Abstract
Abstract The following article frames a particular case study: Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), referenced in the paper with its American title, Breathless. Foraging through the dense and sophisticated thicket of narrative, visual and textual features, the present study will attempt to untangle the overall intrinsic complexity of Godard’s film, as it exceeds simple commonalities between genre conventions or traditional stylistic approaches. The abrasive dialectical opposition that Breathless enacts against classical storytelling is indeed central to the specific cluster that can be examined under the labels of “experimental cinema”, “auteur cinema”, “art cinema”, predicated on Godard’s abundant departures from cinematic (mainstream) norms. The methodology adopted in the article will encompass both a cultural studies approach and the visual strategies of textual analysis from the perspective of film studies. This will spur a close examination of Godard’s directorial style, paying attention to a rich plethora of technical devices inscribed within salient sequences and offset against the matrix of creative options presented by the French Nouvelle Vague.
Highlights
Background to the film and its revolutionary statusJean Luc Godard’s Breathless can be considered, in many ways, as a highly significant and remarkable New Wave film and as a crucial landmark in film history
Every account of Godard’s film as a canonical New Wave picture must bear in mind the fact that Godard’s entire oeuvre has intended to set the standards for a new aesthetic, but primarily that the film has tried to explore an unknown continent in the aesthetics of cinema in general
By smashing the boundaries of the conventionally filmable, Breathless is both representative of the New Wave aesthetics and unique in this context
Summary
Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless can be considered, in many ways, as a highly significant and remarkable New Wave film and as a crucial landmark in film history. The point of this essay is engaged with the dual nature of the film, which is as both a vehicle of the New Wave’s spontaneity and as the most revolutionary work within this context. In this respect, I shall focus on both the narrative structure and the overall style of the film, highlighting the great unconventionality and freshness of Godard’s mise-en-scene and cinematic language. To grasp how the film works (both diegetically and extradiegetically) one should focus on Godard’s aesthetic agenda and directorial sensibility, in order to see how the film showcases its trailblazing cinematic language
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