Word: godard
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...Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood, a place where young hopefuls loiter. In the late '50s, every young French director who had directed nothing wrote for Cahiers. One by one, they emerged - Claude Chabrol with The Cousins, François Truffaut with The 400 Blows. Only Jean-Luc Godard seemed to stay behind, and one day he disappeared with the Cahiers' petty cash. Chabrol and Truffaut wondered if Godard was trying to finance a film. They came to his aid, the money was amicably restored, and more was honorably found. Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) went before...
Earthbound Themes. Godard went about making the picture almost flippantly, sitting in a café each morning and writing dialogue for the afternoon's shooting, bending the story line and tossing in new ideas whenever they occurred...
...city provided the sets, from Orly airport to the Champs-Elysées, and, since life itself is full of jerky movements, Godard ordered his cameraman to shoot from the shoulder and forget the tripod...
...Godard is Gallically capable of spectacular flights of chop logic ("Marxism and Catholicism are the same"), but in his work he is earthbound with his themes. Molelike behind dark glasses, his hair thinning and his bank account growing, he avoids people and parties, often passes hour after hour with friends while saying almost nothing. His main worry is that the New Wave may be hurt by its worst potential enemy: pretension. "The public," he says, "is happily insensitive to the verbiage of the esthetes. The essential thing is for us to remain lucid, and not take ourselves for the navel...
More daringly cubistic is the manner in which Godard has assembled his footage. Every minute or so, sometimes every few seconds, he has chopped a few feet out of the film, patched it together again without transition. The story can still be followed, but at each cut the film jerks ahead with a syncopated impatience that aptly suggests and stresses the compulsive pace of the hero's doomward drive. More subtly, the trick also distorts, rearranges, relativizes time-much as Picasso manipulated space in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All meaningful continuity is bewildered; the hero lives, like...