** This post is written by Julien R. Gagnier from the University of Toronto.**

Exuding rare creativity, youth rebellion and downright existential coolness, Breathless is, by all measure, a great little film. Screened as part of the Nouvelle Vague retrospective, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature represents the first international breakthrough of the movement that would later revolutionize the way films are made, seen, and ultimately, enjoyed. The year is 1960 and in the dark screening rooms, “Le Cinéma de Papa” (Dad’s Cinema) had been successfully criticized on celluloid by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows a year earlier at Cannes as a vestige of the past: an archaic delivery of experiences far removed from the French reality and the evolution of film. With the advent of Breathless, the medium now seemed to have so much more to offer than the polite, ‘conventional’ filmmaking of Duvivier, Carné and other directors of the ‘tradition of quality’—a term used to wage a war of cinematic principles and definitions. Suddenly, there was no right or wrong method in making a good film, only new and more creative ones, exploring a reality that had been there all along yet nonetheless ignored—a rebellion that bore resemblance to the neo-realist movements in Italy with a jolt of Hollywood innovation best represented by the cinema of Chaplin, Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Ray and Welles, divorced from the formulaic and instead, expressing the characteristic auteurship as a driving force in style, complexity and most importantly, content (An excellent essay by Brad Deane of the Cinematheque explores the movement in much greater depth here http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca/programme.aspx?programmeId=259&page=1).

But then, what was so unconventional about Godard? His first feature is populated by the ‘accidental’ filmmaking that gave other Cahiers du Cinéma critics-turned-directors—Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette—their own language. But it was arguably Godard’s playful, minimalist and undeniably subversive style that best embodied the iconoclastic power of the movement. Breaking every ‘rule’ he had learned throughout his childhood watching movies, Godard helped pioneer the editing practise of the jump cut and triumphantly returned to the roots of a spontaneous cinema that recalls the efforts of Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929) but more precisely, that of Roberto Rosselini’s as seen in Rome, Open City (1945), where ‘street photography’ attributed a sense of identity and relevance to the camera’s voyeurism in the film; no longer was the lens strictly a window to the events, but was also itself key to their unfolding and understanding.

In this light, Breathless speaks volumes; in a deceptively simple story, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) steals a car, kills a police officer, roams Paris and finds a girl, Patricia (the stunning Jean Seberg). Michel also obsesses over Humphrey Bogart and mimics him accordingly. Godard’s approach in delivering this homage to American gangster films of a Frenchman and an American girl in search of love explores motifs that are key to his criticism of cinema: Michel is the disorganized criminal—never quite on par with his predecessors and older colleagues yet accepting of it. Similarly, Godard seeks renewal rather than a return to the old form, even if it means embracing the limitations of the medium insofar as it true to its subjects: this, in fact, is what derives the charm of the film. Forced to steal to finance his films, Godard also allegedly borrowed budget-minimizing techniques from director Jean-Pierre Melville (who takes the role of a famous novelist in the film) such as using wheelchairs as camera dollies. He also borrowed Melville’s world of elegant crime and throws Michel at the edges of the very underworld that was first explored in Bob le Flambeur (1955), in one instance asking if the titular character can spare him some cash, only to be told that he is in jail. Time has passed between the two films, both in reality and in fiction: this is something to remember. Is this the case of homage, replacement, or extension of the genre? Arguably, all three: Godard seeks essentially to free the craft of filmmaking from its academic and aesthetic pretences, thus leaving it bare as a cinema that, as he claims, presents “things as they are.” In the process, he creates a destabilizing, unusual yet exciting cinema that only he—in continuing his critical exercise from the Cahiers, only this time, by directing—can articulate. It is safe to say that such a methodology was emblematic of the French New Wave as a no holds barred belief in a right to make films that confronted the pre-established order of academic filmmaking; it was an assertion of relevance in a generation that longed to express its own experiences—a statement of freedom. Accordingly, Godard has pushed the limits of what cinema has come to mean and we are indebted to him for daring to be different.

Julien R. Gagnier is the editor of the film magazine Next Projection. He is also co-founder and president of the Next Projection Film Society—an organization created at the University of Toronto in 2007 that promotes film appreciation and criticism among students and other Toronto cinephiles through screenings and speaker engagements.