Breathless

Breathless (1960) is about a young man who steals a car, shoots a policeman on the road, and the American woman he knows in Paris. Michel is a petty criminal doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart. Driving from Marseille to Paris he kills a policeman and enters the city. Patricia is an American student selling newspapers. He wants money from her, a place to sleep, and for her to run to Italy with him. She cannot decide. What the film is famous for is its editing. The image jumps in the middle of a scene: the same shot continues but a piece is missing. It is called the jump cut and it entered cinema here. But it arrived out of necessity rather than theory. Godard's cut ran about half an hour too long and had to come down. Rather than drop scenes, he cut pieces out of the middle of them; every scene stayed in the film and the length fell. A style was the side effect. The shooting came from the same necessity: a handheld camera, the operator seated in a wheelchair, real streets, available light, and dialogue dubbed afterwards. François Truffaut wrote the story; Claude Chabrol is credited as technical adviser. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg star. It was taken as the manifesto of the French New Wave and showed how low budget independent cinema could be made. It runs 90 minutes, in black and white. Good for: film history, the New Wave, and formal innovation. Less good for: the plot is thin, the characters are unpleasant, and the film is deliberately loose.