And We're Still Trying To Catch Our Breath

A director in the time when directors were revolutionaries, a filmmaker when films were being reinvented, Jean-Luc Godard was as influential and renegade as the movement he was involved in- the Nouvelle Vogue or French New Wave.
Paris in the 1950s was a film lover’s haven. The younger generation, seeking freedom and refuge from the conservative ideals of their elders turned to cinema. It was in the smoky and jazzy early years of the 1950s that visiting cine-clubs became a staple activity for young Parisians. Cine-clubs would screen movies, new and old, regardless of genre, for audiences of adoring and often cynical young movie buffs.
It wasn’t long before Godard, a wide-eyed movie-watcher, got the urge to pick up a camera for himself. In 1960, after making several shorter experimental films, he released his first feature film, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). A definitive film of the New Wave and of modern cinema in general, Breathless pioneered filmmaking methods that were unheard of at the time but have now become cliché. During the final editing process, upon realizing the film was half an hour too long, Godard began hacking frames out right and left rather than eliminating entire scenes. The outcome was the now commonly used film technique, the jump cut.
Godard’s choppy editing technique resulted in an equally jittery pace, combined with the New Wave’s signature long takes gave Breathless the offhandedly breathless feeling that is has become known for. The directors of the New Wave were risk-taking movers and shakers. Fed up with predictability and conventionality in movies, they decided to take things into their own hands. Breathless is one of the defining films of the New Wave movement because of its impulsiveness and narcissistic cinematography. Characters and plot was purely subjective, a canvas on which to paint with technique, philosophy, and tributes to favorite filmmakers and styles.
Godard’s main character, Michael (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, or rather, Bogart’s screen persona. Michael tries to dress like him, imitate his movements, his facial expressions. He steals a car. He shoots a cop. He doesn’t seem to be too affected by his actions though. Perhaps Godard is saying that when one models one’s self after a perceived image of something, one’s very existence becomes superficial. His characters behave as if they are in a B-rated crime flick. They are nonchalant, emotionless, as if they know they are in a movie and their actions do not have an impact.
And they don’t have an impact. Godard’s personal existentialist reasoning does not extend to the characters themselves, because they do not exist, they are merely puppets. He wanted the film to speak for its self, to break new waves. Like a Fauvist, he reveled in the essence of his medium, pulling in tradition, rejecting frivolity, and making his movies the way he wanted thought movies should be made. The members of the New Wave were not looking to entertain or profit, they wanted the viewing of a movie to be as much of an art as the movie its self. Breathless is considered Godard’s greatest work. But being his first film, he resented this notoriety; to him it was a form of paralysis, an inability to progress aesthetically. This subjected him to perpetually reproducing his own methods in his many films to come. For Godard, Breathless was a beginning and an end. But in the pages and frames of cinematic history, it represented the dawn of a new generation of movie.