Breathless

50th ANNIVERSARY RESTORATION! NEW 35mm PRINT! ► As one oft-quoted estimation of Jean-Luc Godard’s significance has it, “There is the cinema before Godard, and the cinema after.” Easily the most important and influential filmmaker of the past fifty years, Godard is also, more than any other director, the cinema’s great modernist. Breathless, his debut feature, is one of the cinema’s watershed works — perhaps the most representative and important film of the French nouvelle vague, probably the most influential movie of the 1960s. Occasioned by Breathless’s 50th anniversary, this crisp new 35mm restoration, the first ever of Godard’s landmark, was supervised by Raoul Coutard, the film’s cinematographer, and features newly revised, newly translated subtitles. Simultaneously a playful parody of and sincere hommage to the American gangster film, Breathless stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, a charismatic small-time crook on the lam from the police in Paris, and Jean Seberg as Patricia, his ambivalent American girlfriend. The film’s use of handheld 35mm cameras, location shooting, and direct sound came to define New Wave aesthetics, as did its most radical technical innovation, the startling, disruptive use of elliptical editing and the jump cut. It is replete as well with the in-jokes, cinematic references, abrupt shifts of tone and mood, and Brechtian (soon to be known as Godardian) asides that would also become hallmarks of the New Wave. Five decades later, Breathless remains utterly engaging and remarkably vital cinema. "It stands apart from all that came before and has revolutionized all that followed" (James Monaco).