'Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains': Jean-Luc Godard on the film that changed cinema

Stylish and experimental, Breathless heralded a new era of film-making when it was released 65 years ago. In 1964, its director told the BBC why he broke every rule he could.

Jean-Luc Godard was crystal clear about what he planned to do with his feature-length film debut, Breathless (À bout de souffle), which was released 65 years ago this month. He wanted to blow up the whole idea of what cinema was. In 1964, the director told the BBC's Olivier Todd: "It was a film which took everything the cinema had done – girls, gangsters, cars – exploded all this and put an end once and for all to the old style." 

Stylish and semi-improvised, Breathless seemed revolutionary when it hit French screens on 16 March 1960. With its fragmented editing, offbeat dialogue and nonchalant approach to storytelling, it helped rewrite the language of modern cinema. As renowned US film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential."

On its surface, Breathless's plot resembles that of a hard-boiled crime thriller. It tells the story of amoral, impulsive petty criminal Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his doomed relationship with the enigmatic Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student living in Paris. The film's plot plays out as Michel tries to evade arrest after murdering a policeman: he struggles to collect the money necessary to fund his escape and to convince the ambivalent Patricia to flee with him to Italy. But its director was not so much concerned with its crime narrative as he was with shattering cinematic conventions. 

Born in 1930 to wealthy Franco-Swiss parents, Godard had spent the decade preceding Breathless's release immersed in cinema. At the beginning of the 1950s he had begun working as a film critic for the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. When he started, French cinema was dominated by studio-produced literary adaptations which valued polished storytelling over innovation. Godard, along with his fellow cinephiles at the magazine, railed against these films, arguing that they failed to capture any real emotion or show how people really behaved.

At the same time, US films that had been banned during the Nazi occupation were being shown in French cinemas. Following the Second World War, France had signed the Blum-Byrnes agreements which had opened up its markets to US products in return for eradicating its war debt. This led to a flood of US films that were enthusiastically embraced by these young French critics. They especially admired westerns and detective thrillers – genres they regarded as critically underappreciated. It was Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank who coined the term film noir or dark film. The Cahiers du Cinéma writers also revered film-makers who could stamp their own unique creative visions onto Hollywood productions, such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. They regarded these directors as the true "auteurs" or authors of those films, rather than the studio which produced them or the stars who appeared in them.

Throughout the 1950s, these critics would debate and discuss the shortcomings of French cinema while developing their own ideas of what it should be. Many of the writers Godard worked alongside at Cahiers du Cinéma, such as François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, would also end up becoming directors and leading proponents of the influential movement that would become known as La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave). 

With Breathless, Godard saw his chance to put the ideas he and his friends discussed into practice. He explained to the BBC in 1964 that he purposely set out to break rules he felt were holding back cinema. "Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains, just as the debris is collected after an explosion. And when there is nothing useful left, we can start from scratch on fresh ground," he said.

The film's story was written by Truffaut, who based it loosely on a 1952 news article about a Paris criminal, Michel Portail. However, when Godard came to filming, he would pretty much abandon Truffaut's script. Instead, he got his actors to improvise scenes, or he would feed them lines from behind the camera while filming. This gave the dialogue a spontaneous and personal feel. But it meant that much of Breathless needed to be shot sequentially, so Belmondo and Seberg would know what had happened earlier in the story.

Due to its limited budget, Godard's plan was to make the cheapest film possible. So instead of shooting in a studio where he would be able to control the lighting, the sound and the set, he took to the streets of Paris with his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who filmed on location using a lightweight handheld camera and relying on natural light. The camera, while portable and effective at filming in low-light conditions, was both noisy and unable to record synchronised sound. This meant that nearly all of the improvised lines of dialogue needed to be written down as Belmondo and Seberg ad-libbed, and then dubbed in post-production. This resulted in the later recorded dialogue often not matching the actors' lips, leading to debates that continue to this day about what the characters are actually saying.

Because much of Breathless's guerilla-style filming was done without permits or permission, random people going about their everyday lives in Paris's bustling streets and cafes were often captured in shot, lending an authenticity to its depiction of life in the city. Coutard had been a war photographer, and his reportage style of filming captured an immediacy and intimacy that made the film seem, at times, documentary-like. His camera moves restlessly around, capturing small everyday moments as the characters meet, talk and hang out. Sometimes the camera almost seems to be a participant in the action, sitting in the passenger seat of the car Michel has just stolen while he talks to it as if it were a friend. Breathless's lack of a conventional film crew added to its inventiveness. One of its most famous scenes, where Michel and Patricia are seen walking down the Champs-Élysées chatting as she advertises a newspaper, was achieved by Godard pulling Coutard along in a wheelchair while he filmed the actors walking towards him.

"The freedom of shooting on the Champs-Élysées, Jean Seberg walking down the curb with her unforgettable chanting, 'New York Herald Tribune'. It was like the invention of a mythology for me," the Italian director of Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, told the BBC's The Film Programme in 2009.

But Godard wasn't trying to convince audiences that they were seeing unfiltered reality. He had been influenced by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a story could so absorb an audience that they became passive and unthinking. So, to keep viewers critically engaged, Brecht would remind them that they were watching a play and not real life.

Godard embraced this idea, using a range of stylistic devices to make it impossible for viewers to forget that they were watching a film. Characters regularly break the fourth wall, addressing their dialogue directly to the audience. Often, they comment on their own situation, shaking the viewer's feeling of being an unseen spectator. And while a typical film's soundtrack subtly suggests the mood of a scene, in Breathless the music starts and stops suddenly, often disconnected from what is happening on screen at the time. 

But it was Godard's rejection of the usual cinematic editing rules that would become the signature of the film. "I was incredibly passionate about the style, the language of À bout de souffle," Bertolucci told the BBC. "There were these jump cuts, for example. At school they were always telling you how to avoid jump cuts which were considered mistakes, and the movie was full of jump cuts."

Breathless's use of jump cuts – abrupt transitions forward in time within the same scene – came about partly by accident. The finished film turned out to be much longer than intended, and Godard needed a way to cut it down to a manageable length. But instead of dropping whole scenes or sequences, the director chose to condense its running time by cutting out sections within takes. Often, he removes material from a continuous shot of movement or dialogue while making no attempt to match the edits, breaking the viewer's immersion in the film and giving it an energetic, skittish rhythm.

This jittery editing style lent Breathless a feeling of unpredictability, grabbing the audience's attention and forcing them to be aware of the film-making process. Godard also did this by referencing other films, while at the same time subverting the very conventions that make those films work. Otto Preminger's 1950 film noir thriller Whirlpool is playing when Patricia enters a cinema in an effort to lose the police trailing her. In another scene, when she looks through a rolled-up poster at Michel, the shot mimics a scene in the western Forty Guns (1957) which is seen through a gun barrel. The admired French director of gangster films, Jean-Pierre Melville, has a cameo appearance playing a fictional celebrity author, while Godard himself crops up as a bystander on the street who recognises the fugitive Michel from the newspaper articles. 

In another homage to Godard's influences, the protagonist, Michel, dresses like his hero Humphrey Bogart and practises trying to emulate his onscreen mannerisms. At one point, while gazing at the poster for Bogart's last film, The Harder They Fall (1956), he whispers "Bogey" in admiration. But Michel's behaviour, unlike that of a Bogart hero, comes across as neither heroic nor courageous. He displays no conscience over his crimes or remorse over his actions. His girlfriend, Patricia, who goes on to betray him to the police, could be seen as a classic femme fatale character, but instead of being driven by passion, their relationship seems oddly detached and her motives remain opaque. The meaning in Breathless is never simply spelt out for its audience, and its freewheeling plot and morally ambiguous characters provide no easy answers. The film leaves it to the viewer to come to their own interpretations and judgements.

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With its distinctive storytelling, imaginative camerawork and photogenic young leads, who imbued it with an effortless sense of cool, Breathless was an immediate critical and commercial hit. It seemed to capture the mood of the times and people flocked to see it. "They were in a sense ready for it," Professor James Williams told Kirsty Lang on the BBC's Last Word in 2022. "I mean, people wanted something new and different." It would go on to win Godard the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 1960 Berlin International Film Festival.

For the aspiring directors who saw Breathless, its effect was electric. "As a potential film-maker, it was like just being free, it was like being on a drug or something. It was just amazing," Get Carter's director Mike Hodges told the BBC's The Film Programme in 2006.

"It broke all the rules – and rules of film-making are quite frightening in many ways. You've got to get the angles right, and you have lines that you don't cross. This was in the classical tradition. So in a sense, cinema was very like the classical painters, whereas when you saw Godard's film, it was like the impressionists coming to life, but on the screen."

Breathless's impact would be felt in many of the US films that followed its release, with Godard influencing the Hollywood studios that had so affected him. Breathless's characters' moral ambiguity and its abrupt shifts in tone could be seen in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), its innovative camera angles and examination of relationship uncertainty were reflected in The Graduate (1967), and its low-budget filming techniques and improvised dialogue were embraced in Easy Rider (1969). 

In the 1970s, a slew of young directors inspired by the French New Wave, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, would put their own singular "auteur" visions of cinema on the screen. The director Quentin Tarantino, who named his production company A Band Apart, after Godard's 1964 film Bande à part, has long acknowledged the effect the director had on him. He told Film Comment in a 1994 interview that "Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms".

Part of Breathless's continuing influence on film-makers is in persuading them that it is possible for the viewer to do just what Godard did. As Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright wrote after Godard died in 2022: "It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting."

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