Breathless

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Patricia is pregnant. Like the virgin mother-to-be in Hail Mary or the pop princess of Masculin Feminin contemplating a gruesome abortion (and unlike the desperate housewife in A Woman is a Woman), this young American has been knocked up - but her decision remains more ambiguous than that of the other two Godard heroines. The situation is doubly appropriate. For one, Breathless was probably the film, more than any other, which birthed the new cinema to dominate the next decade; for another, this is a movie uncertain and uneven in its style and story. Yet just as Patricia's fickleness and hesitation charm her beaux, so the movie's ragged, freefloating style impressed and excited an entire generation and held the coming epoch in thrall.

At times, one can have trouble figuring out why. Jean-Luc Godard is a brilliant filmmaker, but the intensely focused experimentalist who helmed Masculin Feminin or Weekend, wild yet precise in the manner of a jazz improvisationist, has not quite found his groove yet in Breathless. For better or worse, this remains the film's distinctive charm and provides it with the uniqueness that helps it to remain, to this day, the most popular and celebrated film in his oeuvre. It has an amiable looseness that would tighten up before long, a relaxed luxuriance best manifested in the captivating bedroom scene in which the characters' facades drop a bit and we glimpse the uncertain yet somewhat unconscious kids behind the masks.

Sixties Rising 1959 - 1962 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 13

The thirteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 13: Sixties Rising"

Sixties Rising

They called it a new wave. When a young boy skipped school and went for a spin, when party guests stood frozen as sundials in a chateau garden, when Anna Karina tossed her hair to and fro, it was hard to shake the image of a terrific tsunami crashing down upon an unsuspecting film world. There was the tremendous vitality of the images themselves: that whirling dervish seen through a dizzyingly subjective lens, those guests posed with gigantic shadows like something out of a Dali painting, the beautiful girl captured - or unable to be captured - by a handheld camera shooting casually on the street (contemporary audiences would have to wait for that particular image, as the film was banned; but there were dozens of others in the same spirit). Then there was something else, something beyond the visuals, as if the frame was a window through which one peered into a new state of ecstatic, thrilling consciousness. There was a certain je ne sais quoi in the air, and not just in France; all across Europe the promise of the late fifties was suddenly spreading its wings and soaring skyward.