Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (16 page)

T
HE FIRST CUT
of
Breathless
was two-and-a-half hours long, but Beauregard had required that Godard deliver a ninety-minute film. Godard asked Jean-Pierre Melville for advice on how to cut it down:

I told him to cut everything that didn’t keep the action moving, and to remove all unnecessary scenes, mine included. He didn’t listen to me, and instead of cutting whole scenes as was the practice then, he had the brilliant idea of cutting more or less at random within scenes. The result was excellent.
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Godard (and the editor, Cécile Decugis, who essentially executed Godard’s instructions) did not, for the most part, cut at random;
⁴⁰
on the contrary, he responded to his enthusiasms, and removed all moments—within scenes, even within shots—that seemed to him to lack vigor. He kept in the film only what he thought was strongest, regardless of dramatic import or conventional continuity, thus producing many jump cuts, where characters and anything else that moves within the shot seem to jump from one position to another in a relatively fixed frame. Such cuts were generally considered to be a cardinal error of an amateurish film technique and were
scrupulously avoided in the professional cinema. They were seen as both intrinsically funny, a kind of cinematic solecism, and unsettling in the way they break the cinematic illusion by presenting two obviously discontinuous times as immediately sequential. The jump cut, despite—and because of—its ill-repute, became one of the principal figures of the visual style of
Breathless
.

Godard also filmed from deliberately disorienting angles, filming the police chase of Michel from opposite sides of the road, so that the police car and Michel’s car appear to be going in opposite directions rather than having one follow the other. He filmed a close-up of Michel’s gun from the opposite side as he filmed Michel’s body, thus having the gun point not at the policeman, but back toward Michel.
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On another set, such brazen disregard for standards would have been cited by a script supervisor and a cameraman, who would have informed the director of his “errors.” Here, these playfully defiant shots occur in the film’s first minutes, as if to announce up front that the old rules would not apply to
Breathless
or to Godard.

Through these decisions, Godard removed the scrim of convention by which the cinema transmits time and space to the viewer; however, by flouting the principles on which the classical cinema is based, he in fact ended up emphasizing them. In appearing amateurish, the film calls attention to the codes of professionalism, and in the end highlights the fact that they are merely conventions: it denaturalizes them.
Breathless
presents standard aspects of the classic cinema, but mediated, or quoted. Paradoxically, this interpolation of Godard’s directorial authority between the viewer and the action does not render the film arch, distant, or calculated, but rather produces the impression of immediacy, spontaneity, and vulnerability. Godard’s presence is invoked as a sort of live-action narrator who calls the shots as they unfold, with as much potential for accident and error as any live performance. But here, the “errors” only reinforce the illusion of immediacy. The overall result is an accelerated and syncopated rhythm, made of leaps ahead and doublings-back, a sort of visual jazz (with Godard as the improvising soloist) that outswung the American detective and gangster films that had served as Godard’s models.

The jump cut is a device that Godard subsequently reused only rarely. He soon devised other, and more sophisticated, methods for conjuring his presence in his films. It was not in Godard’s work, but in the work of lesser directors, that the jump cut would become a cliché, and then a commonplace in television commercials and, later, music videos. The great importance of its appearance in
Breathless
was that it served as a starting point for Godard’s more thorough reconsideration of technique and convention in editing: years later, after his work had changed direction more than once, Godard
said of his editing technique in
Breathless:
“Thinking about it afterward, it gave me new ideas about montage.”
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B
REATHLESS
I
S NOTABLE
for still another kind of montage, the assembly of allusions and references to film history. Not only did Godard film
Breathless
in the style of an American film noir, he stocked it with citations from the American cinema.
Breathless
is replete with visual quotations from movies by Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, Anthony Mann, and from
The Enforcer
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(as well as from
Le Plaisir
by Max Ophüls). In lieu of credits—the film has none—the film bears a dedication to Monogram Films, an American “B-movie” studio; and the film shows posters for
Westbound
, by Budd Boetticher, a poster of Humphrey Bogart from
The Harder They Fall
(his last film), another poster for another western (starring Jeff Chandler) bearing the remarkable French title
Vivre dangereusement jusqu’au bout
(to live dangerously to the end), the original American title of which was
10 Seconds to Hell;
a clip from the sound track of Preminger’s
Whirlpool
. Michel Poiccard himself is obsessed with American movies and takes on the gestures and the attitudes, the perpetual pugnacity and casual misogyny of the noir hero, specifically, the sneer displayed on-screen by Humphrey Bogart, as well as an aptitude for violence that seemed to him to constitute the genre and its promise, or myth, of freedom.

All of Godard’s friends in the New Wave were deeply affected and influenced by the recent American cinema. However, the first films of the New Wave—those of Chabrol and Truffaut, as well as the early efforts of Rivette and Rohmer—hardly resembled it. As filmmakers, the group from
Cahiers
kept their relations with the films they loved tacit and implicit. Only Godard made a film that in story, in style, and in substance is directly derived from the American movies they admired.

Breathless
openly bore the marks of its director’s absorption of the history of cinema, and Godard went on to build his career as a filmmaker with an explicit and voracious aptitude for quotation. In
Breathless
, the technique only added to the immediacy of the effect, suggesting, as it did, that Godard dosed his film with quotations because they were what he was thinking about at the time of its making.

For Godard, the cinema’s ability to combine two ideas in one image made it better than writing as a representation of his thought processes. The technical complexities of the cinema were nonetheless obstacles to a spontaneity of expression comparable to that of a writer, but Godard’s unusual methods both made the medium more responsive to his immediate inclinations and made that spontaneity apparent in the film itself. The ultimate and most important effect of his decision to compose the dialogue, and to specify the
action, as close as possible to the time of the shoot, was to displace the film from being revelatory of the fictional characters to being principally revela-tory of Godard himself. Even as
Breathless
uncovers the psychology of its characters, it expounds the thoughts and preferences of Godard in the moment. The viewer’s crucial and primary emotional identification is not with any filmed character but with Godard. The rapid, even irrational, transitions and juxtapositions of mood and tone are the cinematic equivalent of Godard’s own stream of consciousness, one mind’s montage of the thousands of hours of cinema to which Godard had subjected himself, with which he had forged his identity.

And Godard was thinking not only about films, but also about books, paintings, and music, elements of culture directly transmitted through the film by citations in images or on the sound track. Indeed,
Breathless
bore the burden of Godard’s intense autodidacticism, with quotations from and references to literature (Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Aragon, Rilke, Françoise Sagan, Maurice Sachs), paintings (Picasso, Renoir, Klee), and music (Mozart and Bach). The pieces of paper that Pierret, the journalist, saw scattered around Godard’s plate of crudités included many quotations from literary sources that Godard had culled from his obsessive reading and which he liberally sprinkled throughout the film’s dialogue. The result was a first-person documentary of a distinctive, indeed a unique, sort: this first-person cinema invoked not the director’s experience but his presence.

And yet it was a presence that was defined as much by its displacement as by its manifestation. In this context, Godard’s obsessive quotation, his past thievery, and his passive reaction to actors and circumstances—all second-degree actions—all appear as part of the same phenomenon: parasitism, literally, feeding on the side, nourishing oneself from another’s product or earnings. Whether drawing from his grandfather or Beauregard, from the till at
Cahiers
or his pages of quotes, from the ecstasies of literature or the transcendent self-abnegation that was cinema, whether from the actors who peopled his film or the observed strangers in whose gestures Godard clad his actors, Godard as an original creator existed independently not at all.
Breathless
was both a work of existential engagement with the world—an engagement that was constant, essential, and involuntary, inasmuch as it was a collage of preexisting material—and therefore also a work of Sartrean bad faith, made by a thinker who did not think but was thought.

Breathless
is essentially the film of an adolescent, the film to which Godard had been building since his early determination to make movies; it marked both the end of his adolescence and its culmination, and it is over-filled with stored-up ideas and desires. (Years later, when Godard was asked
how he would account for the sense of urgency in
Breathless
, he answered, “Adolescence, youth, fear, despair, solitude.”)
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The film is infused with an exultation in despair, as seen in the dancelike movement of Belmondo to an inner dirge that he hears as up-tempo, or in his joy in his dark destiny, despite the gaudy ruin it promises. Truffaut saw it as the “saddest”
⁴⁵
of Godard’s films, as a film of “moral and physical unhappiness.”
⁴⁶
Critics less sophisticated than Truffaut recognized that the film transcended its own fictional or narrative contours to become a phenomenon, an act of self-assertion, a generational watershed.

Breathless
is the cornerstone film of the French New Wave because it is the one that explicitly claims the group’s intellectual heritage (American movies, modern literature, a polemical yet highly rhetorical critical style) while at the same time brandishing the group’s hectic, threadbare, disreputable social circumstances. As Godard said, “We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis the Fifteenth.”
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Breathless
identified the virtues and vices, the ideas and the practices of the New Wave with his own.

Moreover, with
Breathless
, Godard achieved for the cinema, himself, and his movement what Sartre had accomplished in the late 1940s for philosophy, himself, and existentialism: he made his movement the emblem of the times, defined his medium as the one of the moment, and personally became its exemplary figure. Godard instantly became the embodiment of cinema, the New Wave, intellectual fashion, and intellectualism as fashion. Sartre carried a generation with him in the name of the philosophy with which he was personally identified. Godard did the same for the cinema, his ideas about it, and himself; he not only depicted and enacted the struggles of his generation, he ignited its ambitions, turning it into a group that wanted nothing more than to make films, and to make them as he did.

T
HE SEMINAL IMPORTANCE
of the film was recognized immediately. In January 1960—prior to the film’s release—Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded “to encourage an auteur of the future.”
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Then, after successful test screenings to full houses in Lyon and Marseille,
Breathless
opened in Paris on March 16, 1960, not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters. In its first week of business, it attracted 50,095 spectators in those mere four theaters, and, in its entire Paris first run (which lasted seven weeks), 259,046 spectators. The eventual profit was substantial, rumored to be fifty times the investment. The film’s success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception. Godard’s new view of cinema and its broader implications were reflected, with a remarkable accuracy, in the reviews published at the time of its opening. Perhaps more than any other serious film in the history of
cinema,
Breathless
, as a result of its extraordinary and calculated congruence with the moment, and of the fusion of its attributes with the story of its production and with the public persona of its director, was singularly identifiable with the media responses it generated.

Balducci had arranged for notables in and out of the cinema to see
Breathless
. Jean-Paul Sartre (who remarked, “It’s really very beautiful”),
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Sophia Loren, Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, and Carlo Ponti all saw early screenings. The film was a conversation piece in sophisticated circles by the time it opened. The most vituperative rejections of the film were from the left-wing film journal
Positif
, where Louis Seguin accused the film of purveying a “mythology” that was “rightist.”
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But most reviewers were aware that they were in the presence of something original and important; one critic set the tone for the film’s epochal significance by referring back to Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 article prophesying the coming age of the “caméra-stylo,” the camera that a new generation of filmmakers would wield with the fluency, spontaneity, and intimacy with which writers write: Gérald Devries, in
Démocratie 60
, opined, “Here is, in fact, the first work authentically written with a caméra-stylo.”
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