Safe to say he loves his socks
Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1960. No debut film since “Citizen Kane” in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard’s technique of “jump cuts” is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society. (…)
The credits for “Breathless” are a New Wave roll call, including not only Godard’s direction but an original story by Francois Truffaut (Godard famously wrote each day’s shooting script in the morning). Claude Chabrol is production designer and technical adviser. (…)
Godard’s key collaborator on the film was the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked with him many times, notably on “Weekend” (1967). It was only Coutard’s fourth film, and his methods became legend: How when they could not afford tracks for a tracking shot, he held the camera and had himself pushed in a wheelchair. How he achieved a grainy look that influenced many other fiction films that wanted to seem realistic. How he scorned fancy lighting. How he used hand-held techniques even before lightweight cameras were available. How he timed one shot of Belmondo so that the streetlights on the Champs Elysses came on behind him. There is a lovely backlit shot of Belmondo in bed and Seberg sitting beside the bed, both smoking, the light from the window enveloping them in a cloud. (…)
In this scene and throughout the film, Godard uses jump cuts–cuts within continuous movement or dialogue, with no attempt made to make them match. The technique “was a little more accidental than political,” writes the Australian critic Jonathan Dawson. The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and “rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring.”
