We're delighted to be screening Godard’s French New Wave masterpiece, still sparkling with wit and invention after 65 years, as a companion to Richard Linklater's lively drama on it's creation.
No film has been at once so connected to all that had come before it and yet so liberating… After Breathless, most other new films seemed instantly old-fashioned.
Breathless 1960
A bout de souffle
| Aug 12 |
|
"Exuberantly youthful and tirelessly innovative, Breathless nods to the past but has its eye firmly fixed on the future. A Bogart-idolising car thief, on the run after killing a cop, turns to his American girlfriend for help, but soon begins to question her loyalty. Godard dispensed with the conventions of cinematic grammar, breaking the rules in some style even as he embraced a familiar lovers-on-the-run set-up. The film still sparkles with mischievous wit and wondrous invention." — British Film Institute
"Soon after Breathless first appeared, not only were millions mimicking Belmondo’s own mannerisms but filmmakers began to imitate Godard. His footprints show up in everything from A Hard Day’s Night and Bonnie and Clyde to today’s sassy, bounding, nervously edited commercials for athletic shoes and blue jeans. In the seven years following Breathless, Godard created a run of movies that may be the greatest period of sustained brilliance in motion picture history. But his genius was already obvious in this lilting yet heartbreaking masterpiece which captures the lyricism and cruelty of city life, the easy amoralism of youthful impatience, the melancholy dead-end of male-female relations, the doomed romanticism of those weaned on old movies." — John Powers