Godard shot Breathless like a newspaper, then cut it like a fever
In twenty-three chaotic days in 1959, Jean-Luc Godard turned a real car-theft killing into a jump-cut crime romance. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg wandered Paris with almost no lights, a noisy handheld camera, and dialogue scribbled in an exercise book no one else could see. France still bought more than two million tickets.
Breathless was Godard's first feature and Belmondo's breakout. Michel Poiccard, a brash thief who worships Hollywood gangsters, steals a car in Marseille, kills a motorcycle policeman on the Route nationale 7, and flees to Paris to find Patricia Franchini, an American student hawking a U.S. paper along the city's grand avenue. She wavers between desire and dread while he hides in apartments and hotels, chasing money he is owed. When she finally tips the police, he refuses to run and is shot in the back on rue Campagne-Première.
The story began as a brief Truffaut spotted about Michel Portail, who in November 1952 stole a car, killed officer Grimberg, and had an American journalist girlfriend. Truffaut and Claude Chabrol drafted a treatment; Godard pitched it to producer Georges de Beauregard after Chabrol and Truffaut endorsed him from Cannes in May 1959. Seberg took fifteen thousand dollars—one-sixth of the budget—while Godard wrote as he filmed, telling Truffaut it was about a boy who thinks of death and a girl who does not.
Raoul Coutard shot nearly everything handheld on Ilford HP5 still stock pushed from 400 to 800 ASA, using an Éclair Cameflex that forced almost total post-dubbing. Godard wheeled Coutard in a wheelchair instead of laying tracks, hid him under packages in a postal cart, and filmed without permits. Jump cuts, often credited as New Wave invention, largely emerged in the edit under Cécile Decugis; Andrew Sarris later read them as the empty gap between moral choices. Critic Pauline Kael judged it the crucial New Wave import for American screens, and Sight & Sound polls keep ranking it among the greatest ever made.
Source: Breathless (1960 film)
