Jonathan Baumbach
BREATHLESS
REVISITED
"An and theory of an, at one and the same time; beauty and
the secret of beauty; cinema and apologia (or cinema."
-Godard on
Elena el Les Hommes
Breathless
has aged well. Seventeen years after, Godard's
least ovenly political film remains his most radical work of art, one of
the half dozen signal events in the short history of film. Its imitators–
and its influence has been pervasive even among directors who clearly
despise its esthetic-have in no way compromised the originality of
Godard's first feature. As with most deeply instinctive works, concerned
more with their own process than with delineating a world,
Breathless
is essentially inimitable. Audacity is the work's defining impulse. "I
wanted," says Godard in an interview, "to give the impression of just
finding or experiencing the processes of cinema for the first time."
It
is
not only its freshness and sense of discovery, its breakneck energy and
wit that make
Breathless
so exhilarating to watch, but in addition its
moment by moment defiance of esthetic injunctions, its thumb of the
nose at conventional tyrannies.
Breathless
translates discontinuity into
coherence, revises our idea of the possibilities of cinema.
Chance informs the movement of Godard 's world (chance and a
certain anti psychology) as instinct seems to be at the heart of his
method. The plot, which serves as both parody and metaphori c
occasion, is derived from a
m~lange
of American gangster film conven–
tions. In the opening shots, Michel (Belmondo) steals a car, is followed
by the police, and, finding himself trapped, takes a gun from the glove
compartment and kills the policeman. (We see Michel fire the gun and
in a separate shot we see the policeman fall, making it seem as if the
firing of the gun and the death of the policeman were only cinemati–
cally connected.) This series of chance conjunctions dooms Michel.
Godard assumes the Hollywood code of the thirties and forties in
which if a character commits murder, the filmmaker is obliged to
