

NEW PRINT! 50th ANNIVERSARY RESTORATION!

Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, propulsive and poetic ode to Hollywood B-films and macho fatalism is one of the key films of the modern cinema (if not the key film), jettisoning the conventional methods of "professional" filmmaking—seamless editing, psychological realism and audience "suspension of disbelief"—to create a new aesthetic based on rupture, discontinuity, and a constant awareness of the film as a film. Combining the existentialism of Albert Camus with the style of tough-guy Hollywood heroes, Breathless follows Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in a star-making performance), a Bogart-worshipping petty hoodlum who flees to Paris after coolly killing a motorcycle cop, where he hides out with his former girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student, while waiting for money to arrive so that he can escape to Italy. Cleverly dodging the standard beats of the lovers-on-the-run tale, Breathless instead focuses on the moments in between: seemingly random interludes of bedroom jousting, philosophical speculation and left-field movie references don't distract from the story, they are the story. Revolutionary and liberating, Breathless is "one of Godard's (and our culture's) reflex images, so acute and apt that it remains sharply in focus for anyone who cares about the cinema, about the West in 1960, or about ourselves at the onset of the twenty-first century" (Dudley Andrew).

Thanks to James Velaise, Pretty Pictures.

Exclusive Engagement begins Thursday, September 30.

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