À bout de souffle (1960)

When a cinéphile talks about the French Revolution, you can be fairly certain that he is not alluding to that messy business that took place in France in the latter years of 18th Century, in which aristocrat hunting became the national sport and the country acquired a constitution and a catchy anthem.  No, what he has in mind is that other revolution, the one that hit French cinema with the force of a tsunami and tornado combined in the late 1950s thanks to the emergence of a dynamic new breed of film director who sought to make cinema truer, bolder and more relevant to contemporary audiences.  One of the leading figures in this French New Wave was Jean-Luc Godard, a former critic on the influential review paper Les Cahiers du cinéma, who had an impact of seismic proportions with his debut feature, À bout de souffle.  When asked what the film was supposed to be about, Godard simply said that it was a documentary about Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

From the end result, it is hard to believe that À bout de souffle started out as nothing more than a conventional gangster film.  The basic storyline came from François Truffaut, who had developed it for his first feature but later rejected it in favour of another, which became Les 400 coups (1959).  Truffaut passed the plot concept over to Jean-Luc Godard, who was stuck for an idea for his first film.   The story concept was not one that impressed Godard, but two aspects appealed to him: the notion of a man obsessed with death and the association with classic film noir.  From this basic premise, Godard was able to pursue some of the themes that would become central to his oeuvre - existentialism (fatalism versus free-will) and power struggles in male-female relationships. 

What started out as a modest tribute to Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep ended up as something far more profound - one man’s search for identity and meaning, seen through the distorting prism of a gangster thriller played as a romantic comedy.  It was not the subject of the film that mattered, though.  What was far more significant was how it was put together.  It was as if its director had deliberately set out to break every single rule in the professional filmmakers’ handbook.  The straitjacket that had throttled creativity in French cinema for the past few decades was ripped open by Godard in this film, with as much frenzy and dramatic impact as Hitchcock’s carving up of Janet Leigh in Psycho.  Cinema would never be the same again. 

In view of the splash À bout de souffle made, you would think that Jean-Luc Godard knew exactly what he had in mind before he started making the film.  The reality was that Godard had only a vague idea of what the film was meant to be about when he began filming in August 1959 and pretty well made it up as he went along.  (This is not as revolutionary as its sounds - many of the films in the silent era were made this way, including most of Chaplin’s early shorts.)   Instead of a script, all that Godard had was a few sketchy notes which allowed him to give his actors a broad outline of what he wanted them to perform each day.   Although he was not asking his actors to improvise, Godard did give them considerable freedom, something that his lead, Jean-Paul Belmondo, found extremely liberating.

Belmondo had previously worked with Godard on his humorous short film Charlotte et son Jules and had turned down the opportunity to work with Julien Duvivier on Boulevard (1960) because he favoured Godard’s directing technique.  Belmondo was, at this stage in his career, still an unknown commodity, and had only been seen in small supporting roles.  It was for this reason that producer Georges de Beauregard insisted that Godard cast an established actress for the female lead, so the director selected Jean Seberg on the strength of her performance in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse (1958).  At the time, Seberg was under contract with Columbia Pictures.  When Godard offered Columbia 12,000 dollars or a percentage of the profits to release the actress, the studio opted for the former, convinced that the film would flop. 

Not having to work to a script or a schedule gave Godard considerable freedom, which he exploited fully, although neither of his lead actors had much confidence that he would end up with a coherent film.  À bout de souffle was filmed entirely in Paris in real locations using a lightweight Eclair Cameflex camera, which allowed for some interesting tracking shots with the camera operator (Raoul Coutard) following Belmondo and Seberg through the busy Parisian locations with the camera mounted on his shoulder.  There was no provision for lighting, so the entire film was shot in natural light, achieving a near-documentary feel which other directors of the nouvelle vague would emulate in their films.  Godard and his crew would turn up at various locations (including the offices of Les Cahiers du cinéma) and start filming without requesting permission, not bothering about the passers-by who gawped at the camera whilst a scene was being recorded.  Notice also how there is absolutely no reaction from the surrounding Parisians in the sequence at the end of the film where Belmondo is chased down a street by his guntoting enemies.  These little touches of unreality, splinters in the fourth wall, reveal how easily we are taken in by the filmmaker’s art, how willingly we accept the reality of what we see on the screen.  They also serve to remind us that reality can itself be an illusion.  Barely ten minutes into the film, we know that Belmondo’s character (Michel) has all but lost his sense of reality; he is living in a dream-like fantasy - perhaps he even imagines that he is only acting in a movie?  Maybe he really does believe he is Bogart - once he has taken the bullet, he’ll be able to walk off the set and shoot another picture the next day.  But is this delusion or reality?  Could this be what life really is - when we die, we just get up and play another role, live another life, ad infinitum?

After the month-long shoot, Godard then had the arduous task of editing the film into a marketable proposition.  His initial cut ran to three hours, which was unacceptable for a theatrical release.  Jean-Pierre Melville (the director who was probably Godard’s biggest influence and who appears in the film in a cameo role) suggested removing everything that was not relevant to the main plot.  This would undoubtedly have resulted in a far more conventional gangster thriller, but Godard had not set out to make this kind of film.  Instead, he did pretty well the exact opposite of what Melville advised, dispensing with most of the scenes that deserved to be there (on narrative grounds) and keeping the rest.  Because no dialogue had been recorded whilst the film was being shot, this had to be added during post-production - by this stage, Godard had got round to writing the script.  (How many other filmmakers write the script after completing the filming?)  Whilst Godard’s inspired use of the jump-cut is an essential part of the film’s aesthetic and fits because it reveals the main protagonist’s fractured psychology through a jarring temporal distortion, it is likely that this was an entirely fortuitous outcome of the way in which the director chose to make his film.  This is precisely the kind of creative jolt that tends to get smothered by the conventional approach to filmmaking, which requires everything to be mapped out in advance.  Being a great fan of jazz, Godard hired the great jazz pianist and composer Martial Solal to provide the film’s score, another touch of modernity which helped to set it apart from other contemporary French films.

The release of À bout de souffle in March 1960 was a pivotal moment in film history.  Most of France’s leading critics were ecstatic in their praise for the film and many saw it as a turning point in French cinema, the day on which the temple of comformity came tumbling down.  Although today’s film historians will tell us that the French New Wave began two years previously, with debut features from Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, À bout de souffle was the first film of the nouvelle vague to show just what it represented - a decisive and irreversible break with the cinema of the past.  The film was not only groundbreaking cinema, it was also a commercial success, attracting an audience of two million in France on its first release.  In addition, it won Godard two prestigious awards - the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1960 and the Prix Jean Vigo.

As well as putting Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Belmondo on the map, launching two cinema legends on their respective careers, À bout de souffle altered everyone’s perception of what a film should be and how films should be made.  The conventions which most filmmakers had been slavishly adhering to for the past twenty or so years were exposed for what they were - unnecessary constraints that inhibited creative freedom and denied audiences new and exciting cinema-going experiences.  It was the dawn of a new age - the age of the auteur.  What happened in France in the 1960s would be repeated in other countries around the world, including the United States.  The rich diversity that we see in cinema today (particularly in France) can be seen as a consequence of the celluloid revolution that was instigated by Jean-Luc Godard and his New Wave contemporaries in the early 1960s, and the film that rang the changes most stridently was À bout de souffle, a film so radical, so subversive that it left audiences and critics breathless.

© James Travers 2011


With Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) the most celebrated film ever made, and probably the more influential of the two, Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle--literally, "out of breath"; in the States, irrelevantly called Breathless-helped  establish and define, for themselves and others, the nouvelle vague-the ripping movement that stormed French cinema, overthrowing the reigning ‘Tradition of Quality’ and its academic, refined, meticulously crafted objets d’art.  The movement denoted freedom: freedom from the constraints of conventional, worked-through and tied-up narrative; freedom of personal expression; the freedom of roving and penetrating inquiry-and  formally encompassing all these, a freedom of camera motion scarcely seen since Dziga Vertov took to the streets in the ‘20s to record the pulsating synergy of Soviet life.

These young upstarts drew inspiration from Renoir’s lifetime of personal expression, from Hollywood professionalism and (especially in screwball comedies, westerns and noirs) glints of anarchy, and from Rossellini’s use of camera-for instance, in Germany, Year Zero (1947)-as character, even the main character, rather than as mere observer.  Theirs was another French Revolution, sweeping out such "royalists" as Autant-Lara  and Clément, who at the time were enthroned as arbiters of filmmaking form and taste.

Time doesn’t march; it sprints!  Now, forty years after its arrival, A bout de souffle still astonishes; as in the case of Potemkin, its formal and technical excitement doesn’t wane.  Too, the film still exerts a zinging fascination with a theme whose currency hasn’t faded: our dynamic relationship with the movies we watch.  How does the interaction between us and film shape and detail us?  While freeing us from some of the conventionalism of ordinary life, does it perhaps tie us to another set of conventions derived from films?  Are we who we (think we) are?  Or is our sense of self so informed by influences from films that who we (think we) are is a distortion we are either dimly aware of or unaware of? 

Another related issue is the extent to which films have so conditioned our perception of reality that we sometimes address this perception as though it were reality.  We may even lose ourselves in the discrepancy between our perception and reality.

Godard’s A bout de souffle opens with Michel, a young hoodlum, standing on a street in Marseilles.  Several times throughout the film he will repeat the gesture he now makes: in the manner of Humphrey Bogart he rubs a thumb across his lips, announcing--to himself as well as us-he’s  a "tough guy."  Tough enough!  Once his accomplice gives him the all-clear signal, Michel steals a car; but before speeding away, despite her pleas (and her help), he blows off this accomplice, saying, "I’m in a rush."  Michel is on his way to Paris to unload the car and be paid; he needs the money to beat it to Italy with Patricia, the American girl in Paris he loves (or says he loves because that’s what guys say in movies).  Driving, he talks out loud to himself; the image cuts back and forth among his mashed-in mug, the tree-lined road the car zips through, and the adjacent countryside.  (A camera is inside the car, and two others are strapped to the car, one on the front, one on the side.)  The sum is all of a rush; the title of the film, Out of Breath, begins to sink in.  We’re not passively watching this film; we feel we’re in it for the ride.  Still we’re caught up short when Michel turns to us to say, "If you don’t like the sea, and you don’t like the mountains, and you don’t like the big city, then"-well, the English subtitle I saw smoothed out the French-"go hang yourself."  Now we, too, have been blown off by this guy, and we don’t mind.  But something subversive has just happened; Michel’s addressing us reverses the roles of film and audience: briefly, we’ve become the movie that Michel is watching and (as adolescents of the day were known to do) is himself talking back at.  We’re the show, as Godard slyly makes his point that films and audiences are "[o]pposed mirrors each reflecting each." 

Having found a gun in the glove compartment of the stolen vehicle, Michel is no one to cross.  The cops are after him, and he’s run off the road.  An officer approaches; Michel blows him away.  The kid is not just a car thief anymore.  Now he dashes across the countryside in the direction of the City of Lights.  With a quick cut he is a backseat hitchhiker-this boy who, on the road, had disparaged two girl hitchhikers, refusing to stop for them.  But Michel is full of tough-guy talk when it comes to girls.  And now he’s a cop killer.

My summary can’t do justice to this marvelous opening movement which brings into play all sorts of ideas.  Plainly, Michel’s toughness is an act.  But when the ‘act’ is all one has, it can settle in, take over, and determine behavior even in the worst way.  Now that he has killed, moreover, there may be no chance to come across anything new out of which Michel can fashion or refashion a persona.  In other words, he may be stuck with the image of himself he has taken from movies.  Now his whole young life will be a mad dash until he is literally out of breath-shot dead by the police who (we know from movies) must inevitably catch up with him.  There is so much here that brilliantly interprets violent adolescent behavior-especially when one extends the textbook for creating one’s persona to include venues of popular culture other than movies.

There is, for me, an even more intriguing dimension to the opening which also resonates throughout the entire film.  Godard uses the Hollywood gangster film and its conventions to provide a powerful sense of Michel’s crisis of identity.  The starting point is again the boy’s reliance on movies for the personality or self-image he has managed to compose.  (Underscoring this reliance is the fact that, while Patricia mentions her parents, Michel never mentions his.)  Let’s face it: Michel is an aimless small-time hoodlum-a punk-who ends up shooting to death a cop for no better reason than he happens to stumble across a gun.  I appreciate that he doesn’t want to be caught and sent to prison; but the situation is absurd, nearly arbitrary, pointing up (for us) how unhelpful to him his reliance on movies may be.  This boy has no script. In the old movies James Cagney or whoever was never clueless; he had a definite plot which tended to locate, even fix, him in a predictable sequence of events.  But the off-the-cuff air of the movie Michel finds himself in more or less casts him adrift; and the "cool" he exhibits resembles not so much Keatsian negative capability as whistling in the dark.  In this context, his nonchalance, even his apparent apathy, provides as index of his stress as well as a window on our own negotiations with film influences that may have insinuated themselves into our consciousness even more subtly, and with an outcome as unhelpful to us as their counterparts have been to Michel. 

Godard may be suggesting, "In our brave new, post-Hiroshima world the old ways have blown apart; it’s a whole new movie, so don’t look to the old rules for guidance."  After all, no matter what consolation he derives from identifying with gangster movies, Michel is no gangster.  His only connection to that world is a fence; certainly he belongs to no gang.  How could he ever?  Possibly anxious from their borrowings from the same movies, such associates might at any minute puncture Michel’s mask, his patchwork of emulation and impersonation; then where would he be?  His "cool" would become fodder for their ridicule-a fate often perceived by adolescents as worse than death.  Michel’s predicament is both comical and grotesque.  On the one hand, by so poorly reflecting the image of a gangster the old films project Michel is effectively cut off from the genre that has formed and now feeds his posture and attitude; on the other, his continual reliance on this genre, besides likely distorting his view of reality, cuts him off as well from whatever possibilities exist that he might otherwise use to fashion another, perhaps more grounded sense of self.  In this light, Michel’s situation compares unfavorably with Godard’s own.  Godard can make a film, say, A bout de souffle, in order to discover-if you will, create-a sense of who he is that liberates him from the enormous influence of his filmgoing experience even while, bending it to his will, he draws from this experience; but Michel’s "self-expression," stealing cars, is a poor substitute that in fact cannot help but deepen the rut the boy is in.  May not Godard be looking at Michel and saying, "There but for the grace of making films go I"?

Michel’s dream is to flee to Italy.  There, of course, he would be an immigrant.  This suggests another aspect of the ’30s gangster film: denied access to the 
mainstream, a despised immigrant resorting to the underground business of organized crime as a means of moving on up.  By contrast, Michel-a disorganized criminal-is headed nowhere, not even to Italy, it turns out.  Surviving him will be his girlfriend, Patricia, a visiting American student who will make it to Italy, her Italian surname, Franchini, suggests.

In some ways Patricia is Michel’s mirror-image, someone incompletely formed as yet, in her case, rather than looking to films, looking to the girl in a Renoir painting poster for guidance on her own appearance.  Godard stresses this mirror imaging of the two main characters by having them on a number of occasions look into one another’s eyes; the two even have a staring contest.  Nevertheless, Patricia isn’t nearly so adrift as Michel.  For instance, she receives money from home that helps her sustain her existence abroad.  Too, she is much more articulate than Michel, whose speech amounts to repetitive schtick-one more index of his juvenile insecurity.  But these differences between them helps us understand them both.  Because she is more verbal, for example, she can articulate things about them both that Michel can’t (or won’t) articulate about himself.  In effect, she speaks for him as well as herself.

Four of her pertinent remarks follow:
 

• I want you to love me, but at the same time I don’t want you to.I love my freedom also.
• I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.
• It’s sad to fall asleep.  [Falling asleep] separates.  Even if you’re lying together, when you’re asleep you’re alone.
• I want to know what’s behind that mask of yours.

Lonely, confused about themselves and others, desperate to know ’the truth’ about their feelings, the pair are in no sense adults, nor are they on any track that might get them to adulthood, no matter how many geographic moves they make.  Right after she makes the third remark quoted above, about the sadness of separation in sleep, Patricia turns to us, showing the same need for us as Michel has shown.  Why us?  Because we, the audience, her reality, project her fantasy, her motive, of assuaging loneliness; and the self-reflexivity of the film corresponds, in part, to this sore selfconsciousness afflicting Patricia and Michel.  This, in turn, may reflect some of our own feelings vis-à-vis the "reality" that films generally represent to us- but not this film, not Godard’s, whose distancing devices permit us to see at work a process that other films make us a part of.  Moreover, Patricia’s utterances, including the four just quoted, often are pronouncements that sound suspiciously like movie dialogue-again, not a failure in the writing but a means of revealing the influence that movies have had on these two kids.  At best this influence is a mixed blessing; for, while the films they watch, or the art they look at, or the pop music they listen to, help them to chart or invent themselves, because directed by so powerful a force outside themselves this self-invention, or "self-discovery," may be a distortion of who they really are.  At least, we along with Godard worry that this is so.

A bout de souffle projects an aching sense of wanting to know.  Godard himself is trying to pierce the masks of his characters to sound out the reality, if any, that lies underneath.  Patricia’s remark to Michel, "I want to know what’s behind that mask of yours," is ironic in three ways: (1) Patricia herself often appears enigmatic; (2) it seemingly takes forever for her to decide that she loves Michel; and (3) standing over his bulleted corpse at the end, she adopts-by absorption? assimilation?-Michel’s mask, as her duplication of his Bogart lip-rubbing gesture discloses.  Her earlier remark now achieves brilliant clarity; she had also meant, "I want to know what’s behind my mask."  As do we.  As does Godard.  In terms of his own mask.

Some feel that they know what lies behind Patricia’s front: a little bitch.  This misinterpretation is based on two pieces of evidence: firstly, after announcing, "I hate squealers," rather than accompanying Michel to Italy she turns him into the police, who viciously kill him; secondly, Michel’s own dying words seem to brand her as such.  However, it is a mistake to view Patricia through the convention of the femme fatale when the film as a whole probes and pierces such movie conventions.  The pertinent facts in context follow.  One, the girl is confused and quite undone by Michel’s lack of response when she finally does declare her love for him.  Two, yes, she phones the police, because she’s in as thoughtless a rush to stay in Paris without Michel as Michel, earlier, had been to leave Marseilles without the accomplice who so obviously adored him.  But she tells Michel that she has done so; it is he who tarries beyond the limit of his own safety, doubtless feeling hurt and betrayed and therefore summoning a full draught of his stupid adolescent bravado.  (Make what you will of the fact that Godard himself plays the first soul to alert the police of Michel’s whereabouts.)  Three, Patricia is anything but heartless when she runs out after Michel during his final foot-run from the police.  Four, throughout the film, as part of his insecure mask, his inveterate "cool," Michel has casually referred to girls as "bitches"; but his dying word, deguelasse, meaning filthy, vile, is uttered neither angrily nor bitterly but affectionately-a fact that the police (as verbally fixated, rather than visually sensitive, as some filmgoers) fail to relay to Patricia when they translate for her, as little bitch, the slang word that isn’t a part of her rudimentary French vocabulary.  Five, yes, yes, the closing shot shows Patricia’s face fully reflecting her feeling that she’s damnable for what she did.  So?  Her capacity to feel remorse and guilt is proof of her humanity, not a lack of it.  Six, c’mon, neither she nor Michel is an actual being; they’re characters in a film-and, at that, in a film whose distancing techniques constantly stress the fact.  Seven, these characters are, as noted earlier, stamped with a basic likeness, a shared identity that makes them, according to the script, joint executors of Michel’s fate and joint recipients of it.  Michel’s finish is Patricia’s finish, too.  No wonder the image with which Godard leaves us isn’t a happy face.

Patricia is no more a bitch-whatever that means-than Michel is a wanton thug.  Rather, they are both in some critical sense one, making the gap between them-which Patricia’s not comprehending Michel’s dying word encapsulates-an index of their incompletion and self-dissociation.  Godard is saying that movies-in general, popular culture-help to create this cognitive and emotional gap while also, in complex fashion, functioning to negotiate and bridge the gap while at the same time, adding to the complexity, widening and deepening the gap.  Thus he employs techniques which give form to the dissociation-this gap.  For instance, his use of unconventional narrative implies its discrepancy with the more conventional plot arrangements of most other films before his and since.  There is also the discrepancy between how his characters behave, and why, and the relatively spelled-out ways that characters in conventional films behave.  And there is another, electrifying technique that Godard employs (though doesn’t invent) towards the same suggestive end as the others-a technique with which A bout de souffle has become all but synonymous: the jump-cut.  Simply stated, the jump-cut is the visual jerk that results when consecutive frames are deleted from the imaging of a continuous action within the same shot and the same scene.  Indeed, this technique formally embodies all the ideas I have touched on here, and it operates, also, as a Brechtian distancing device, stressing the film’s analytical bent, by snapping us, the audience, into an analytical mode of attention.

The film’s most moving shot is also its most famous: the traveling shot at his back when, bulleted by the police, Michel stumbles ahead to his end on a Paris street.  Here, as elsewhere, Godard is invaluably aided by Raoul Coutard’s fresh, light, unaffected black-and-white cinematography-see, for its antecedents, Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924) and, a greater film than even A bout de souffle, The Man with a Movie Camera (1928)-and by Martial Solal’s quick, dramatic music.  But the impact of this shot, and of the death scene that follows, derives most of all from the cumulative passion of Godard’s humanistic vision and from young Jean-Paul Belmondo in his stunning, seamless, starmaking role of Michel.  How good Belmondo is still with us, still adding to his remarkably wide range of roles on both stage and screen; alas, Jean Seberg!  Hounded viciously to her end by J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., Seberg left us long ago, at age 40.  As Patricia she is terrific; like Dietrich’s Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), with each fresh viewing her performance mellowingly grows in complexity and ambiguity.  A bout de souffle is the one performance of hers that has since absorbed her own tragic finish, in no small part because reality, an ironist on this occasion, has seen fit to reverse her and Belmondo’s fates in the film. 

François Truffaut, whom we also have lost (to cigarettes, though, not politics), is credited with the film’s script; in fact, Godard himself prepared what script there was from a story idea that his friend culled from a news item.  (Truffaut lent his name to give the film a professional leg up.)  These two would not remain friends forever; Godard came (rightly) to believe that Truffaut betrayed the nouvelle vague by permitting his own appropriation by the bourgeois enemy, facile entertainment rather than penetrating, probing art.  (There was more, too, to their falling-out.)  Now Seberg’s suicide isn’t the only sadness that this first feature of Godard’s has come to absorb; for the rupture of their friendship, left permanent by Truffaut’s death at 52 (my age), the film also accommodates, driving Out of Breath’s cool, analytical beauty into the trembling heart of all of us.

© Dennis Grunes 2001

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