A small-time car thief kills a policeman and hides in Paris with an American student. He wants to persuade her to run to Italy with him. Godard's debut invented the style and techniques of the French New Wave, and it remains the most influential film of the 1960s.
Breathless is a 1960 crime and drama film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. This breakdown covers 4 techniques (1 editing and 3 narrative), each with the scene where you can see it. If you like how it is made, Monty Python and the Holy Grail uses several of the same techniques.
Cutting out bits of time within a continuous shot so the image suddenly jumps forward. This adds energy and urgency, shortens the scene and reminds you the film is constructed.
How this film uses it
Godard and editor Cécile Decugis made the jump cut famous. They cut within a scene to remove dead time, so the picture jumps forward. The rhythm that results feels closer to thinking than to watching. The cuts in the car and apartment scenes set the pace of the film. They also say that cinema doesn't need to pretend to be continuous. With the jump cut, the film openly admits it is something made.
Where to see it
Michel driving the stolen car. The cuts inside a single continuous drive remove seconds. What is left is a rhythm that matches his scattered, doomed energy.
Having a character look into the camera and speak to the audience, also called breaking the fourth wall. It makes you feel like their confidant and reminds you this is a film.
How this film uses it
Patricia glances at the camera once, deliberately and without explanation. The look breaks the film's fiction and makes you part of what you are watching, which turns out to be a film about watching a man and a woman. Godard uses the look to question how you know what you are seeing, and he plays it completely straight.
Where to see it
Patricia's glance to camera. The film admits that it is a film, and suddenly your own act of watching is the thing under examination.
Setting up a film to look like a familiar genre, then breaking that genre's rules on purpose. You have to rethink what kind of story you are watching.
How this film uses it
Breathless looks like an American gangster film: a criminal on the run, a femme fatale, a chase. Godard uses those conventions as a frame and then takes them apart from the inside. Michel has no glamour. He is sulky and small. Patricia's betrayal is a modern woman making a choice, which is a long way from the femme fatale's treachery. The genre is only where the film's thinking starts.
Where to see it
The ending. Michel dies without the dignity or release a gangster film would give him. The conventions the genre promised never arrive.
Giving the narrator a voice so intimate, witty and self-aware that you get pulled into their point of view. You find yourself going along with things you would normally reject.
How this film uses it
Breathless has no voiceover. Michel talks out loud instead, to Patricia, to himself and at one point straight to the camera. His running commentary covers his calculations, his delusions and his habit of casting himself as a Bogart figure. It is seductive because it is honest about that self-flattery. Godard gets you to like Michel while knowing you shouldn't. The narration works on you the same way Michel works on Patricia.
Where to see it
Michel talking to the camera as he drives the stolen car. His commentary carries out the seduction it describes, and you get drawn into a point of view you should resist.
Questions
Breathless: quick answers
What filmmaking techniques does Breathless use?
CineCode breaks down 4 techniques in Breathless (1960): Jump Cut Propulsion, Direct Address, Genre Subversion and Voiceover as Seduction.
Who directed Breathless?
Jean-Luc Godard directed Breathless, released in 1960. CineCode also covers Contempt (1963).
What films are similar to Breathless?
Films that share techniques with Breathless include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Parasite (2019), Fight Club (1999).
