Word: godard
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Breathless (Films Around the World) is a cubistic thriller that has an audience because half a century of modern art and movies have rigorously educated the public eye. Filmed on the cheap ($90,000) by an obscure, 30-year-old film critic (Jean-Luc Godard) of the French New Wave, Breathless would seem to offer little to the average star-struck spectator-it features a Hollywood reject (Jean Seberg) and a yam-nosed anonymity (Jean-Paul Belmondo). What's more, it asks the moviegoer to spend 89 minutes sitting still for a jaggedly abstract piece of visual music that...
Breathless has no plot in the usual sense of the word. The script of the picture was a three-page memo. Situation, dialogue, locations were improvised every morning and shot off the cuff. By these casual means Godard has achieved a sort of ad-lib epic, a Joycean harangue of images in which the only real continuity is the irrational coherence of nightmare. Yet, like many nightmares, Breathless has its crazy humor, its anarchic beauty, its night-mind meaning...
...Director Godard obviously means that some people are monsters, but quite possibly the question requires an existentialist answer, too. The hero, though such ideas are far beyond his merely physical preoccupations, behaves like a personification of Gide's acte gratuit ("an action motivated by nothing . . . born of itself"), and his story can be seen as an extemporization on the existentialist tenet that life is just one damn thing after another, and death is the thing after that...
...Godard does not pose his philosophical questions very seriously; he seems chiefly concerned with developing an abstract art of cinema, in which time and space are handled as elements in a four-dimensional collage. Camera and performers, moving at random and simultaneously, create the cubistic sense of evolving relativity. Foregrounds and backgrounds engage in a characteristically cubistic dialogue of planes. Similarly, noises and images, words and actions conflict or collaborate in amusing, revealing or intentionally meaningless ways. At one point the screen goes black in broad daylight while the characters go on talking-they are really in the dark...
Last week Gilbert Godard was busy spending his insurance money on 1) a new house, 2) a new car, 3) a new lawsuit-against the newspaper Parisien Libéré, which called him "a common crook." As an added symptom of recovery, he stood for a while outside the butcher's shop making rude faces through the window at Maigret, at whom, strangely enough, he was very sore...