Behind the scenes: the escape from Paris of a thief and his American girlfriend that changed the history of cinema

November 8, 202208:51

He is tired, in love, and decides to stop running away. But she doubts his love. Nothing would happen if he were not a criminal hunted for the murder of a policeman and she, a captivating but evanescent young American. And the story would be ordinary, almost trivial, if it weren’t for the fact that the film changed the course of cinema history. “There are films that are unlike anything that has been made before,” Francois Truffaut said of Breathlessthe film by Jean-Luc Godard that began one of the most important authorial trajectories of the seventh art and left Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg immortalized as that couple who escaped through Paris and assumed the inevitable mark of a cinephilia that became unique.

The film, in an enviable restored copy, opened the latest edition of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival as a tribute to its director –passed away last september– and it is part of the programming that recalls the icon that almost with its own existence marked the beginning and the end of the sea bream Nouvelle Vague French. “There are many JLG works that went through the festival. Last year we published a beautiful version/dialogue of and with The book of the image. Start this 37th edition with Breathless It seems to us a symbolic return to the principles of this tireless revolutionary, who always knew how to continue the search and stay true to himself. There are many people who will see it for the first time in a movie theater. In other words, he will see it for the first time”, says Fernando Juan Lima, president of the Mar del Plata Film Festival, excited after presenting, together with Pablo Conde, artistic director of the festival, the golden copy that he returned to Belmondo and Seberg at the big screen in the Auditorium. Godard was a filmmaker who endowed cinema with his own reflection on philosophy and built from his memorable debut feature an essay on the gaze and the very construction of the language of cinema.

Filming lasted almost a month. Breathless, between August 17 and September 15 mainly in Paris, with some added shots of the Côte d’Azur. That golden 1959 confronted Godard with the development of his debut feature after making several shorts and being one of the fundamental firms of the no less essential Cahiers du Cinéma. But contrary to the freshness that his mythical work seems to exude with the pulse of the camera in hand and the shot jumps that break spatial continuity, everything Breathless it is a careful engineering craft planned down to the millimeter. A revolutionary film that hid a careful elaboration. “I improvise, without a doubt, but with materials that I have had for a long time.

Over the years lots of things are gathered and suddenly they are introduced into what is being done”, Godard would say. The film that began shooting that August was based on a plot by Truffaut with dialogues that were improvised during filming and that had the advice of Claude Chabrol on technical aspects. “I had written the first scene (Jean Seberg on the Champs-Elysées) and, for the rest, I had an enormous amount of notes that corresponded to each scene”, confirmed Godard in dialogue with Jean Collet, Michel Delahaye, Jean-André Fieschi, André Labarthe and Bertrand Tavernier. However, the continuity breaks were suggested by a legendary filmmaker who participated in Breathless with a small role: Jean-Pierre Melville.

But Godard also surrounded himself with a formidable technical team that built the legend of Breathless behind the scenes. That was the case of the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, a montage supervised to the millimeter by the director (in charge of Cécile Decugis), and the sound climates of a score with which the great Martial Solal contributed to the innovative airs of the film: the film that made post-synchronized sound another of its trademarks of style. Everything was allowed, everything could be integrated into the film that had the camera in hand to save time and, with it, money. For this very reason, Coutard used ultrasensitive film to save on costly lighting fixtures. Austere, the production of the film could not count on the traveling car that certain actions demanded and that is why Coutard used a wheelchair to specify the camera movement as part of the action: “There was nothing else to do. We had nothing. We didn’t have time or money, and perhaps this was the fundamental reason that made us abandon the studios, shoot with the camera on our shoulders and barely light”, affirmed the photographer.

Embraced by a cinephilia that would end up erecting him as a standard, Godard was inspired by good morning sadness by Otto Preminger for the character of Jean Seberg, a kind of continuation of that. With the curse of great works, twenty-four years later Jim McBride rehearsed a remake of Breathless starring Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky that was as forgettable as everything unforgettable about the original film. Released on March 16, 1960, the romance between Michel and Patricia made cinema break into modernity. One that continues so alive and fresh but also seduces with the melancholy of the golden time gone by where everything was yet to be done and everything was yet to be invented.

Breathless is available on Qubit.tv.