How Breathless personifies filmmaking feels like lighting an oil fire—it blazes through one incident after another. Girlie tabloids fill the screen, slipping in to reveal Jean-Paul Belmondo’s face. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, he peers out from under his hat and rubs his thumb across his lips. On a signal from a female accomplice, he steals a big old car parked by an American military man in town with his wife.
Audiences taste Godard’s rebellious style in a sequence where he hijacks the Hollywood genre mid-drive. The film surges forward with rapid shot changes as he shifts gears. When Belmondo speaks spontaneously, the camera instantly turns to the audience. It is like an auteur shooting down the French authorities when stopped for questioning. He goes on to Montparnasse, the legendary Campagne-Première street, where every breath feels like anarchy in the heart of Paris.
Breathless is practically the manifesto of the French New Wave. Godard handled the film like an appetizer—light but packed with flavor. In a 1957 investigation, L’Express called the generational influence of the movement “nebulous.” Anxiety, customs, and pleasures—all captured by Godard and the five critics of Cahiers du Cinéma—were at the heart of cinema’s new direction. Before the triumphs of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour at Cannes in 1959, Breathless sealed the movement’s legacy.
The film is aggressive yet indifferent, juvenile yet sophisticated. Under Godard’s direction, it takes on a unique style and personality, fully embracing his vision.
As many knew, Truffaut and Godard had already built their reputations as critics. Both challenged traditional ideas of what makes a great film. Rejecting Hollywood’s glossy productions and massive budgets, Godard championed artists over the industry. In his view, critics and studio heads ignored true creative minds within the Hollywood system. Instead of bloated, high-minded productions, he saw filmmaking as a space for personal vision—something more intimate, scaled-down, and independent.
He and Truffaut, along with other French New Wave directors, believed in the auteur structure: a film directly expresses the director’s imagination, just as books reflect their writers and paintings their artists.
Godard’s signature black comedy shines through Breathless, but the film also takes off in unexpected directions—playing with storytelling, personification, and plot. He resisted traditional studio systems with other New Wave filmmakers and Cahiers du Cinéma. This resistance partly stemmed from the flood of American wartime films that dominated Parisian theaters due to trade agreements. The New Wave generation grew up at the right moment to push back.
Young critics united against Hollywood’s heavy-handed, moralistic, big-budget approach to filmmaking. Godard, in particular, championed Westerns, noir, B-movies, and specialized genres. Breathless itself feels breathless—Truffaut’s early idea of a fast-paced gangster film reimagined on the streets of Paris.
Even though it is a trap, it is hard to resist getting lost in the filmmaking of Breathless—it just pulls you in. Falsehood is at the core of its style, but the protagonist’s entire act is not meant to make sense. He speeds down the highway, playing cops and robbers with a gun, only to end up stuck behind a gas station, fixing the road. The film unfolds like a daydream, set in a brightly lit travel agency where innocent police officers and subtropical Florida somehow become the neon glow of Parisian highways.
Breathless is fragmented but imaginative, and its structure complements the film’s technical style. It breaks the eyeliner, throws in random side characters, uses odd-timed close-ups, and relies on jump cuts to give the narrative a surreal, almost psychological quality. Standard editing cues are thrown out in favor of a more freeform cinematic language. This unpredictability underlines the protagonist’s struggle to find poetry in his own life.
However, the film’s attitude—its reckless energy—feels in sync with both the characters and the audience.
How Breathless plays with filmmaking is bold, but it is not just about being ambitious or experimental. It is also about the technical brilliance of its cast and crew. Godard knows exactly how comfortable Belmondo is with the film’s tempo. As Belmondo plays around on set, Raoul Coutard—the cinematographer—spends long hours in a cramped hotel room, coaching him and Jean Seberg. When a scene is nothing more than the passage of time between two actors, Coutard becomes Godard’s eyes and hands, capturing the moment with a raw, improvisational feel.
Though relatively new to feature films, Coutard had worked as a photographer during the Paris war games in Indochina in the 1950s. He learned how to capture a subject without forcing anything, without over-directing. Breathless plays with this approach—stuffing multiple rolls of film into the camera, experimenting with exposure, and bending the streets of Paris (and the actors themselves) into one cohesive frame.
The film’s absurdity takes shape during production. According to Godard, Breathless was never meant to be realistic. The noir elements in the film are deliberately dishonest, partly because he lacked traditional filmmaking skills—something he fully acknowledged; however, instead of seeing that as a limitation, he turned it into a strength. The film plays with cinematic fiction, blends it with raw human emotion, and captures moments with everyday life’s anonymity, rhythm, and spontaneity—all while keeping it stylishly artificial.
With light equipment and a small crew, Godard designed each scene on the day of the shoot, sketching ideas in a notebook as he went. However, That same spontaneity led to tension and chaos on set, ultimately becoming part of the film’s DNA.
Breathless received an explosive response—it was a film that permanently changed cinema. A young Godard once watched a film and left the theater, abandoning any notion of traditional studio filmmaking. Now, his film was doing the same to others. Its originality—in tone, character, and style—made conventional Hollywood films feel outdated overnight. With Breathless, Godard reached a turning point: a dirty yet oddly polite experiment that reshaped the language of film. Even in his later, more complex works, he would return to the contradictions that made Breathless a revolution in 1960.
Beyond its growing focus on historiographical imagery and memory, the film sharpens into a precise, almost reflexive lens that captured Western audiences’ attention in the 1960s. At the same time, it breaks away from conventional filmmaking, embodying the spirit of the New Wave and influencing everything from video games and painting to music, culture, literature, and, of course, cinema itself.
References
- Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2019). Film Art: An Introduction (12th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
- Godard, J.-L. (Director). (1960). Breathless [Film]. Les Films Imperia.
- Marie, M. (2003). The French New Wave: An Artistic School (R. Neupert, Trans.). Wiley-Blackwell.
- Neupert, R. J. (2007). A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2nd ed.). University of Wisconsin Press.
- Truffaut, F. (1985). The Films in My Life (L. Weinberg, Trans.). Da Capo Press.
