Saturday, March 12, 2016
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Fellini
8½ (Italian title: Otto e mezzo [ˈɔtto e ˈmɛddzo]) is a 1963 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, the film features a soundtrack by Nino Rota with costume and set designs by Piero Gherardi.
The title is in keeping with Fellini's self-reflexive theme. Its title refers to Fellini's eight and a half films as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the collaboration accounting for a "half" film (His previous six feature films included Lo sceicco bianco (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), and La Dolce Vita (1960). With Alberto Lattuada, he co-directed Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) in 1950. His two short segments included Un'Agenzia Matrimoniale (A Marriage Agency) in the 1953 omnibus film L'amore in città (Love in the City) and Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio from the 1962 omnibus film Boccaccio '70). The working title for 8½ was La bella confusione (The Beautiful Confusion) proposed by co-screenwriter, Ennio Flaiano, but Fellini then "had the simpler idea (which proved entirely wrong) to call it Comedy".
8½ won two Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design (black-and-white). Acknowledged as an avant-garde film and a highly influential classic, it was among the top 10 on BFI The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, ranked third in a 2002 poll of film directors conducted by the British Film Institute and is also listed on the Vatican's compilation of the 45 best films made before 1995, the 100th anniversary of cinema.
personal story: memories of childhood, present troubles, relationship with producers. Many fictional films have been made about the process of film production. Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 concerns itself with the preproduction stage of a film that is abandoned before shooting starts. In more strongly psychological films, such as Fellini's 81/2, the search and the investigation become internalized when the protagonist, a noted film director, attempts to discover the source of his creative problems.
8½ is about the struggles involved in the creative process, both technical and personal, and the problems artists face when expected to deliver something personal and profound with intense public scrutiny, on a constricted schedule, while simultaneously having to deal with their own personal relationships. It is, in a larger sense, about finding true personal happiness in a difficult, fragmented life. Like several Italian films of the period (most evident in the films of Fellini's contemporary, Michelangelo Antonioni), 8½ also is about the alienating effects of modernization. The fantasy sequences in Fellini's 8 1/2 yield information about the protagonists' traits and possible future actions that would be less vivid if presented objectively. most films take objective narration as a baseline from which we may depart in search of subjective depth but to which we will return. There are, however, other films that refuse this convention. Fellini's 8l /2, Bunuel's Belle de jour and Haneke's Cach6, Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, and Nolan's Memento mix objectivity and subjectivity in ambiguous ways. Here, as elsewhere, the manipulation of story information is not just a matter of what action takes place in the film. Any choice about range or depth affects how the spectator thinks and feels about the film as it progresses.
Costumes can play important motivic and callsal roles in narratives. The film director Guido in Fellini's 81/2 persistently uses his dark -glasses to shield himself from the world.
According to Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, Fellini's film used similar artistic procedures and had parallels with Musil's 1930 novel The Man Without Qualities.
1. 1am not a ‘therapeutic’ artist, my films don’t suggest solutions or methods, they don’t put forward ideologies. All I do is bear witness to what happens to me, interpret and express the reality that surrounds me. If, through my films - that is, recognising themselves in them - people come to an equal awareness of themselves, then they have achieved the state of clear-sighted detachment from themselves which is essential in making new choices, in bringing about changes.
2. My films don’t have what is called a final scene. The story never reaches its conclusion. Why? I think it depends on what I make of my characters. It’s hard to put it - but they’re a kind of electrical wire, they’re like lights that don’t change at all but show an unchanging feeling in the director from start to finish. They cannot evolve in any way; and that’s for another reason. I have no intention of moralising, yet I feel that a film is the more moral if it doesn’t offer the audience the solution found by the character whose story is told. In other words, the man who has just seen a character sorting out his problems, or becoming good when he started off bad, finds himself in a much more comfortable situation. He is going to say quietly to himself: ‘Well, all I have to do is carry on being the creep I am, betraying my wife, conning my friends, because at a given moment the right solution will turn up, just as it does in the films. . .‘ My films, on the contrary, give the audience a very exact responsibility. For instance, they must decide what Cabiria’s end is going to be. Her fate is in the hands of each one of us. If the film has moved us, and troubled us, we must immediately begin to have new relationships with our neighbours. This must start the first time we meet our ftiends or our wife, since anyone may be Cabiria - that is, a victim. If films like I vitelloni, La strada and 11 bidone leave the audience with this feeling, mixed with a slight uneasiness, I think they have achieved their object. I feel, and I can even say today, unhesitatingly, that whenever I think up a story it is in order to show some anxiety, some trouble, a state of friction in the relationships that ought normally to exist between people. If I were a political animal, in order to explain this I should hold meetings or join a political pIty; or go out barefoot and dance in the streets. If I had found a solution, and if I were able to explain it convincingly and in good faith, then of course I should not be a story-teller, or a film-maker.
3. Good intentions and honest feelings, and a passionate belief in one’s own ideals, may make excellent politics or influential social work (things which may be much more useful than the cinema), but they do not necessarily and indisputably make good films. And there is realty nothing uglier or drearier - just because it is ineffectual and pointless - than a bad political film.
4, Commitment, I feel, prevents a man from developing. My ‘anti- fascism’ is of a biological kind. I could never forget the isolation in which Italy was enclosed for twenty years. Today I feel a profound hatred - and I am actually very vulnerable on this point - for all ideas that can be translated into formulas. I am committed to non-commitment.
I love becoming committed to frivolous things. In fact, I am wholly committed to everything I do.
5. I am against things that try to define themselves too precisely, and against people who do the same. The word ‘committed’ irritates me. I react in a childish, exaggerated way tothose who profess to be committed. People who are over forty-five today, you see, grew up in the shadow of fascism and the Church. All through my childhood, I heard things spoken of in terms of duty. Idealised commitment. Now, when I hear today’s I see in it a threat to true freedom. That is, authentic individual growth. What on earth is the ‘committed cinema’ committed to do? This kind of Marxist or Chinese terminology makes me very suspicious. Not because of what you might call individual anarchy, but because of what is really a personal experience.
Fascism meant omnipotent stupidity and ignorance. I cannot say that I ever fought in the anti-fascist ranks; that would not be true; I have never played at politics.
6. After the war, our subjects were handed to us, ready-made. There were very simple problems: how to survive, the war, peace. These problims were set before us, in an immediate, brutal way. But today the problems are different, Of course the neo-realists were not hoping that war and poverty would continue because they found their best subjects in them . . . but it sometimes seemed as if the neo-realists thought they could make a film only if they put a shabby man in front of the camera. They were wrong.
7. To me, neo-realism is a way of seeing reality without prejudice, without conventions coming between it and myself - facing it without preconceptions, looking at it in an honest way - whatever reality is, not just social reality, but spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, all that there is within a man. . . In telling the story of particular people I always try to show a particular truth.
8. Realism is a bad word. In a certain sense everything is realistic. I see no dividing line between imagination and reality. I see a great deal of reality in imagination, I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to arrange everything neatly on one universally valid level. I have an infinite capacity for amazement, and I don’t see why I should set up a pseudo-rational screen to protect me from being amazed.
9, Realism is neither a tight enclosure nor a one-dimensional panorama. A landscape, for instance, has a number of layers, and the deepest, which only poetic language can reve3l, is not the least real. What I want to show beyond the outer surface of things is what people call ‘unreal’. They say I have a taste for mystery. If they liked to give the word a capital M, then I would be glad to accept it. To me, mysteries belong to man, they are the great unreasoning lines of his spiritual life, love, health . . . At the centre of successive layers of reality, God is to be found, I think . the keyyoung people putting forward an4 developing the same sort of idiocy as Mussolini and the bishops, it really makes me mad.
to the mysteries. I would add that if neo-realism is called ‘social’, as it is by certain Italian critics, then it is limited. Man is not just a social being, he is divine.
10. I am not yet humble enough to make myself an abstraction in my films. I try in them to throw light on what I don’t understand in myself, but as I am a man, other men can no doubt see themselves in the same mirror too. What is autobiographical is the story of a kind of call that pierces the torpor of the soul and wakes me. I should very much like to stay in that state, in those moments when the call reaches me. I feel, then, that someone is knocking at the door and I don’t go and open it. Of course I shall have to make up my mind to open it, some day or other. Basically, I must be a spiritual vitellone.
11. In my way of thinking, there do not exist humorous themes or themes which are not humorous. Humour, just like the dramatic,
to evaluate should make us withhold judgement, or anyway should prompt us to give up our old points of reference and try to find new ones more suited to the new context.
In conclusion, it seems to me that what deludes and irritates us in the cinema, in literature and the theatre and in the figurative arts, is the limitedness of what they produce. A remarkable sort of limitedness which condemns no-one, not even the authors that express it, but rather shows how today’s people are more individual, and culturally, spiritually and socially more evolved than they were. Until now, artists have always been the high points that burst out of a shapeless, passive mass, the common denominator in which others recognised themselves and from which they drew nourishment. Today, this denominator is rather less common because the more highly developed personality of each individual limits and reduces it, and the high points do not burst out at so high a level because the average, in the mass of people, is higher than it was. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. Perhaps we are destined to become a whole human race of artists, each producing and nourishing himself on what he produces. Perhaps art, in the sense we know it, will no longer be neèessary. These are utopian ideas, of course; but one thing we ought to bear in mind. We tend to say that men are the same and will always be the same, but what we really know about men goes back only 10,000 years. If you consider that the human race is millions of years old and will go on for as many million more, then every judgement, every assertion and every forecast is lost in the mists of time.
15. I have always thought that the cinema is a means of expression, an entirely original language that owes nothing, and bears no relationship, to any other art form. As far as literature is concerned, admittedly the cinema has borrowed a good deal from it, but this can be counted as normal interdependence between the arts. More important is the fact that whenever a literary work is godmother to a film, the result is always mediocre, disappointing and entirely to the disadvantage of the film. This may be the definite proof of the cinema’s originality, showing that it cannot bear graftings or overlappings of any kind. Everything that connects the cinema with literature is the result of laziness and sentimental whim, when it is not actually due to brutal calculation. It is a case of doing something arbitrary and unnatural, like sticking four car wheels on to a horse, or cutting a steak into the shape of a cod-fish.
16. 1 feel that decadence is indispensable to rebirth. I have alreidy said that! love shipwrecks. So I am happy to be living at a time when everything is capsizing. It’s a marvellous time, for the very reason that a whole series of ideologies, concepts and conventions is being wrecked. Man went to the moon, didn’t he? Well then, to keep talking of iron curtains, frontiers and different currencies is completely absurd. We’ve got to overthrow all that.
This process of dissolution is quite natural, I think. I don’t see it as a sign of the death of civilisation but, on the contrary, as a sign of its life. It is the end of a certain phase of the human race. But the process of dissolution is too slow and must be hurried. We must start from scratch. Make a clean sweep of everything.
Is our society waiting for what is going to happen to it? Not at all. Force of circumstances causes society itself to generate what happens. There’s no solution and no continuity. . . The young are aware that a new world is beginning. But it is very hard to speak of this without becoming rhetorical. The dawn which is coming moves rue.
17. As a man 1 am interested in everything, and as far as what you call problems are concerned I go in search of them, because I am curious, and anxious to learn. But as a film director, I am quite indifferent to abstract problems, those which are now called ideological. For an idea or a situation or an atmosphere to kindle my mind or my imagination, to amuse me or to move me, it must come to me as a concrete fact. This may be a certain person or character that comes out to meet me; it may be the memory of a particular adventure or of a particular coincidence of human beings in a landscape or a situation. Then my imagination is kindled. If I were a composer I would then start writing down notes, if I were a painter I would scribble on the canvas. As a film director, I find my means of çxpression in the film image. I am a story-teller in the cinema and I can’t honestly see what other qualification can be attributed to me apart from this - which may seem modest but, to me, is terribly demanding.
18. I believe - please note, I am only supposing - that what I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual man from the network of moral and social convention in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, and which encloses him and limits him and makes him seem narrower, smaller, sometimes even worse than he really is. If you really want me to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are, that is, discover yourself, in order to love life. To me, life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering, I like it, I enjoy it, I am moved by it. And I do my best to share this way of feeling with others.
19. Evety period of stolid materialism is followed by times of spirituality. We are now living in a kind of dark tunnel of suffering unable to communicate with one another, but I already feel I can see a gleam in the distance, a sense of new freedom: we must try to believe in this possibility of salvation.
20. If I say that I am fairly confident, I don’t want to seem like a butterfly flitting carelessly from flower to flower, but like a person who feels alive, who has not yet exhausted his human adventure. Really, I like everything about life, and sometimes I feel electric with curiosity, as if I had not yet been fully born. Yes, I haven’t yet lost faith in the journeyc even though it often seems dark and desperate. -
The important thing for man today is to hang on. not to let his head droop but to keep looking up along the tunnel, perhaps even inventing a way of salvation through fanta’ or will-power, and especially through faith. For this reason I think that the work of artists is really needed today.
The title is in keeping with Fellini's self-reflexive theme. Its title refers to Fellini's eight and a half films as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the collaboration accounting for a "half" film (His previous six feature films included Lo sceicco bianco (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), and La Dolce Vita (1960). With Alberto Lattuada, he co-directed Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) in 1950. His two short segments included Un'Agenzia Matrimoniale (A Marriage Agency) in the 1953 omnibus film L'amore in città (Love in the City) and Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio from the 1962 omnibus film Boccaccio '70). The working title for 8½ was La bella confusione (The Beautiful Confusion) proposed by co-screenwriter, Ennio Flaiano, but Fellini then "had the simpler idea (which proved entirely wrong) to call it Comedy".
8½ won two Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design (black-and-white). Acknowledged as an avant-garde film and a highly influential classic, it was among the top 10 on BFI The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, ranked third in a 2002 poll of film directors conducted by the British Film Institute and is also listed on the Vatican's compilation of the 45 best films made before 1995, the 100th anniversary of cinema.
personal story: memories of childhood, present troubles, relationship with producers. Many fictional films have been made about the process of film production. Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 concerns itself with the preproduction stage of a film that is abandoned before shooting starts. In more strongly psychological films, such as Fellini's 81/2, the search and the investigation become internalized when the protagonist, a noted film director, attempts to discover the source of his creative problems.
8½ is about the struggles involved in the creative process, both technical and personal, and the problems artists face when expected to deliver something personal and profound with intense public scrutiny, on a constricted schedule, while simultaneously having to deal with their own personal relationships. It is, in a larger sense, about finding true personal happiness in a difficult, fragmented life. Like several Italian films of the period (most evident in the films of Fellini's contemporary, Michelangelo Antonioni), 8½ also is about the alienating effects of modernization. The fantasy sequences in Fellini's 8 1/2 yield information about the protagonists' traits and possible future actions that would be less vivid if presented objectively. most films take objective narration as a baseline from which we may depart in search of subjective depth but to which we will return. There are, however, other films that refuse this convention. Fellini's 8l /2, Bunuel's Belle de jour and Haneke's Cach6, Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, and Nolan's Memento mix objectivity and subjectivity in ambiguous ways. Here, as elsewhere, the manipulation of story information is not just a matter of what action takes place in the film. Any choice about range or depth affects how the spectator thinks and feels about the film as it progresses.
Costumes can play important motivic and callsal roles in narratives. The film director Guido in Fellini's 81/2 persistently uses his dark -glasses to shield himself from the world.
According to Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, Fellini's film used similar artistic procedures and had parallels with Musil's 1930 novel The Man Without Qualities.
1. 1am not a ‘therapeutic’ artist, my films don’t suggest solutions or methods, they don’t put forward ideologies. All I do is bear witness to what happens to me, interpret and express the reality that surrounds me. If, through my films - that is, recognising themselves in them - people come to an equal awareness of themselves, then they have achieved the state of clear-sighted detachment from themselves which is essential in making new choices, in bringing about changes.
2. My films don’t have what is called a final scene. The story never reaches its conclusion. Why? I think it depends on what I make of my characters. It’s hard to put it - but they’re a kind of electrical wire, they’re like lights that don’t change at all but show an unchanging feeling in the director from start to finish. They cannot evolve in any way; and that’s for another reason. I have no intention of moralising, yet I feel that a film is the more moral if it doesn’t offer the audience the solution found by the character whose story is told. In other words, the man who has just seen a character sorting out his problems, or becoming good when he started off bad, finds himself in a much more comfortable situation. He is going to say quietly to himself: ‘Well, all I have to do is carry on being the creep I am, betraying my wife, conning my friends, because at a given moment the right solution will turn up, just as it does in the films. . .‘ My films, on the contrary, give the audience a very exact responsibility. For instance, they must decide what Cabiria’s end is going to be. Her fate is in the hands of each one of us. If the film has moved us, and troubled us, we must immediately begin to have new relationships with our neighbours. This must start the first time we meet our ftiends or our wife, since anyone may be Cabiria - that is, a victim. If films like I vitelloni, La strada and 11 bidone leave the audience with this feeling, mixed with a slight uneasiness, I think they have achieved their object. I feel, and I can even say today, unhesitatingly, that whenever I think up a story it is in order to show some anxiety, some trouble, a state of friction in the relationships that ought normally to exist between people. If I were a political animal, in order to explain this I should hold meetings or join a political pIty; or go out barefoot and dance in the streets. If I had found a solution, and if I were able to explain it convincingly and in good faith, then of course I should not be a story-teller, or a film-maker.
3. Good intentions and honest feelings, and a passionate belief in one’s own ideals, may make excellent politics or influential social work (things which may be much more useful than the cinema), but they do not necessarily and indisputably make good films. And there is realty nothing uglier or drearier - just because it is ineffectual and pointless - than a bad political film.
4, Commitment, I feel, prevents a man from developing. My ‘anti- fascism’ is of a biological kind. I could never forget the isolation in which Italy was enclosed for twenty years. Today I feel a profound hatred - and I am actually very vulnerable on this point - for all ideas that can be translated into formulas. I am committed to non-commitment.
I love becoming committed to frivolous things. In fact, I am wholly committed to everything I do.
5. I am against things that try to define themselves too precisely, and against people who do the same. The word ‘committed’ irritates me. I react in a childish, exaggerated way tothose who profess to be committed. People who are over forty-five today, you see, grew up in the shadow of fascism and the Church. All through my childhood, I heard things spoken of in terms of duty. Idealised commitment. Now, when I hear today’s I see in it a threat to true freedom. That is, authentic individual growth. What on earth is the ‘committed cinema’ committed to do? This kind of Marxist or Chinese terminology makes me very suspicious. Not because of what you might call individual anarchy, but because of what is really a personal experience.
Fascism meant omnipotent stupidity and ignorance. I cannot say that I ever fought in the anti-fascist ranks; that would not be true; I have never played at politics.
6. After the war, our subjects were handed to us, ready-made. There were very simple problems: how to survive, the war, peace. These problims were set before us, in an immediate, brutal way. But today the problems are different, Of course the neo-realists were not hoping that war and poverty would continue because they found their best subjects in them . . . but it sometimes seemed as if the neo-realists thought they could make a film only if they put a shabby man in front of the camera. They were wrong.
7. To me, neo-realism is a way of seeing reality without prejudice, without conventions coming between it and myself - facing it without preconceptions, looking at it in an honest way - whatever reality is, not just social reality, but spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, all that there is within a man. . . In telling the story of particular people I always try to show a particular truth.
8. Realism is a bad word. In a certain sense everything is realistic. I see no dividing line between imagination and reality. I see a great deal of reality in imagination, I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to arrange everything neatly on one universally valid level. I have an infinite capacity for amazement, and I don’t see why I should set up a pseudo-rational screen to protect me from being amazed.
9, Realism is neither a tight enclosure nor a one-dimensional panorama. A landscape, for instance, has a number of layers, and the deepest, which only poetic language can reve3l, is not the least real. What I want to show beyond the outer surface of things is what people call ‘unreal’. They say I have a taste for mystery. If they liked to give the word a capital M, then I would be glad to accept it. To me, mysteries belong to man, they are the great unreasoning lines of his spiritual life, love, health . . . At the centre of successive layers of reality, God is to be found, I think . the keyyoung people putting forward an4 developing the same sort of idiocy as Mussolini and the bishops, it really makes me mad.
to the mysteries. I would add that if neo-realism is called ‘social’, as it is by certain Italian critics, then it is limited. Man is not just a social being, he is divine.
10. I am not yet humble enough to make myself an abstraction in my films. I try in them to throw light on what I don’t understand in myself, but as I am a man, other men can no doubt see themselves in the same mirror too. What is autobiographical is the story of a kind of call that pierces the torpor of the soul and wakes me. I should very much like to stay in that state, in those moments when the call reaches me. I feel, then, that someone is knocking at the door and I don’t go and open it. Of course I shall have to make up my mind to open it, some day or other. Basically, I must be a spiritual vitellone.
11. In my way of thinking, there do not exist humorous themes or themes which are not humorous. Humour, just like the dramatic,
to evaluate should make us withhold judgement, or anyway should prompt us to give up our old points of reference and try to find new ones more suited to the new context.
In conclusion, it seems to me that what deludes and irritates us in the cinema, in literature and the theatre and in the figurative arts, is the limitedness of what they produce. A remarkable sort of limitedness which condemns no-one, not even the authors that express it, but rather shows how today’s people are more individual, and culturally, spiritually and socially more evolved than they were. Until now, artists have always been the high points that burst out of a shapeless, passive mass, the common denominator in which others recognised themselves and from which they drew nourishment. Today, this denominator is rather less common because the more highly developed personality of each individual limits and reduces it, and the high points do not burst out at so high a level because the average, in the mass of people, is higher than it was. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. Perhaps we are destined to become a whole human race of artists, each producing and nourishing himself on what he produces. Perhaps art, in the sense we know it, will no longer be neèessary. These are utopian ideas, of course; but one thing we ought to bear in mind. We tend to say that men are the same and will always be the same, but what we really know about men goes back only 10,000 years. If you consider that the human race is millions of years old and will go on for as many million more, then every judgement, every assertion and every forecast is lost in the mists of time.
15. I have always thought that the cinema is a means of expression, an entirely original language that owes nothing, and bears no relationship, to any other art form. As far as literature is concerned, admittedly the cinema has borrowed a good deal from it, but this can be counted as normal interdependence between the arts. More important is the fact that whenever a literary work is godmother to a film, the result is always mediocre, disappointing and entirely to the disadvantage of the film. This may be the definite proof of the cinema’s originality, showing that it cannot bear graftings or overlappings of any kind. Everything that connects the cinema with literature is the result of laziness and sentimental whim, when it is not actually due to brutal calculation. It is a case of doing something arbitrary and unnatural, like sticking four car wheels on to a horse, or cutting a steak into the shape of a cod-fish.
16. 1 feel that decadence is indispensable to rebirth. I have alreidy said that! love shipwrecks. So I am happy to be living at a time when everything is capsizing. It’s a marvellous time, for the very reason that a whole series of ideologies, concepts and conventions is being wrecked. Man went to the moon, didn’t he? Well then, to keep talking of iron curtains, frontiers and different currencies is completely absurd. We’ve got to overthrow all that.
This process of dissolution is quite natural, I think. I don’t see it as a sign of the death of civilisation but, on the contrary, as a sign of its life. It is the end of a certain phase of the human race. But the process of dissolution is too slow and must be hurried. We must start from scratch. Make a clean sweep of everything.
Is our society waiting for what is going to happen to it? Not at all. Force of circumstances causes society itself to generate what happens. There’s no solution and no continuity. . . The young are aware that a new world is beginning. But it is very hard to speak of this without becoming rhetorical. The dawn which is coming moves rue.
17. As a man 1 am interested in everything, and as far as what you call problems are concerned I go in search of them, because I am curious, and anxious to learn. But as a film director, I am quite indifferent to abstract problems, those which are now called ideological. For an idea or a situation or an atmosphere to kindle my mind or my imagination, to amuse me or to move me, it must come to me as a concrete fact. This may be a certain person or character that comes out to meet me; it may be the memory of a particular adventure or of a particular coincidence of human beings in a landscape or a situation. Then my imagination is kindled. If I were a composer I would then start writing down notes, if I were a painter I would scribble on the canvas. As a film director, I find my means of çxpression in the film image. I am a story-teller in the cinema and I can’t honestly see what other qualification can be attributed to me apart from this - which may seem modest but, to me, is terribly demanding.
18. I believe - please note, I am only supposing - that what I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual man from the network of moral and social convention in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, and which encloses him and limits him and makes him seem narrower, smaller, sometimes even worse than he really is. If you really want me to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are, that is, discover yourself, in order to love life. To me, life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering, I like it, I enjoy it, I am moved by it. And I do my best to share this way of feeling with others.
19. Evety period of stolid materialism is followed by times of spirituality. We are now living in a kind of dark tunnel of suffering unable to communicate with one another, but I already feel I can see a gleam in the distance, a sense of new freedom: we must try to believe in this possibility of salvation.
20. If I say that I am fairly confident, I don’t want to seem like a butterfly flitting carelessly from flower to flower, but like a person who feels alive, who has not yet exhausted his human adventure. Really, I like everything about life, and sometimes I feel electric with curiosity, as if I had not yet been fully born. Yes, I haven’t yet lost faith in the journeyc even though it often seems dark and desperate. -
The important thing for man today is to hang on. not to let his head droop but to keep looking up along the tunnel, perhaps even inventing a way of salvation through fanta’ or will-power, and especially through faith. For this reason I think that the work of artists is really needed today.
breathless
Jean Luc-Godard’s first feature, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1960), was not the first French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) film, but it soon became its signature work. Made on a low budget and shot entirely on the street and in urban locations, the film proved to be a box-office sensation and had over two million admissions in France alone. Not only that, it made the New Wave an international brand and catapulted Godard and others associated with the film’s production, such as Raoul Coutard and Jean-Paul Belmondo, to worldwide stardom.
In fact much of Breathless’s fame today is tied up with its New Wave origins, a major current of which came from a clique of ambitious young critics writing for the anti-establishment film commentary magazine, Cahiers du Cinema [1,2]. These critics dismissed mainstream French studio films of the day and championed, instead, film noir, a term they gave to moody B-Grade American crime films of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, which they felt had more panache and psychological authenticity. This group – which included Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette – then went about putting their critical theories into practice by making their own independent and “rebellious” feature films. (Other young French filmmakers of that period who were not part of the Cahiers du Cinema clique but who came to be associated with the New Wave included Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy.)
Of all those Cahiers du Cinema critics, Godard was probably the most argumentative and uncompromising, so it is perhaps not surprising that his film stood out and was even more distinctive than those of his colleagues. Thus Breathless is often seen today as a historical landmark that affected the course of cinematic expression. Nevertheless, the film is not just of historical interest, in the fashion, say, of The Birth of a Nation (1915), but still has an electric vitality when viewed today.
Although the New Wave critics were avowed auteurists, I believe that the success of Breathless is not solely due to Godard’s undoubted abilities. There was a fortunate concurrence of disparate talents that helped make the film the masterpiece that it is [3,4,5]. For one thing, there were contributions from his Cahiers du Cinema colleagues. Claude Chabrol, who had already had success with two features, served as a technical advisor for the film. In addition the original story and treatment came from Francois Truffaut, who was then a good friend of Godard’s and was fresh off the success of his own debut film, The 400 Blows (1959). Truffaut’s scheme told the noirish story of a young criminal’s desperate efforts to avoid police pursuing him and gather up his girlfriend in Paris so that the two of them can make a getaway to Rome. This treatment provided Godard with a basic narrative structure for the film – which was not the kind of thing, it seems, that naturally emerged from his own inspiration and was not so apparent in his subsequent films.
Also noteworthy, and crucial to the film’s dramatic impact on audiences, was its gaudy cinematography. The first thing that stands out is the proliferation of jump cuts – jolting cuts without changing the frame – that would normally be regarded as film-editing faults in other contexts. Here, however, the jump cuts work to positive effect, and help give the film a sense of a hectic, out-of-control haste that is constantly jumping the story forward. This is presumably what is alluded to by the film’s French title, “A Bout de Souffle”, which literally in English means: “Out of Breath” and which would probably have been a better English title for the film.
Further accentuating the nervousness created by the jump-cuts were opposing moments of slowed-down pace due to long-duration tracking shots of conversations mostly between the two main characters. These slow-moving passages in the middle of hectic circumstances with the clock ticking made for a maddening stop-and-go tempo that makes the viewer even more mindful of the criminal’s dire situation.
Now you might say that this back-and-forth temporal movement between skittishness and languor represented a brilliant piece of mise en scene on Godard’s part; but I wonder if perhaps this ingenious effect was actually an accident of Godard’s somewhat ad hoc production circumstances. Although Godard was writing the script each day as the film was being shot, the shooting was carefully planned and all the dialogue was pre-specified and not extemporaneously created. In fact the film was shot without sound, and all the pre-specified dialogue was dubbed in later. Godard was fortunate to have hooked up with the resourceful young cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who came up with practical ways to photograph Godard’s scenes in crowded locations. Now while it is known that Coutard made innovative use of hand-held photography (not common in those days with the relatively heavy equipment in use), this does not mean that Godard and Coutard were winging it as they proceeded filming the script. In fact the moving camera shots appear to have been carefully planned, with some of them lasting as long as three minutes. These moving camera shots appear when the two main characters are engaged in key conversations.
However, during the final editing stages of the film, as Roger Ebert has pointed out, Godard discovered that the film was 30 minutes too long and needed to be shortened [6]. Godard couldn’t go ahead and cut up the lengthy moving-camera shots – they needed to be retained intact. And he didn’t want to remove the dialogue that he had written. So he was left with cutting a lot of the film’s transitions, creating all those jump cuts. If Ebert is correct, then we are led to believe that the film’s nervous back-and-forth tempo was something of an accidental creation.
However, we shouldn’t let Breathless’s innovative cinematography, whether accidental or planned, dominate our perspective on the film. The really fascinating thing about this work is not so much the cinematography but more the edgy and winding romantic relationship of the two main characters.
Breathless was not the first film depicting the always fascinating situation of a romantic young couple on the run from the law, but it may have been the most inspired. Its predecessors in this camp include Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950). And we can see strong traces of Breathless in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1966), Terrence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974) [7]. In all these films there is a sense of fatalism and romantic desperation. One of the two romantic characters in these narratives is totally reckless, with the partner helplessly following along and unable to prevent their ultimate destruction.
In Breathless the romantic couple is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (in the role of Michel Poiccard) and Jean Seberg (as Patricia Franchini), and the personae of these two actors very much dominates the film’s presentation. Belmondo was 26 years old at the time, and his expressive face and sinewy physique gave a kinetic and emotional image to his character. Seberg was only 21, but already a Hollywood star. Her cool beauty and impenetrable innocence provided the perfect foil for Belmondo’s romantic shadow boxing. One of the film’s strong points is the way Godard visually dwells at length and in repeated closeups on Seberg’s paradoxical allure.
In fact it is worth discussing their two characters a little further.
Michel Poiccard.
He is perpetually rehearsing small narratives that he imagines to be glamorous decorations to his character. In this connection he likes to mug and make outlandishly emotional facial expressions, in the fashion of how a teenager might make faces while looking at his or her image in the mirror. As part of his attempts at self-glorification, he admires film noir and the screen personality of Humphrey Bogart, as well as gaudy, gas-guzzling American sedans. His daredevil self image leads him to hot-wire and steal cars whenever he needs some transportation. This recklessness makes him attractive to girls but is also fatally self-destructive. Despite his adolescent and self-indulgent behaviour, though, Michel has the capacity to feel love and jealousy. His braggadocio posturing is a cover for his personal insecurity, and he cannot help revealing his emotional vulnerability.
Patricia Franchini.
As played by Jean Seberg, who was born and grew up in Iowa, Patricia is very much a US Midwestern girl – in fact Seberg’s Midwestern accent calls attention to her distinctively non-European character. By this I mean that Patricia is friendly and easy to approach, but difficult to know well. Emotionally, she remains aloof even while she engages in friendly interactions. She is looking for someone to capture her, to conquer her, and until then she is just along for the ride and can detach herself from a relationship at a moment’s notice. In fact at one point she tells Michel,
“I stayed with you to see if I was in love with you. . . .
and since I’m being cruel to you, it proves I’m not in love with you.”
The story of Breathless proceeds through three main stages.
1. Michel Comes to Paris
In the first sequence the viewer is introduced to Michel Poiccard, a low-level hoodlum in Marseilles who hot-wires a parked Oldsmobile and heads north. On the way driving while toying with his pistol, he talks to himself about his plans to head for Paris and pick up some money owed to him by someone, and then convince a girl, Patricia, to run away with him to Rome. Along the way some highway cops start chasing him for speeding, and Michel shoots and kills one of them when he is approached. This is all told visually with jump-cuts and at breakneck speed.
Upon arriving in Paris, Michel first steals some money from a casual girlfriend. Then he tracks down Patricia, who is hawking the International Herald Tribune along the Champs Elysees, and as they talk, the pace dramatically slows down. There is a long 3:20 tracking shot of the two of them talking, as Michel tries to convince Patricia to run away to Italy with him. It seems that they had recently had a brief affair in Nice and slept together for a few nights. Patricia clearly finds Michel to be cute, but she is noncommital.
Things speed up again as Michel attends to the matter of picking up some money owed to him by a person named Berruti. While moving about the city, he also notices a newspaper headline reporting that the road cop-killer has been identified as Michel Poiccard.
2. Michel and Patricia Together
Patricia goes back to her hotel room and discovers that Michel had stolen her room key at the front desk and is waiting for her in the room. Now the pace slows down again. This is a 23-minute scene in the small hotel room, which despite the cramped dimensions, features a series of long tracking shots – one of them a 3:20 shot of the two of them talking on the bed. Most of this scene is small talk, but it importantly reveals the evolving relationship and the disparate personalities of Michel and Patricia. At one point she mentions that grief is better than nothingness (i.e. death), and he responds by saying that he would choose nothingness: “I want it all or nothing”. They make love that night, and the next morning attend to their respective obligations – he has to get his owed money, and she needs to conduct an interview for a journal she sometimes works for.
3. To Get Away
Patricia’s immediate assignment is to attend a press conference held for a trendy novelist, Parvulesco (played by noted film director Jean-Pierre Melville). This interview scene serves as something of an intermezzo in the film and gives Godard the chance to offer up some of his provocative bon mots about the world through the mouth of the novelist. While Patricia offers up some sensible queries, the other interviewers only want to ask the novelist titillating questions about how men and women posture towards each other. Parvulesco pontificates that men want only women, and women want only money. When Patricia asks him what is his greatest ambition, he answers that it is "to become immortal and then die".
Now the pace quickens again. After her interview assignment, Patricia is approached by the police, who inform her that Michel is a wanted murderer. As with other such dramatic moments in the story, Patricia shows very little emotion upon hearing this. She soon helps Michel elude the cops, and as they drive away in another stolen car, she is surprised to read in the newspaper that the cop murderer Michel is a married man. When she blithely asks him about this, he responds with equal equanimity,
“She dumped me. . . Or I dumped her, I can’t remember.”
They eventually find Berruti for Michel’s money, but the cops are closing in. All the way along, Patricia has been agonizing over whether she really loves Michel or not. The closing sequences provide for an answer to that question.
Of the comparable lovers-on-the-lam films, perhaps the closest match to Breathless is Bonnie and Clyde. This is not too surprising, since Bonnie and Clyde's script writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, were fans of Breathless and even approached Godard about directing their script. And we can see definite traces of Michel Poiccard’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s) boastful vulnerability in Clyde Barrow’s (Warren Beatty’s) personality in Bonnie and Clyde. But I think an even closer overall character match might be with the Kit and Holly characters of Badlands. In that latter film, Holly is closer to Patricia’s personality than Bonnie is.
Many people have been attracted to Breathless’s hip references to American culture and general self-parody. They see the film as Godard’s taking the opportunity to call attention to how media inordinately shapes modern culture and its increasing tendency towards cliche and vicarious disengagement. In addition to cultural references, there are celebrity cameo appearances. Besides the already-mentioned participation of film director Jean-Pierre Melville, there were several other figures in the cast from general French New Wave circles, including Philippe de Broca, Jacques Rivette, Jean Douchet (a Cahiers du Cinema film critic), and Jean-Luc Godard, himself, who briefly appears as a pedestrian that fingers Michel to the police.
All of this puckish cultural referencing was presumably part of Godard’s evolving and not entirely clear criticism of cinematic narrative, itself. When Godard was asked at the time of this film’s production how he felt about cinema, he replied [1],
"I have contempt for it [the cinema]. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the same time I have contempt for it."
Godard was vigorously opposed to the traditional conventions of studio-based narrative films. Over the following few years Godard made a succession of films that displayed a progressive retreat from cinematic narrative and looked more like cinematic essays concerning a theme, an aesthetic evolution that he explicitly embraced in an interview during that period [4]. In fact after the 1968 political events in France, his movement from dramatic narrative to visual political tracts became even more pronounced.
However, this evident retreat from narrative (in general) may have been an effect of a more specific, but deeper, underlying cause: the fact that Godard was clearly a frustrated romantic. In most of Godard’s movies, starting already with Breathless, there is a depiction of the romantic narrative being crushed by an unfeeling world ruled by capricious, uncontrollable forces. Of course some cynical hedonists might well be perfectly happy with that state of affairs. Why subject yourself to the fantasy-laden constraints of selfless love?, they might ask – just seize whatever pleasures may be at hand. But Godard is not one of these types. He is clearly frustrated, and he forcefully expresses his frustration, it seems to me, over the fact that the romantic narrative is ultimately false – it is only short-lived and inevitably doomed to fail. He tells us this over and over in his films.
In this regard of romantic narrative, it is interesting to compare Godard with filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, who also depicted the sadness of failed, unattained romance. Wong, the Master of the Broken Heart, often presented impassioned yearning for romantic fulfilment and the pain that comes from unrequited love. But Wong clearly believes in love, indeed he celebrates it with his visual poetics. He simply shows the inconsolable anguish that comes from the beloved’s being unattainable. Godard, on the other hand and unlike Wong, had lost his belief in the possibility of love, and he expressed his unhappiness about it. He did this best in Breathless.
In fact much of Breathless’s fame today is tied up with its New Wave origins, a major current of which came from a clique of ambitious young critics writing for the anti-establishment film commentary magazine, Cahiers du Cinema [1,2]. These critics dismissed mainstream French studio films of the day and championed, instead, film noir, a term they gave to moody B-Grade American crime films of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, which they felt had more panache and psychological authenticity. This group – which included Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette – then went about putting their critical theories into practice by making their own independent and “rebellious” feature films. (Other young French filmmakers of that period who were not part of the Cahiers du Cinema clique but who came to be associated with the New Wave included Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy.)
Of all those Cahiers du Cinema critics, Godard was probably the most argumentative and uncompromising, so it is perhaps not surprising that his film stood out and was even more distinctive than those of his colleagues. Thus Breathless is often seen today as a historical landmark that affected the course of cinematic expression. Nevertheless, the film is not just of historical interest, in the fashion, say, of The Birth of a Nation (1915), but still has an electric vitality when viewed today.
Although the New Wave critics were avowed auteurists, I believe that the success of Breathless is not solely due to Godard’s undoubted abilities. There was a fortunate concurrence of disparate talents that helped make the film the masterpiece that it is [3,4,5]. For one thing, there were contributions from his Cahiers du Cinema colleagues. Claude Chabrol, who had already had success with two features, served as a technical advisor for the film. In addition the original story and treatment came from Francois Truffaut, who was then a good friend of Godard’s and was fresh off the success of his own debut film, The 400 Blows (1959). Truffaut’s scheme told the noirish story of a young criminal’s desperate efforts to avoid police pursuing him and gather up his girlfriend in Paris so that the two of them can make a getaway to Rome. This treatment provided Godard with a basic narrative structure for the film – which was not the kind of thing, it seems, that naturally emerged from his own inspiration and was not so apparent in his subsequent films.
Also noteworthy, and crucial to the film’s dramatic impact on audiences, was its gaudy cinematography. The first thing that stands out is the proliferation of jump cuts – jolting cuts without changing the frame – that would normally be regarded as film-editing faults in other contexts. Here, however, the jump cuts work to positive effect, and help give the film a sense of a hectic, out-of-control haste that is constantly jumping the story forward. This is presumably what is alluded to by the film’s French title, “A Bout de Souffle”, which literally in English means: “Out of Breath” and which would probably have been a better English title for the film.
Further accentuating the nervousness created by the jump-cuts were opposing moments of slowed-down pace due to long-duration tracking shots of conversations mostly between the two main characters. These slow-moving passages in the middle of hectic circumstances with the clock ticking made for a maddening stop-and-go tempo that makes the viewer even more mindful of the criminal’s dire situation.
Now you might say that this back-and-forth temporal movement between skittishness and languor represented a brilliant piece of mise en scene on Godard’s part; but I wonder if perhaps this ingenious effect was actually an accident of Godard’s somewhat ad hoc production circumstances. Although Godard was writing the script each day as the film was being shot, the shooting was carefully planned and all the dialogue was pre-specified and not extemporaneously created. In fact the film was shot without sound, and all the pre-specified dialogue was dubbed in later. Godard was fortunate to have hooked up with the resourceful young cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who came up with practical ways to photograph Godard’s scenes in crowded locations. Now while it is known that Coutard made innovative use of hand-held photography (not common in those days with the relatively heavy equipment in use), this does not mean that Godard and Coutard were winging it as they proceeded filming the script. In fact the moving camera shots appear to have been carefully planned, with some of them lasting as long as three minutes. These moving camera shots appear when the two main characters are engaged in key conversations.
However, during the final editing stages of the film, as Roger Ebert has pointed out, Godard discovered that the film was 30 minutes too long and needed to be shortened [6]. Godard couldn’t go ahead and cut up the lengthy moving-camera shots – they needed to be retained intact. And he didn’t want to remove the dialogue that he had written. So he was left with cutting a lot of the film’s transitions, creating all those jump cuts. If Ebert is correct, then we are led to believe that the film’s nervous back-and-forth tempo was something of an accidental creation.
However, we shouldn’t let Breathless’s innovative cinematography, whether accidental or planned, dominate our perspective on the film. The really fascinating thing about this work is not so much the cinematography but more the edgy and winding romantic relationship of the two main characters.
Breathless was not the first film depicting the always fascinating situation of a romantic young couple on the run from the law, but it may have been the most inspired. Its predecessors in this camp include Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950). And we can see strong traces of Breathless in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1966), Terrence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974) [7]. In all these films there is a sense of fatalism and romantic desperation. One of the two romantic characters in these narratives is totally reckless, with the partner helplessly following along and unable to prevent their ultimate destruction.
In Breathless the romantic couple is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (in the role of Michel Poiccard) and Jean Seberg (as Patricia Franchini), and the personae of these two actors very much dominates the film’s presentation. Belmondo was 26 years old at the time, and his expressive face and sinewy physique gave a kinetic and emotional image to his character. Seberg was only 21, but already a Hollywood star. Her cool beauty and impenetrable innocence provided the perfect foil for Belmondo’s romantic shadow boxing. One of the film’s strong points is the way Godard visually dwells at length and in repeated closeups on Seberg’s paradoxical allure.
In fact it is worth discussing their two characters a little further.
Michel Poiccard.
He is perpetually rehearsing small narratives that he imagines to be glamorous decorations to his character. In this connection he likes to mug and make outlandishly emotional facial expressions, in the fashion of how a teenager might make faces while looking at his or her image in the mirror. As part of his attempts at self-glorification, he admires film noir and the screen personality of Humphrey Bogart, as well as gaudy, gas-guzzling American sedans. His daredevil self image leads him to hot-wire and steal cars whenever he needs some transportation. This recklessness makes him attractive to girls but is also fatally self-destructive. Despite his adolescent and self-indulgent behaviour, though, Michel has the capacity to feel love and jealousy. His braggadocio posturing is a cover for his personal insecurity, and he cannot help revealing his emotional vulnerability.
Patricia Franchini.
As played by Jean Seberg, who was born and grew up in Iowa, Patricia is very much a US Midwestern girl – in fact Seberg’s Midwestern accent calls attention to her distinctively non-European character. By this I mean that Patricia is friendly and easy to approach, but difficult to know well. Emotionally, she remains aloof even while she engages in friendly interactions. She is looking for someone to capture her, to conquer her, and until then she is just along for the ride and can detach herself from a relationship at a moment’s notice. In fact at one point she tells Michel,
“I stayed with you to see if I was in love with you. . . .
and since I’m being cruel to you, it proves I’m not in love with you.”
The story of Breathless proceeds through three main stages.
1. Michel Comes to Paris
In the first sequence the viewer is introduced to Michel Poiccard, a low-level hoodlum in Marseilles who hot-wires a parked Oldsmobile and heads north. On the way driving while toying with his pistol, he talks to himself about his plans to head for Paris and pick up some money owed to him by someone, and then convince a girl, Patricia, to run away with him to Rome. Along the way some highway cops start chasing him for speeding, and Michel shoots and kills one of them when he is approached. This is all told visually with jump-cuts and at breakneck speed.
Upon arriving in Paris, Michel first steals some money from a casual girlfriend. Then he tracks down Patricia, who is hawking the International Herald Tribune along the Champs Elysees, and as they talk, the pace dramatically slows down. There is a long 3:20 tracking shot of the two of them talking, as Michel tries to convince Patricia to run away to Italy with him. It seems that they had recently had a brief affair in Nice and slept together for a few nights. Patricia clearly finds Michel to be cute, but she is noncommital.
Things speed up again as Michel attends to the matter of picking up some money owed to him by a person named Berruti. While moving about the city, he also notices a newspaper headline reporting that the road cop-killer has been identified as Michel Poiccard.
2. Michel and Patricia Together
Patricia goes back to her hotel room and discovers that Michel had stolen her room key at the front desk and is waiting for her in the room. Now the pace slows down again. This is a 23-minute scene in the small hotel room, which despite the cramped dimensions, features a series of long tracking shots – one of them a 3:20 shot of the two of them talking on the bed. Most of this scene is small talk, but it importantly reveals the evolving relationship and the disparate personalities of Michel and Patricia. At one point she mentions that grief is better than nothingness (i.e. death), and he responds by saying that he would choose nothingness: “I want it all or nothing”. They make love that night, and the next morning attend to their respective obligations – he has to get his owed money, and she needs to conduct an interview for a journal she sometimes works for.
3. To Get Away
Patricia’s immediate assignment is to attend a press conference held for a trendy novelist, Parvulesco (played by noted film director Jean-Pierre Melville). This interview scene serves as something of an intermezzo in the film and gives Godard the chance to offer up some of his provocative bon mots about the world through the mouth of the novelist. While Patricia offers up some sensible queries, the other interviewers only want to ask the novelist titillating questions about how men and women posture towards each other. Parvulesco pontificates that men want only women, and women want only money. When Patricia asks him what is his greatest ambition, he answers that it is "to become immortal and then die".
Now the pace quickens again. After her interview assignment, Patricia is approached by the police, who inform her that Michel is a wanted murderer. As with other such dramatic moments in the story, Patricia shows very little emotion upon hearing this. She soon helps Michel elude the cops, and as they drive away in another stolen car, she is surprised to read in the newspaper that the cop murderer Michel is a married man. When she blithely asks him about this, he responds with equal equanimity,
“She dumped me. . . Or I dumped her, I can’t remember.”
They eventually find Berruti for Michel’s money, but the cops are closing in. All the way along, Patricia has been agonizing over whether she really loves Michel or not. The closing sequences provide for an answer to that question.
Of the comparable lovers-on-the-lam films, perhaps the closest match to Breathless is Bonnie and Clyde. This is not too surprising, since Bonnie and Clyde's script writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, were fans of Breathless and even approached Godard about directing their script. And we can see definite traces of Michel Poiccard’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s) boastful vulnerability in Clyde Barrow’s (Warren Beatty’s) personality in Bonnie and Clyde. But I think an even closer overall character match might be with the Kit and Holly characters of Badlands. In that latter film, Holly is closer to Patricia’s personality than Bonnie is.
Many people have been attracted to Breathless’s hip references to American culture and general self-parody. They see the film as Godard’s taking the opportunity to call attention to how media inordinately shapes modern culture and its increasing tendency towards cliche and vicarious disengagement. In addition to cultural references, there are celebrity cameo appearances. Besides the already-mentioned participation of film director Jean-Pierre Melville, there were several other figures in the cast from general French New Wave circles, including Philippe de Broca, Jacques Rivette, Jean Douchet (a Cahiers du Cinema film critic), and Jean-Luc Godard, himself, who briefly appears as a pedestrian that fingers Michel to the police.
All of this puckish cultural referencing was presumably part of Godard’s evolving and not entirely clear criticism of cinematic narrative, itself. When Godard was asked at the time of this film’s production how he felt about cinema, he replied [1],
"I have contempt for it [the cinema]. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the same time I have contempt for it."
Godard was vigorously opposed to the traditional conventions of studio-based narrative films. Over the following few years Godard made a succession of films that displayed a progressive retreat from cinematic narrative and looked more like cinematic essays concerning a theme, an aesthetic evolution that he explicitly embraced in an interview during that period [4]. In fact after the 1968 political events in France, his movement from dramatic narrative to visual political tracts became even more pronounced.
However, this evident retreat from narrative (in general) may have been an effect of a more specific, but deeper, underlying cause: the fact that Godard was clearly a frustrated romantic. In most of Godard’s movies, starting already with Breathless, there is a depiction of the romantic narrative being crushed by an unfeeling world ruled by capricious, uncontrollable forces. Of course some cynical hedonists might well be perfectly happy with that state of affairs. Why subject yourself to the fantasy-laden constraints of selfless love?, they might ask – just seize whatever pleasures may be at hand. But Godard is not one of these types. He is clearly frustrated, and he forcefully expresses his frustration, it seems to me, over the fact that the romantic narrative is ultimately false – it is only short-lived and inevitably doomed to fail. He tells us this over and over in his films.
In this regard of romantic narrative, it is interesting to compare Godard with filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, who also depicted the sadness of failed, unattained romance. Wong, the Master of the Broken Heart, often presented impassioned yearning for romantic fulfilment and the pain that comes from unrequited love. But Wong clearly believes in love, indeed he celebrates it with his visual poetics. He simply shows the inconsolable anguish that comes from the beloved’s being unattainable. Godard, on the other hand and unlike Wong, had lost his belief in the possibility of love, and he expressed his unhappiness about it. He did this best in Breathless.
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