A Bout de Souffle = Breathless (Reserve Print)

Michel, on the run after shooting a policeman, is betrayed by his girlfriend, Patricia, an expatriate American. The plot is drawn from the ‘B’ crime thriller (the film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, Hollywood’s all-B movie studio) and Godard pays homage to Hollywood’s action genres but his free approach to narrative and stylistics made this the most original and influential of the early New Wave films. The theme of the limits of personal freedom on the boundary between anarchism and nihilism emerges almost casually. The sense of dislocation is most obvious in Godard’s use of the jump cut, a device which he rarely, if ever, used again although he retained the effect. A more accurate translation of the title is ‘out of breath’ rather than the more romantic ‘breathless’.

Credits: Producer, Georges de Beauregard ; director, writer, Jean-Luc Godard ; photography, Raoul Coutard ; music, Martial Solal.
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roger Hanin, Daniel Boulanger, Richard Balducci.