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Richard Brody: Everything Is Cinema

Richard Brody received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2009 for Everything is Cinema.

BREATHLESS
“A boy who thinks about death”

A regular feature of Cahiers du Cinéma from November 1955 onward was the “Council of Ten,” in which critics from Cahiers and other publications rated new releases on a scale from “don’t bother” (a dot) to “masterpiece” (four stars) and the scores were collated into a ranked list. Godard was first polled for the issue of August—September 1957 and soon became a steady participant. In July 1959, the list was headed by Hiroshima, mon amour, Alain Resnais’s first feature film (from a script by Marguerite Duras), followed by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo.

Only Godard had given all three films four stars, a gesture of recognition that their simultaneous release represented a landmark in cinema history: Hawks’s film exemplified classicism, Truffaut’s marked the French New Wave’s arrival on the world scene, and Resnais’s was a radical attempt at a cinematic modernism inspired by avant-garde literature. Godard, who was about to make his first feature film, conceived it in relation—and in opposition—to all three: against a dutiful approximation of Hawksian classicism; against Truffaut’s naturalistic form of memoir-autobiography; and against Resnais’s formalist modernism.

Once Beauregard’s involvement in the project was confirmed and Pignières’s promise of financing secured, Godard began to seek actors. He suggested to Beauregard1 that efforts be made to hire an American actress, Jean Seberg, to play the American woman. As Godard knew, Seberg lived in Paris with her French husband, François Moreuil, a young attorney who also harbored directorial ambitions (and was a cousin of the American director William Wyler).

Seberg had become famous in 1956 when, while still a high school student in Marshalltown, Iowa, she was chosen by Otto Preminger in a much-ballyhooed nationwide talent search to play Joan of Arc in his film Saint Joan. Seberg was miscast—and then tyrannized—by Preminger. His notoriously harsh methods may have borne fruit with other, experienced actors, but Seberg could not bear up under his verbal assault, and her performance suffered: a Joan of Arc without self-confidence is no Joan of Arc at all. For the role, her hair had been cut martially short; and Preminger again imposed this style, both pixieish and provocatively androgynous, for her second film, Bonjour Tristesse, based on the bestselling French novel by the young writer Françoise Sagan.

Bonjour Tristesse, in which Seberg plays a teenage daughter who destroys her widowed father’s chance at happiness with another woman, had been scorned in the United States. (The New York Times critic called it a “bomb” and Seberg a “misplaced amateur.”) In France, where it was released in May 1958, Bonjour Tristesse was widely derided for what was taken to be Preminger’s glossy Hollywood treatment of a novel that should have been reserved for a French director. The dissenting voice of enthusiasm for the film was that of François Truffaut, who exulted in the pages of Arts that Seberg had a “special quality of heartbreaking young beauty that somehow shone through her technically inadequate performances.”2 Godard placed the film third in his Cahiers ten-best list for 1958, behind Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American and Ingmar Bergman’s Dreams.

Seberg, who had been wounded by critics’ uncomprehending response to Bonjour Tristesse, was immensely grateful to Truffaut for his praise. She thanked him in what she called a “fan letter,” which she sent after the success of The 400 Blows. In the note, she told Truffaut: “of all the young directors I believe in you and Renais [sic].”3 Her career had been hurt by the bad reviews and by the commercial failure of her films with Preminger: after making Bonjour Tristesse, Preminger had sold her contract to Columbia Pictures, which cast her in the minor comedy The Mouse That Roared.

Moreuil arranged a meeting between Godard and Seberg. She was unimpressed by the director, describing him as “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look [her] in the eyes when he talked,” but she was encouraged by her husband to accept the role Godard was offering.4 In any case, Seberg believed the project was more interesting than any she had been offered in the United States; meeting the director Samuel Fuller by chance in Paris, she told him, “It will be better than working with Preminger.”5

Although Columbia had little work for Seberg, the studio was nonetheless reluctant to lend her out to unknowns. Godard tried to sway Columbia with a twelve-page telegram, giving the studio the choice of either one-half of the film’s revenues outside France or fifteen thousand dollars. The decisive gesture however, seems to have been that of her husband, who flew to Los Angeles and told the Columbia studio executives that Seberg would retire from acting if her request to film with Godard was not met. The studio executives agreed to terms with Beauregard on June 8. With little reason to believe that the film would generate much non-French revenue, they took the cash.

Godard had not forgotten his promise to cast Belmondo in the lead role of his first film. Although Charlotte et son Jules was still unreleased, Godard had in a way already publicly “discovered” the actor: writing in Arts in 1958 about the film Un drôle de dimanche, in which Belmondo plays a supporting role, Godard had likened him to two of the greatest French film actors, heralding him as “the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow.”6 Belmondo, who was already recognized as a comic theater actor, was beginning to get lucrative, if uninspiring, offers from the mainstream film industry. While Godard was preparing Breathless, Belmondo was offered a supporting role in a film by the veteran director Julien Duvivier, which his agent, Blanche Montel, encouraged him to accept. While waiting for Belmondo to decide, Godard considered offering the role to, among others, the popular singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour, whom Truffaut had met at Cannes and would soon cast as the lead in his second film, Shoot the Piano Player. Belmondo took Godard’s offer, over the objections of Montel, who told him, “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.” He signed a contract that paid him 400,000 francs (approximately eight hundred dollars), which barely covered his vacation on the Riviera before the shoot started.7

Although Godard knew the story well, having worked on it with Truffaut, he was now at a loss as to how to tell it. His four short fictions had all been adaptations—Une Femme coquette of a Maupassant story, All the Boys Are Called Patrick of Rohmer’s script, Charlotte et son Jules based on Cocteau’s Le Bel indifférent, and Histoire d’eau using Truffaut’s footage. His occasional work in the film industry had also been second-order—editing nature footage for the producer Pierre Braunberger and the publishing house of Arthaud, writing dialogue for scripts by the young directors Edouard Molinaro and Jean-Pierre Mocky, adapting the Loti novel for Beauregard. The stories he had proposed to producers had all been adaptations—Odile from Goethe, Quartier Nègre from a novel by Simenon, even The Myth of Sisyphus. Until now, he had been a critic, a writer who wrote in response to preexisting material; and he was having trouble getting a story going on his own.

On June 17, Godard Sent a note to Truffaut from the Côte d’Azur to request help with the story: “If you have time to finish off for me in three lines the story begun one morning metro Richelieu-Drouot (those were the good Times8), although I haven’t got Françoise Sagan9 at my disposal I’d be able to add the dialogue.” Truffaut had formally ceded the story in question to Beauregard for the derisory sum of one million francs (two thousand dollars), a gesture of friendship to Godard for which the producer was grateful; but the story was at that point not a script or even a story outline.10 Truffaut, who was also staying in the south of France with his mistress, Liliane David, wrote back with a promise to sketch out the story upon his return to Paris.

The outline was needed by Beauregard and Pignières for the latter to submit with his application to the government for the production subsidy to which he was entitled. Laws passed in 1948 to aid the French cinema in the wake of the Blum-Byrnes accord offered producers direct grants on the basis of their previous productions (and financed them with a special tax on ticket sales), and also provided inexpensive credit to producers from the French national bank. Pignières’s track record allowed him to participate in this system, and on June 25, he submitted requests for a direct grant to foster production of Breathless.

Time was running out on this system of financing. On June 16, André Malraux, who had in January been named France’s first minister of cultural affairs,11 had announced a revision of the terms of government aid to the French cinema. Where the law had formerly granted financial assistance to producers primarily on the basis of the quantity of their previous releases— thus favoring the industry’s commercial mainstream—now it would favor quality. The new system would be called the “advance on receipts,” which granted producers financing on the basis of a script’s quality (as determined by a board of industry reviewers).

A French cinema of artistic merit, Malraux contended, would reinforce French culture both within France and around the world. The new policy was based on Malraux’s recognition that the cinema and its function had changed. As television became increasingly common in French households, demand for films was declining; the number of tickets sold in France had dropped from 411 million in 1957 to 371 million in 1958. Malraux recognized that, in order to remain viable, the French cinema would need to become part of the French cultural patrimony, and to be exported like Bordeaux wine or Camembert cheese; that if the French film industry was to have a future, it would be in the international market of art films.

But Pignières, when he submitted his dossier to the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) on June 25, 1959, under the old system of aid for producers was not claiming for the film any artistic merit; he was simply requesting quasi-automatic financial assistance for a commercial venture.

Beauregard’s commerce, however, was singularly tenuous. The producer worked on a tightrope of solvency and did not always keep his footing. José Bénazéraf, a producer who shared an office with Beauregard at the time, summed him up in a phrase: “fragility and payment due.”12 Beauregard, he explained, “seems to have been persecuted by the constant lack of money. He put into a film everything he had and everything he didn’t have.”13 Beauregard’s two previous films (the Loti productions) had largely been financed by an independent backer, but did so poorly that Beauregard was left with a debt of 60 million old francs ($120,000). As a commercial proposition, Breathless could hardly do worse.

Godard’s friends from Cahiers had made their first films without producers: Chabrol’s first two films had been self-financed; Truffaut’s company was funded by his father-in-law; Rivette’s film, Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), was self-financed (and was, at the time, unfinished, for lack of funds); Rohmer’s forthcoming film was backed by Chabrol. Only Godard had a producer from within the French film industry. Beauregard, because of his trusting (and cavalier) temperament, granted Godard a liberty that was exceptional by industry standards but was still less than that afforded his friends by the autonomy of their productions. Compared to his cohorts, Godard was making his film in the face of opposition, which, although initially mild, would intensify during the shoot over matters of pure practicality.

In Paris Godard worked on the adaptation of Breathless. His original plan had been to use Truffaut’s story outline and merely add dialogue to it. Instead, he remodeled the entire story, reconfiguring the action, adding and subtracting characters, and drastically shifting the emphases.14

Truffaut’s new story outline differed in several respects from the version of the story that he had hoped to shoot several years earlier. His original plan ended in suspense, with the criminal aware that he was recognized by passersby from newspaper pictures: he knew that he was being looked at in the street, as Truffaut said, “like a star.”15 But when sketching out the subject for Godard, Truffaut replaced this personal touch with a clearer and more decisive ending, the criminal’s bloodless suicide by aspirin overdose. Truffaut also cut a long flashback in the middle, concerning the backstory of the French criminal and his American lover in the United States several years earlier. He offered Godard a more straightforward and neutral story than the one he had planned for himself.

The new outline by Truffaut told a story of claustrophobia, of the increasingly frantic anguish of a young man who, having turned in despair to crime, sees the walls of the world close in around him—a parallel to The 400 Blows, and to Truffaut’s own experience. It was mainly a manhunt, in which the point of view shifted between the police and the man being hunted.

Godard, however, removed all but a trace of the police side of the plot, focusing the action on the young man who is desperate in a big city, scrambling for help from his friends, who are all away or unable to help in time— an echo of the financial difficulties that Godard himself had endured.16 And most importantly, in Godard’s draft, the American woman comes into the plot near the beginning, and their love story dominates the film.

Also, Godard shifted the bulk of the action to his own stomping grounds—the Champs-Elysées (where Cahiers du cinéma was located), Montparnasse (the neighborhood of the hotel seen in Charlotte et son Jules), and St.-Germain-des-Prés—and even included in his treatment a geographical wink to Jean-Paul Sartre, showing the fugitive as he “crosses the boulevard Saint-Germain, passes in front of [the bookstore] la Hune and enters the courtyard of a building next to the Flore”17—the café made famous by Sartre during the war. Writing to Truffaut, Godard explained that “the action revolves around a car thief . . . in love with a girl who sells the New York Herald and takes courses in French civilization:”18 He similarly described the basic idea of the film he was about to make: “In general, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks about death and that of a girl who doesn’t.”19

The film’s autobiographical aspect is not found primarily in the plot, which does not depict (except in scattered details) incidents from Godard’s own life. Instead, Breathless is autobiographical at a higher level of abstraction: the concerns of the “boy” reflect Godard’s own. In making the film, Godard would find further, more radical, ways to redefine cinematic autobiography, but replacing autobiographical action with an autobiographical “subject” or idea was the first step.

The story of Breathless is centered on Michel Poiccard, who, with the help of a female accomplice whom he leaves behind, steals a car in Marseille from an American army officer and drives toward Paris where he plans to meet up with a woman named Patricia. He finds a pistol in the glove compartment. When a police officer on a motorcycle pulls Michel over for speeding, Michel—knowing that he will be arrested—shoots him and then flees on foot through open fields. Arriving in Paris, Michel finds Patricia selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysées; she is unsure whether she wants to see him again. He visits another woman, from whom he steals money, and proceeds in vain to a travel office in search of an underworld friend who owes him money. Making his way to Patricia’s hotel, he sneaks into her room and waits for her in bed. In a twenty-six-minute sequence that takes place in the room and mainly in bed, they make love, fall asleep, wake up, and talk about love and life. There, Patricia reveals that she is pregnant by him. By the time they go out to the street, newspaper headlines blare that Michel is wanted for murder. Patricia helps him stay a step ahead of the police, and considers accepting Michel’s offer to flee with him to Italy as soon as he collects the money he is owed. But when detectives find her at the Herald Tribune office and threaten her with criminal charges and deportation, she has misgivings. A friend finds Michel and Patricia an overnight hideout in a photographer’s studio in Montparnasse; they install themselves there but when Michel goes out to buy food, Patricia calls the police and denounces him, then goes back and warns him. He flees, but, pursued by the police, he is shot in the back. He dies in the street, under Patricia’s blank gaze.

The story resembles a classic American film noir, and indeed in a scene where Michel hides in a movie theater, the sound track plays a clip from Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy, an American film from 1949 with a similar theme. But Godard approached the story in ways that departed radically from its genre models, and did so foremost by the methods with which he filmed it. His years as a critic and the philosophical inclinations that informed them bore fruit: despite his relative inexperience as a filmmaker, and his scant familiarity with the practical aspects of the cinema, he applied his ideas to the aesthetic and the technical elements of his film, and the results were revolutionary.

The shooting of Breathless took place in conditions that were in many respects unprecedented in the history of cinema. Godard was aware of their peculiarity; indeed, he would make sure that his way of making the film would be as much a part of its public identity as the story and the actors. Godard’s novel method was not only the practical springboard for his formal and intellectual inventions, it was a part of them. Breathless would be an “action film” in the sense of “action painting”: the act and the moment of making the film were as much a part of the work’s meaning as its specific content and style. As such, it would be the first existentialist film.

The cameraman, Raoul Coutard, had worked on Beauregard’s earlier productions. Michel Latouche had done the camera work on Godard’s short films, and Godard had planned to ask him to shoot Breathless, but Coutard was Beauregard’s choice. Coutard was gallantly prepared to feign a prior commitment so as not to compel Godard to work with him, but Godard asked Coutard to shoot test footage and was pleased with the results.20 Prior to working with Beauregard, Coutard had been a documentary cameraman for the French army’s information service in Indochina during the war, and Godard decided to rely on this aspect of Coutard’s experience in conceiving the visual schema for the film.

Godard wanted Breathless to be shot, as much as possible, like a documentary, with a handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting. This decision had both an aesthetic component, making the film look newsreel-like, and a practical one, saving the time usually spent setting up lights and a tripod. For several sequences that featured tracking shots, Godard avoided the use of cumbersome tracking rails (on which a wheeled dolly rolls, bearing the camera). Instead, Coutard filmed from a wheelchair pushed by Godard; and for the first sequence with Belmondo and Seberg on the Champs-Elysées, Godard, planning to film unnoticed by passersby, put Coutard inside a deliveryman’s pushcart into which two small viewing holes were cut in the front. An assistant pushed the cart and followed the unrecognized actors while Godard followed the action at a distance.

In order to film at night without added lighting, Godard drew on Coutard’s earlier experience as a still photographer and asked him to name his favorite kind of film for low-light still photography. Coutard chose a film produced by the British firm of Ilford, but Ilford did not manufacture it in the 400-foot rolls that were standard movie stock—it was sold only in small canisters of 17.5 meters (approximately 46 feet), which fit 35mm still cameras.21 Godard went to a photography supply store to buy out the store’s inventory. He and Coutard extracted the rolls from their containers, and on location, two assistants were employed to load and unload the movie camera’s film magazines with the tiny spools (which could be used for approximately thirty seconds’ worth of filming).22 After the shoot, Godard and Coutard used lightproof changing bags to splice the many short rolls together into longer ones so that they could be processed by the film laboratory.

Even film processing became an adventure of invention. Godard wanted to push-process the film, to develop it in a special chemical bath that would increase its sensitivity to light further compensating for the absence of additional lighting. Laboratories, however, customarily processed film in far larger batches than the quantity Godard produced for Breathless. He persuaded the laboratory used by Beauregard to set aside a small and rarely used developing machine for the special chemical bath.

The choice of a lightweight handheld newsreel camera and an appropriate film stock and laboratory treatment allowed him to work more rapidly and casually than the norm. A letter that Godard wrote to the producer Pierre Braunberger while the shoot was in progress is an invaluable record of his distinctive methods and his awareness of their significance. He told the producer:

At the rushes, the whole crew, including the cameraman, finds the photography disgusting. I like it. The important thing is not that things be filmed in this or that way, but simply that they be filmed and not be out of focus.23

Godard’s indifference to the specific image was no pretense but an accurate reflection of his conduct on the set. He habitually gave Coutard obscure, elliptical orders, as when he confusingly requested a close-up by asking that nothing be seen from the shoulders to the hips; when Coutard filmed something else, Godard said, “That’s all right,” and told him to move on to the next shot. As Coutard recalled, Godard often gave such negative instructions: “He said: ‘I want this and that not to be seen,’ and so you could pretty well figure it out . . . For instance, when he wanted a close-up, he said, ‘I don’t want to see the breast pocket on his shirt.’”24 On another occasion, Godard asked Coutard where the “best place” for the camera was, and then, after getting Coutard’s response, ordered that the camera be placed elsewhere. As Godard wrote to Braunberger: “My biggest job consists of keeping the technical crew away from the shoot. I am in a very bizarre state of mind, absolutely not crazed, and lazier than ever. I’m not thinking of anything.”25

Godard kept the technical crew to the scant minimum, but nonetheless found their presence cumbersome. Union regulations required him to hire a makeup artist, but Godard prevented her from doing any makeup, though Seberg said that the makeup artist sometimes slipped her a powder puff.26 The script supervisor was unable to keep track of continuity because Godard kept her away from the shoot; when the crew filmed the hotel room scenes, he made sure she stayed in the hallway. Godard’s state of “not thinking of anything” made him utterly indifferent to continuity or planning; the result was a rare cinematic spontaneity, an “action cinema” akin to the “action painting” for which Abstract Expressionists were already famous. He was aware that the film would reflect the conditions under which it was made, and that his methods were inseparable from his aesthetic.

Wednesday, we shot a scene in direct sunlight with Geva 36. Everyone found it awful. I find it fairly extraordinary. It is the first time that one obliges the film stock to give the maximum of itself by making it do that for which it is not made. It is as if it were suffering by being exploited to the outer limit of its possibilities. Even the film stock, you see, will be out of breath.

The movie and the film stock are, in this view, one; if the movie stock suffers, the film will reflect suffering; if the film stock is à bout de souffle, the movie will fulfill its title as well. Godard’s notion of correspondence between the movie and life behind the camera is a stern aesthetic that unifies the film and the work that went into it, the film and its maker: it is as if the camera were turned as surely on the director and his crew as on his actors, as if the camera were running as much between takes as during them. This idea, which renders film technique personal and renders the personal a product of technique, would prove to be the most lasting effect of Breathless on Godard’s work to come and a defining element of his contribution to cinema.

Godard included his friends in the film. He asked Jean-Pierre Melville— an independent filmmaker (born in 1917) who owned his own studio and made French crime movies with an American flair, including the legendary Bob le flambeur27—to play a voluble novelist whom Patricia would interview at Orly Airport for the New York Herald Tribune, and he named this character Parvulesco, after his Geneva friend, the right-wing philosopher. Godard wanted the scene to play like a real interview, and he asked Melville to improvise his answers—“to talk about women or anything I wanted, the way we did when we drove around at night.”28 Roland Tolmatchoff was supposed to come to Paris to play a gangster named Balducci (the last name of the film’s publicist, Richard Balducci); when Tolmatchoff was unable to come on the appointed day, Godard asked Balducci to play a gangster named Tolmatchoff. He cast Jacques Rivette in a cameo role.

But the most unusual aspect of Godard’s technique concerned the script, or rather, the lack of one. As Godard wrote to Braunberger, “At the moment we really are shooting from day to day. I write the scenes while having breakfast at the Dupont Montparnasse.” He was not exaggerating. Before the shoot, Godard had begun to write a traditional screenplay, filling in dialogue for each scene (starting with the scene that occurs on the Champs-Elysées, where Belmondo finds Seberg selling the New York Herald Tribune). He attempted to write more dialogue (some of which he passed along to Seberg), but was dissatisfied with the results. In early August 1959, Seberg wrote to a friend, “Day by day, the scenario seems to be getting bigger and worse in every way.”29 Godard did not like the script either, so he got rid of it and decided to write the dialogue day by day as the production went along. Of course, the actors found this procedure odd. They hardly had time to learn their lines. The film, however, was shot without direct sound (the entire sound track, including the dialogue, was to be post-synchronized, i.e., dubbed), and so, when the actors’ memory failed, Godard called their lines out to them while the camera was rolling. He wrote to Braunberger, “Seberg is crazed, and regrets doing the film, I start with her tomorrow. I’ll say goodbye to you because I have to find what is going to be filmed tomorrow.”

Having worked on Hollywood shoots, Seberg was shocked.30 Belmondo was able to take the proceedings as something of a joke. Seeing himself at rushes in a hat and with a Boyard cigarette dangling from his mouth (Godard’s brand, cheap, thick, yellow corn-paper cigarettes renowned for the pungency of their smoke), Belmondo feared for his career. Eventually, he felt reassured by the chaos of the shoot: Belmondo was sure that the film could not be edited into anything coherent and figured that it would never be released.

This idiosyncratic scripting produced a particular on-screen result. Godard’s spontaneous method deliberately frustrated the actors’ attempts to compose their characters in any naturalistic or psychologically motivated way. And to make sure of the spontaneity, Godard told Belmondo, “Don’t think about the film tonight. We’ll lose two hours tomorrow making you forget whatever you were imagining off by yourself.”31 In effect, Godard’s actors were quoting Godard. Rather than becoming their characters, they were imitating them.

On August 17, 1959, the first day of the shoot, the crew gathered at 6:00 AM at a café across from Notre-Dame. The action involved Belmondo, who in the story had just returned to Paris after killing the police officer on the rural highway. Godard asked him to enter a phone booth, say whatever he wanted, and leave the phone booth; Godard asked him to enter a café, place an order, and leave without paying. These brief sequences were the sole work of the day; such short work days would prove not atypical for Godard and his crew. The absence of additional lighting, the handheld camera, the lack of makeup, permitted the crew to work very rapidly. There were no cables or other equipment to limit the actors’ freedom of movement; there was no crowd control, no attempt to modify the life on the street around the filming. Godard had calculated the rapidity of his methods, and counted on being able to fill a significant amount of screen time quickly, leaving the rest of his time free so that he could figure out the next day’s program. He often discharged his crew after what was officially only a half-day’s work, and on days when he did not feel inspired, he cancelled the shoot altogether. Beauregard assumed that Godard was slacking off and wasting money. One day when Godard called off the shoot on the pretext of illness, Beauregard found him at a café near the production office; a physical altercation resulted, and Coutard himself had to separate producer and director.

On September 3, 1959, four days into the third week of the shoot, Beauregard wrote to Godard complaining that “there have been eight half-days of work and of these half-days, the work has sometimes been only two hours.” He threatened to report Godard to the CNC (which regulated contracts and employment in the industry) and to withhold his wages if he continued to work short days or to cancel shoot days. However, there was a method to Godard’s apparent caprices, as he later explained: I was also sort of the producer because I very quickly recognized that what’s important in a film is to control the money; the money, meaning the time, meaning having the money and being able to spend it according to one’s rhythm and one’s pleasure.”32

Godard’s way of working not only contributed to the film’s distinctiveness—but also proved to be the best kind of advertising. Months before the movie was even completed, Breathless was the talk of Paris, thanks to a magnificent publicity campaign orchestrated by the press agent, Richard Balducci, who had been hired by Beauregard. The usual puffery would not do for a first-time director working with a struggling producer and a fading starlet among a cast of unknowns. Instead, taking advantage of Godard’s singular methods and the unique atmosphere that they generated on location, Balducci made them the subject of his campaign. In the process, Godard’s way of working became, locally, as familiar as Jackson Pollock’s method of drip painting. Balducci skillfully leaked information about the film, making a virtue of its peculiarities.

While shooting the film, Godard made sure that he would be recognized. He gave himself a crucial, albeit minor, role, something far richer than a Hitchcockian cameo: he plays a passerby who recognizes the nearby Michel Poiccard from his picture in the paper and shows detectives which way the accused criminal went.

The movie was publicized in three substantial articles that appeared in the mainstream press in the months following the shoot and before its release: first, an interview in Radio-Cinéma-Télévision with Truffaut, who put his celebrity to work on the film’s behalf; second, a long and detailed report from location that ran in France-Observateur, written by a journalist who was “embedded” in the crew; and third, an interview in L’Express with Godard himself. All three played a role in the birth of a legend. The calculated methods of publicity had the effect of canonizing Godard as an auteur before he even had something to show.

On October 4, 1959, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision printed its article about Truffaut’s involvement with the film (he had often written for the publication). Truffaut said that he had given Godard “about thirty” pages of a script treatment, and described its story as a sequel to The 400 Blows: “Imagine Antoine four years after the end of the film. After he runs away, he goes from reform school to reform school. He volunteers before he’s drafted and, when he returns from a dreary war in Indochina, he becomes a car thief.”

The association of Breathless with Truffaut’s famous film was, of course, helpful to Godard, but as Truffaut told the interviewer, Claude-Marie Trémois, “The pretext is unimportant. What counts—and what is stunning—is what Godard has done with it.” He spoke glowingly, if with a hint of ironic ambiguity; about the film-in-progress: “Godard is overflowing with ideas. The projection of rushes, which is usually so boring, is here exhilarating because he rarely does two takes of the same scene and when he does, it isn’t really the same scene. It is a succession of discoveries.” Indeed, Coutard later recalled, “Truffaut found it rather funny, the way we were shooting,”33 yet in the interest of Godard’s film, Truffaut mostly withheld his doubts from the press.

For the second article, Balducci had arranged for a journalist, Marc Pierret, to be planted with the crew as an assistant, with Godard’s knowledge and consent, so that he could write about the experience. In a report that took two full pages in France-Observateur34 of October 29, 1959, Pierret guided readers into the universe of Godard’s production methods, and through Pierret, the public was also introduced to Godard’s voice. The process that the Cahiers writers had helped to crystallize—the celebration of the director’s personality through the recognition of its distinctive imprint on his films—was turned around by Godard. With other filmmakers, the film came first, followed by the recognition of the auteur’s personality; with Godard, the person came first.

This process would serve as a template for Godard’s career: interviews have provided him with a parallel sound track on the public record and a vehicle for the intellectual profusion that spilled beyond the confines of his films. In the 1950s, Godard had used criticism to pour forth his ideas with an arch and allusive brilliance; now that he was a professional filmmaker, interviews would play that role, and would do so even better—for Godard had long been recognized, by those who knew him, as a brilliant talker. And Pierret was merely the first of a long list of journalists who would adorn their pages with Godard’s scintillating verbal sallies.

Pierret’s questions teased out Godard’s iconoclastic approach to the cinema. In one exchange, Pierret asks, “Do you love the cinema?”

I have contempt for it. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it and at the same time I have contempt for it. A little like the way I have contempt for, and as I love, the actors who do cinema, who lend their face to all the caprices and obscure desires of the director.

While Bazin praised the cinema for its neutral fidelity to reality, Godard saw the medium’s neutrality—its dependence on external reality—equivocally. Godard had turned to the cinema by default, after painting and writing, and he did not only hold it in contempt—he held himself in contempt for not creating from scratch, as do writers, painters, composers, for having turned to a medium that by its nature is parasitic. Yet as he told Pierret, this medium that “does not exist” allowed Godard himself to exist: “I like to observe people in cafés, in the street. I don’t do anything. I watch them. Then, I can re-create with actors the expressions, the mystery, which a sort of passivity or maladjustment helped me to discover.”

Godard also spoke to Pierret of his unusual methods and alluded to the strain they were placing on his relation with Beauregard:

I need a certain freedom. I get it by sowing a certain confusion. By playing around with the familiar ways. The producer thinks that I’m improvising, whereas I’m only adapting myself to his conditions in order to create a greater possibility of invention.

The journalist described Godard’s “possibility of invention” as he observed the director at work late at night in a Latin Quarter pizzeria, near the end of the shoot, composing the film’s crucial last scene: “The St.-Germain Pizza, 11 PM. J. L. Godard dines alone. Pieces of paper scattered around his plate of crudités. . . . It is not certain that Belmondo will be put to death. Godard is keeping it for the last days of the shoot.”

In Truffaut’s original idea, the ending follows the true-life story: the criminal is arrested; in Truffaut’s sketch for Godard, the criminal commits suicide in police custody. In Godard’s outline, the criminal tries to get away, taking money from his underworld friends and borrowing a car for his escape as Patricia looks on blankly. Now, during the shoot, Godard could not decide whether to follow the laws of genre (the criminal is punished) or to yield to the desire to grant him a light-footed escape.

Death, of course, won out; but rather than letting Poiccard expire bloodlessly, Godard put Belmondo through an agony that he filmed as something of a slapstick dance: Belmondo stumbles down the middle of the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse with blood oozing onto his white shirt.

In the long take, passersby, some bewildered, others bemused, can be seen on the sidewalk as they watch the action or gawk at the camera that trails the actor down the street as his overdone death canter tips the anguish of the moment into a comic theatrical approximation. Godard directed Belmondo quite vaguely, merely instructing him to run and to fall down; Belmondo chose to land poetically between the crosswalk markers—although not for poetic reasons, but simply to avoid landing in the middle of oncoming traffic in the boulevard Raspail. So little attention was paid to crowd control that, as Belmondo completed the first take with his tumble, a policeman on duty reportedly leaped off a passing bus to aid the “victim,” and exclaimed with surprise: “Oh, it’s a movie?”35

According to Pierret, when Godard came in for a close-up of Belmondo at the moment of Poiccard’s death, the director told the actor, “Try to die well: each second of this shot is worth a week in first run.” This scene too was realized without crowd control, as crowds formed and pressed up against the director and the cameraman while filming proceeded.

Pierret’s France-Observateur coverage was followed in late December 1959 with an interview of Godard by the journalist Michèle Manceaux that was published in L’Express. The interviewer encouraged the director to affect the role of the young outlaw. Manceaux remarked that Godard had also had his “four hundred blows”36: “He broke into a safe, got himself locked in an insane asylum, and even took off with the cash box at Cahiers.” She asked Godard point-blank: “Why all this?”

A need for liberty. I don’t really know why. I broke into the safe because I was waiting for a girl who didn’t show up and I really had to do something. Rebellion without a cause, as they say in America. I broke off with my whole family at that time. There are still moments where I need to be in contradiction: for example, I haven’t insured my car. I get a kind of kick out of that.37

Godard’s glamorized “rebellion” was patently relevant to his practice of film; the press had already made much of Godard’s readiness to break the rules in directing, to do whatever wasn’t allowed, and to sow a risky disorder on the set, as well as his willingness—or even desire—to endure the veiled disdain of those closest to him, such as Truffaut, as a result of it. The reports of his youthful delinquency reinforced the image of an artistic rebel with an ongoing need “to be in contradiction” with the way that others made films.

The L’Express interview also provided the occasion for Godard’s first, and definitive, theoretical exposition of his idea of montage as the key element of the cinema: “I read three books a day. I didn’t do anything else. As a freshman,38 I started to go to the movies. But one day, I took off. I was twenty years old.” Manceaux asked Godard whether he had ever considered becoming a writer.

Yes, of course. But I wrote, “The weather is nice. The train enters the station,” and I sat there for hours wondering why I couldn’t have just as well written the opposite: “The train enters the station. The weather is nice” or “jt is raining.” In the cinema, it’s simpler. At the same time, the weather is nice and the train enters the station. There is something ineluctable about it. You have to go along with it.

Godard would repeat and rework this idea, in a variety of forms, for decades to come. Despite sounding like a joke or an incidental anecdote, this concept of the cinema formed the basis for a grand theory. Godard here laid out, minimally and powerfully, the notion he already asserted in his important writings of the 1950s, his view of montage as central to the cinema, indeed constitutive of it. His idea is to define montage as the simultaneous recording of disparate elements in a single image, the simultaneity in one image of two things that would happen sequentially on the page—the train entering the station, the rain falling. In his view, the cinema does automatically what literature wants to do and cannot: it connects two ideas in one time. Yet the organic montage that Godard considered inherent to the cinema mirrored his contempt for it: he depended upon the cinema’s second-order or parasitic status in relation to reality, and upon the camera as a passive recording device. This device made him an artist, but, at least in principle, less of one than is a writer or a painter. Thus the cinema, for Godard, is at once a deliverance and a curse. In the cinema he would he both an artist and a slacker, a hero and a bad boy.

The first cut of Breathless was two-and-a-half hours long, but Beauregard had required that Godard deliver a ninety-minute film. Godard asked Jean-Pierre Melville for advice on how to cut it down:

I told him to cut everything that didn’t keep the action moving, and to remove all unnecessary scenes, mine included. He didn’t listen to me, and instead of cutting whole scenes as was the practice then, he had the brilliant idea of cutting more or less at random within scenes. The result was excellent.39

Godard (and the editor, Cécile Decugis, who essentially executed Godard’s instructions) did not, for the most part, cut at random;40 on the contrary, he responded to his enthusiasms, and removed all moments—within scenes, even within shots—that seemed to him to lack vigor. He kept in the film only what he thought was strongest, regardless of dramatic import or conventional continuity, thus producing many jump cuts, where characters and anything else that moves within the shot seem to jump from one position to another in a relatively fixed frame. Such cuts were generally considered to be a cardinal error of an amateurish film technique and were scrupulously avoided in the professional cinema. They were seen as both intrinsically funny, a kind of cinematic solecism, and unsettling in the way they break the cinematic illusion by presenting two obviously discontinuous times as immediately sequential. The jump cut, despite—and because of—its ill-repute, became one of the principal figures of the visual style of Breathless.

Godard also filmed from deliberately disorienting angles, filming the police chase of Michel from opposite sides of the road, so that the police car and Michel’s car appear to be going in opposite directions rather than having one follow the other. He filmed a close-up of Michel’s gun from the opposite side as he filmed Michel’s body, thus having the gun point not at the policeman, but back toward Michel.41 On another set, such brazen disregard for standards would have been cited by a script supervisor and a cameraman, who would have informed the director of his “errors.” Here, these playfully defiant shots occur in the film’s first minutes, as if to announce up front that the old rules would not apply to Breathless or to Godard.

Through these decisions, Godard removed the scrim of convention by which the cinema transmits time and space to the viewer; however, by flouting the principles on which the classical cinema is based, he in fact ended up emphasizing them. In appearing amateurish, the film calls attention to the codes of professionalism, and in the end highlights the fact that they are merely conventions: it denaturalizes them. Breathless presents standard aspects of the classic cinema, but mediated, or quoted. Paradoxically, this interpolation of Godard’s directorial authority between the viewer and the action does not render the film arch, distant, or calculated, but rather produces the impression of immediacy, spontaneity, and vulnerability. Godard’s presence is invoked as a sort of live-action narrator who calls the shots as they unfold, with as much potential for accident and error as any live performance. But here, the “errors” only reinforce the illusion of immediacy. The overall result is an accelerated and syncopated rhythm, made of leaps ahead and doublingsback, a sort of visual jazz (with Godard as the improvising soloist) that outswung the American detective and gangster films that had served as Godard’s models.

The jump cut is a device that Godard subsequently reused only rarely. He soon devised other, and more sophisticated, methods for conjuring his presence in his films. It was not in Godard’s work, but in the work of lesser directors, that the jump cut would become a cliché, and then a commonplace in television commercials and, later, music videos. The great importance of its appearance in Breathless was that it served as a starting point for Godard’s more thorough reconsideration of technique and convention in editing: years later, after his work had changed direction more than once, Godard said of his editing technique in Breathless: “Thinking about it afterward, it gave me new ideas about montage.”42

Breathless is notable for still another kind of montage, the assembly of allusions and references to film history. Not only did Godard film Breathless in the style of an American film noir, he stocked it with citations from the American cinema. Breathless is replete with visual quotations from movies by Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, Anthony Mann, and from The Enforcer43 (as well as from Le Plaisir by Max Ophüls). In lieu of credits—the film has none— the film bears a dedication to Monogram Films, an American “B-movie” studio; and the film shows posters for Westbound, by Budd Boetticher, a poster of Humphrey Bogart from The Harder They Fall (his last film), another poster for another western (starring Jeff Chandler) bearing the remarkable French title Vivre dangereusement jusqu’au bout (to live dangerously to the end), the original American title of which was 10 Seconds to Hell; a clip from the sound track of Preminger’s Whirlpool. Michel Poiccard himself is obsessed with American movies and takes on the gestures and the attitudes, the perpetual pugnacity and casual misogyny of the noir hero, specifically, the sneer displayed on-screen by Humphrey Bogart, as well as an aptitude for violence that seemed to him to constitute the genre and its promise, or myth, of freedom.

All of Godard’s friends in the New Wave were deeply affected and influenced by the recent American cinema. However, the first films of the New Wave—those of Chabrol and Truffaut, as well as the early efforts of Rivette and Rohmer—hardly resembled it. As filmmakers, the group from Cahiers kept their relations with the films they loved tacit and implicit. Only Godard made a film that in story, in style, and in substance is directly derived from the American movies they admired.

Breathless openly bore the marks of its director’s absorption of the history of cinema, and Godard went on to build his career as a filmmaker with an explicit and voracious aptitude for quotation. In Breathless, the technique only added to the immediacy of the effect, suggesting, as it did, that Godard dosed his film with quotations because they were what he was thinking about at the time of its making.

For Godard, the cinema’s ability to combine two ideas in one image made it better than writing as a representation of his thought processes. The technical complexities of the cinema were nonetheless obstacles to a spontaneity of expression comparable to that of a writer, but Godard’s unusual methods both made the medium more responsive to his immediate inclinations and made that spontaneity apparent in the film itself. The ultimate and most important effect of his decision to compose the dialogue, and to specify the action, as close as possible to the time of the shoot, was to displace the film from being revelatory of the fictional characters to being principally revelatory of Godard himself. Even as Breathless uncovers the psychology of its characters, it expounds the thoughts and preferences of Godard in the moment. The viewer’s crucial and primary emotional identification is not with any filmed character but with Godard. The rapid, even irrational, transitions and juxtapositions of mood and tone are the cinematic equivalent of Godard’s own stream of consciousness, one mind’s montage of the thousands of hours of cinema to which Godard had subjected himself, with which he had forged his identity.

And Godard was thinking not only about films, but also about books, paintings, and music, elements of culture directly transmitted through the film by citations in images or on the sound track. Indeed, Breathless bore the burden of Godard’s intense autodidacticism, with quotations from and references to literature (Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Aragon, Rilke, Françoise Sagan, Maurice Sachs), paintings (Picasso, Renoir, Klee), and music (Mozart and Bach). The pieces of paper that Pierret, the journalist, saw scattered around Godard’s plate of crudités included many quotations from literary sources that Godard had culled from his obsessive reading and which he liberally sprinkled throughout the film’s dialogue. The result was a first-person documentary of a distinctive, indeed a unique, sort: this first-person cinema invoked not the director’s experience but his presence.

And yet it was a presence that was defined as much by its displacement as by its manifestation. In this context, Godard’s obsessive quotation, his past thievery, and his passive reaction to actors and circumstances—all second-degree actions—all appear as part of the same phenomenon: parasitism, literally, feeding on the side, nourishing oneself from another’s product or earnings. Whether drawing from his grandfather or Beauregard, from the till at Cahiers or his pages of quotes, from the ecstasies of literature or the transcendent self-abnegation that was cinema, whether from the actors who peopled his film or the observed strangers in whose gestures Godard clad his actors, Godard as an original creator existed independently not at all. Breathless was both a work of existential engagement with the world—an engagement that was constant, essential, and involuntary, inasmuch as it was a collage of preexisting material—and therefore also a work of Sartrean bad faith, made by a thinker who did not think but was thought.

Breathless is essentially the film of an adolescent, the film to which Godard had been building since his early determination to make movies; it marked both the end of his adolescence and its culmination, and it is overfilled with stored-up ideas and desires. (Years later, when Godard was asked how he would account for the sense of urgency in Breathless, he answered, “Adolescence, youth, fear, despair, solitude.”)44 The film is infused with an exultation in despair, as seen in the dancelike movement of Belmondo to an inner dirge that he hears as up-tempo, or in his joy in his dark destiny, despite the gaudy ruin it promises. Truffaut saw it as the “saddest”45 of Godard’s films, as a film of “moral and physical unhappiness.”46 Critics less sophisticated than Truffaut recognized that the film transcended its own fictional or narrative contours to become a phenomenon, an act of self-assertion, a generational watershed.

Breathless is the cornerstone film of the French New Wave because it is the one that explicitly claims the group’s intellectual heritage (American movies, modern literature, a polemical yet highly rhetorical critical style) while at the same time brandishing the group’s hectic, threadbare, disreputable social circumstances. As Godard said, “We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis the Fifteenth.”47 Breathless identified the virtues and vices, the ideas and the practices of the New Wave with his own.

Moreover, with Breathless, Godard achieved for the cinema, himself, and his movement what Sartre had accomplished in the late 1940s for philosophy, himself, and existentialism: he made his movement the emblem of the times, defined his medium as the one of the moment, and personally became its exemplary figure. Godard instantly became the embodiment of cinema, the New Wave, intellectual fashion, and intellectualism as fashion. Sartre carried a generation with him in the name of the philosophy with which he was personally identified. Godard did the same for the cinema, his ideas about it, and himself; he not only depicted and enacted the struggles of his generation, he ignited its ambitions, turning it into a group that wanted nothing more than to make films, and to make them as he did.

The seminal importance of the film was recognized immediately. In January 1960—prior to the film’s release—Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded “to encourage an auteur of the future.”48

Then, after successful test screenings to full houses in Lyon and Marseille, Breathless opened in Paris on March 16, 1960, not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters. In its first week of business, it attracted 50,095 spectators in those mere four theaters, and, in its entire Paris first run (which lasted seven weeks), 259,046 spectators. The eventual profit was substantial, rumored to be fifty times the investment. The film’s success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception. Godard’s new view of cinema and its broader implications were reflected, with a remarkable accuracy, in the reviews published at the time of its opening. Perhaps more than any other serious film in the history of cinema, Breathless, as a result of its extraordinary and calculated congruence with the moment, and of the fusion of its attributes with the story of its production and with the public persona of its director, was singularly identifiable with the media responses it generated.

Balducci had arranged for notables in and out of the cinema to see Breathless. Jean-Paul Sartre (who remarked, “It’s really very beautiful”),49 Sophia Loren, Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, and Carlo Ponti all saw early screenings. The film was a conversation piece in sophisticated circles by the time it opened. The most vituperative rejections of the film were from the left-wing film journal Positif where Louis Seguin accused the film of purveying a “mythology” that was “rightist.”50 But most reviewers were aware that they were in the presence of something original and important; one critic set the tone for the film’s epochal significance by referring back to Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 article prophesying the coming age of the “caméra-stylo,” the camera that a new generation of filmmakers would wield with the fluency, spontaneity, and intimacy with which writers write: Gerald Devries, in Démocratie 60, opined, “Here is, in fact, the first work authentically written with a caméra-stylo.”51

Godard’s film was recognized to be a part of the New Wave yet different from, and even opposed to, the work of his friends. In Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, Gilbert Salachas wrote, “What distinguishes Breathless . . . is a spectacular anarchy in the tone, the images, the language. This extremism in its originality is presented almost as a manifesto.”52 Critic and film historian Jacques Siclier declared, “In the light of Breathless, The 400 Blows looks like an obedient schoolboy’s homework, Chabrol’s films the product of a perfect academicism.”53

Simone Dubreuilh of Libération54 hailed Godard as “a young man who writes authentically everything that he is thinking directly in images.”55 Others, like Pierre Marcabru in Combat, recognized the correspondence between the film’s substance and its director, and called attention to the implied continuity between the world off-camera and the one filmed:

It seems that, if we had footage of Godard shooting his film, we would discover a sort of accord between the dramatized world in front of the camera (Belmondo and Seberg playing a scene) and the working world behind it (Godard and Raoul Coutard shooting the scene), as if the wall between the real and projected worlds had been torn down.56

The film was also recognized as the signal accomplishment of the New Wave: “Godard goes further than Resnais with Hiroshima and Bresson with Pikpokett [sic].”57 “The terms ‘old cinema’ and ‘new cinema’ now have meaning. . . . With Breathless, the generation gap can suddenly be felt.”58 With Breathless, Cahiers du cinéma immediately became, in effect, the most important film school in France: the technical training formerly considered indispensable was now, virtually overnight, displaced by the wisdom offered by Langlois at his unofficial conservatory.

Though few young filmmakers would imitate Breathless, many would imitate Godard himself, such as Breathless revealed him to be: an artistically voracious autodidact devoted fanatically to the history of cinema.

Godard had been a critic for ten years before getting the chance to make Breathless. By the time he made his first full-length film, he was intensely aware of the role of the press in creating an idea of a film prior to its existence. As the director of a film born of a unique mode of production and philosophical orientation, he also required the appropriate conditions for a correct appreciation of his unusual work. He needed, in other words, to generate—and to induce critics to employ—a method of criticism that was apt for his own film. This was his self-appointed task as an interviewee. He needed to speak directly to his viewers in order to orient their viewing, and he made sure to become enough of a celebrity to get his voice quickly heard. Michel Dorsday, of Cahiers, recalled that Godard “grafted” onto the film “the fame of Jean-Luc Godard.”59

The popular and commercial recognition of Breathless, and the intriguing stories surrounding its production, created a demand for Godard’s presence in interviews. He was interviewed in Le Monde and in Arts at the time of the film’s release, as well as in Swiss journals shortly thereafter. These interviews were themselves a sort of virtuoso performance in which the director both illustrated and extended the methods of his film into the press. In Le Monde, Godard explained how he had worked:

Based on this theme by Truffaut, I told the story of an American woman and a Frenchman. Things can’t work out between them because he thinks about death and she doesn’t. I said to myself that if I didn’t add this idea to the screenplay the film would not be interesting. For a long time the boy has been obsessed by death, he has forebodings. That’s the reason why I shot that scene of the accident where he sees a guy die in the street. I quoted that sentence from Lenin, “We are all dead people on leave,” and I chose the Clarinet Concerto that Mozart wrote shortly before dying.60

In fact, Michel sees a “guy” (played by Jacques Rivette) lying dead in the street after a motor scooter accident (reminiscent of Godard’s mother’s death) and walks on impassively, but remarks to Patricia later that day, “I saw a guy die.” The next day, in bed with Patricia, he tells her: “Do you think of death sometimes? I think about it endlessly.” Thus the “subject” of the film is indeed stated as baldly as possible—a boy who thinks about death—but the cultural artifacts that reinforce the subject and weave it into the fabric of the film are present as a sort of code, and Godard made use of the press to publish the decoder.

Godard’s proposed interpretive method—and its difficult subtleties—did not go unnoticed. After seeing the film and reading the interviews, André Bessèges wrote in France Catholique:

They are shown a “guy dying in the street,” they are made to hear the clarinet concerto that Mozart wrote just before dying. The auteur assures us that it is to make us understand that his hero is obsessed with death. But one must have, to say the least, an acute sense of symbols, and also be an alert connoisseur of music, to catch onto those intentions.61

“To catch onto those intentions” required an initiation, an engagement on the part of the viewer. It also required the active role of the press in transmitting Godard’s remarks in the context of reports on the celebrity’s life. In a revealing moment in the film’s long central scene in Patricia’s tiny hotel room, Michel delivers a monologue on the women of different cities (a riff that Godard’s voluble and opinionated friend Roland Tolmatchoff recognizes as his own) that concludes by praising the women of Lausanne and Geneva above all. At the sound of the word “Lausanne,” the wail of an ambulance siren is heard sharply on the sound track. This sonic coincidence is no accident: the ambulance siren at that moment was added by Godard as a deliberate choice in the sound editing process (inasmuch as Breathless was shot silent and the sound track dubbed, all of the film’s sounds were intentionally applied) and its presence is a reference to the death of Godard’s mother in a motorcycle accident. Godard left the reference apparent to those who might perceive it but hidden from those who would not—yet given his sudden great celebrity, it was inevitable that the underlying facts would come out, and would render the passage explicable.

Godard slips into the film, and into the character of Michel Poiccard, such items of personal reminiscence as: the use of the Swiss numbers septante and huitante instead of the French soixante-dix and quatre-vingts for seventy and eighty, an ashtray that prompts mention of his grandfather’s Rolls-Royce, a comment by Poiccard regarding the luxurious Parisian building where he was born (evoking Patricia’s surprise at his déclassé status), numerous references to Godard’s own Left Bank nightspots and Right Bank landmarks, a mention of a name (Zumbach) from a recent Swiss murder case, the names of Godard’s Swiss friends.62

In a February 3 Tribune de Genève article, Godard, responding to a journalist’s question about those names in the film which “come from the Geneva phone book,” explained the story:

Yes, those are old acquaintances. I thought those fellows would be happy I remembered them. And why make the effort to invent names? Besides, Tomatchov [sic] is unknown in Paris or Berlin. Only the initiated will smile at this sort of connection. Just like when I have my hero say that on average the girls of Geneva and Lausanne are better than those of other European cities.63

Journalists were part of Godard’s system, providing skeleton keys to the work as they created the phenomenon on which they were reporting. Viewers and readers, upon their initiation into the film’s esoterica, themselves popularized the advanced cinematic philosophy that Breathless represented, becoming the first citizens of the new republic the film heralded: the republic of media self-consciousness, of the fusion of communication with theories of communication, of criticism with art.

Having joined his critical theories to his work of art, Godard was aware of the conflict between symbolic expression in a heavily layered and ironic work of fiction, and direct, sincere communication. His next work, which he had announced while Breathless was still in progress, would be constructed around a first-person monologue, and was calculated to allay any doubts (including his own) on the subject of his sincerity.

Speaking during the shoot of Breathless with Marc Pierret, the journalist from France-Observateur who was planted in the crew, Godard announced, “I’ll shoot my next film in Switzerland. With three times less money: an assistant, a cameraman, that’s all. It will be something about torture.” After the shoot ended, he told Michèle Manceaux of L‘Express that it would be called Le Petit Soldat. But it was not the only new project with which Godard had gone public. Although Le Petit Soldat, the story about torture, would indeed become Godard’s second film, it would, in a way, be his second second film.

His first second film had already been publicized, in August 1959, in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma. It was called Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), and was the story of a woman who tells her boyfriend that she wants to have a baby with him despite not being married. It was based on a story outline by the actress Geneviève Cluny, who had passed it along to the actress Michèle Meritz, who brought it to the attention of Claude Chabrol in 1957 while playing a small role in his Le Beau Serge. Chabrol showed the story to his assistant director, Philippe de Broca, and to Godard, who decided to join forces to turn it into a full-length script. In the course of what de Broca recalled as their “fifteen abominable days” of work together, Godard took him to “disgusting cafeterias at impossible hours,” and then announced that he—Godard—would write the story himself.64 Cluny, however, decided to give her story to de Broca, who made it into his first film, Les Jeux de l’amour (The Games of Love), in the summer of 1959 (it was released in June 1960).

Godard, however, gave Cahiers an acerbic six-page divertissement called A Woman Is a Woman, which is a comic love triangle between a woman and two men but with the added fillip of a pregnancy by the wrong one of the two men. It ended with a pun, in which Josette’s steady boyfriend calls her “infâme” (horrid), to which she replies that she is “une femme” (a woman). Godard’s publication of his story in advance of the release of de Broca’s film was a defensive maneuver to stake his claim to the story, which he would hold for the future; he would instead make Le Petit Soldat as soon as possible.

Starting another film as soon as possible was both to Godard’s and Beauregard’s advantage. Godard had wanted to sign for a second film before Breathless was released because he feared that, if Breathless failed, he might never get to make a second film. He was also jealous of Chabrol’s output (three films since 1958) and wanted to catch up. As for Beauregard, signing on to another project at once would allow him to collect funds from automatic aid to producers, with which he could pay current expenses and debts.

By the end of 1959, with the reputation of Breathless growing, Beauregard took advantage of the moment to announce, in a gag of a two-page display ad in the trade journal La Cinématographie française, his forthcoming production of Le Petit Soldat.

The ad was a singular stunt—a text, written in the style of a classified ad, appearing in Godard’s own distinctive handwriting, which read: “Jean-Luc Godard, who has completed ‘Breathless’ and is preparing ‘Le Petit Soldat’ seeks young woman between 18 and 27 to make her both his actress and his friend,” with Beauregard’s company and telephone number listed at the bottom of the page. The prank seemed to be a smarmy attempt to use his growing fame to seek young women in the guise of an open casting call. In fact, Godard already had an actress in mind for the role in the film, a young woman who had rejected a role in Breathless—Anna Karina.

It is a story the actress has told often, each time a little differently, to Cahiers du cinéma, to journalists and interviewers (including to this author), to audiences in New York and in London, and most thoroughly, to Beauregard’s daughter, Chantal, for her biography of her father.65 For a small role in Breathless, Godard had been looking for a model, a cover girl for Elle magazine whom he had seen in commercials (shown not on television but in movie theaters). He made contact and asked her to come to Beauregard’s office, where he offered her the role of the woman in St.-Germain-des-Prés from whom Betmondo steals money when he arrives in Paris. It required her to bare her breasts as she pulled her dressing gown over her head (giving Belmondo the moment to take cash from her wallet). For this reason, the actress refused the role (which Godard gave to Liliane David, Truffaut’s mistress).

Now, while planning Le Petit Soldat, Godard sent the model a telegram asking to speak with her about a different role in a different film, possibly the lead. Given her experience with the director in Beauregard’s office, she had some idea of what the role would, she thought, likely entail, so she ignored the message. But when she told two actor friends (Claude Brasseur and Sady Rebbot, both of whom would later work with Godard) about the note, they told her to respond at once, because they had heard rumors that Godard’s yet-unreleased film was remarkable.

She met Godard at Beauregard’s small office on the rue de Cérisoles. She took a seat. He walked around her several times and told her to come back the next day to sign a contract. She asked whether she would have to get undressed. He said, “No, it’s a political film.” She said that she wouldn’t know how to give a political speech; he said, in a colossal deception, “There aren’t any speeches, so come sign tomorrow.” She could not sign, however, because the actress, Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer, known professionally as Anna Karina (a name bestowed upon her two years earlier, at the beginning of her modeling career in Paris, shortly after her arrival from Denmark, by Coco Chanel in the offices of Elle), was only nineteen, and a minor under French law regarding contracts. (Her mother promptly traveled from Denmark to Paris to sign on her behalf.)

Shortly after Karina’s contract was signed, Godard’s handwritten ad appeared in La Cinématographie française. The effect of this publicity stunt was to make her casting appear to be the result of a response to the ad. Unaware of the ad, Karina was returning to her apartment when her concierge reported the contents of an article in France-Soir, to the effect that Godard had met Karina through a want ad placed in the trade journal, looking for (as she said) his “actress and soul mate.” Karina asked the concierge what this meant. To the concierge, it meant that the actress had slept with the director to get her role. The young actress, who was furious at what she considered a humiliating insinuation, returned to Beauregard’s office in tears, ready to repudiate the contract and face the consequences. The next day, Godard sent her a telegram making poetic reference to her Danish nationality—“A character from Hans Christian Andersen has no right to cry”—which also suggested that through her association with him, she had embarked on a fairy-tale destiny. She ignored the telegram; the director appeared at her door with an enormous bouquet of roses to make amends, and apologized for the ad, which, he said, was Balducci’s idea.66

Though Karina had already signed her contract, Godard began his effort to win her over to his cause. Karina recalled, “He invited me to a screening of Breathless. I didn’t like it at all. Then we had dinner together. None of this appealed to me in the least. I was basically a little suspicious.”67 Nonetheless, she accepted Godard’s request that she do a screen test:

One week later, during the screen test, he interrogated me.
Do you like to read?
Which books?
Which music?
And what about boys. Do you like boys?
What kind of boys?
Good Lord, what does he want from me? I didn’t want to answer. First of all, I thought it was none of his business and besides, it seemed very strange. I was on the verge of tears.
I said to him: Listen, this really is none of your business!
He didn’t insist.68

But of course, since Godard sought to eliminate the barrier between the personal and the artistic, between life on-camera and off, he would soon make it his business.

1. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Trente Ans vingt-cinq films (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1963), p.59.
2. Arts, March 12, 1958.
3. Truffaut archives, BiFi.
4. David Richards,Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 84-85.
5. Les Nouvelles Littéraires, July 7,1982.
6. November 26, 1958; G par G, vol.1, p.150.
7. Philippe Durant, Belmondo (Paris: Robert Laffont 1993), p. 149.
8. Capitalized to make a pun on the title of Les Temps de Paris, a short-lived daily newspaper intended to rival Le Monde, on which Truffaut was able to get Godard work writing gossip; the paper
was published from April 17 to July 3, 1956. (www.quid.fr/2000/INFORMAT/Q0370.HTM)
9. A double reference: on the one hand, Sagan was the author of Bonjour Tristesse, and the hiring of Jean Seberg brought the association inevitably to mind; but Sagan was also staying in St.-Tropez
not far from Truffaut.
10. Belmondo, Trente Ans et vintr-cinq films, p.60.
11. Minister of State in Charge of Cultural Affairs.
12. Echéances—the due date for a payment. Chantal de Beauregard, Georges de Beauregard (Nîmes Lacour, 1991), p. 89.
13. Ibid.
14. The version that Truffaut gave Godard, in La Lettre du cinéma, no. 3; Godard’s version, in L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, March 1968.
15. An ingenious way of staying faithful to the original newspaper accounts of the real incident (which ended with the man’s arrest and trial) while avoiding the conventional cinematic resolution of a courtroom drama.
16. This story, an experience also shared by Paul Gégauff, would become the basis for Eric Rohmer’s first feature, The Sign of Leo, which he too filmed in the summer of 1959, immediately before Godard’s shoot of Breathless. Godard has a cameo role in Rohmer’s film, as a party guest who puts on the record player a record of a Beethoven quartet (op. 132) and repeatedly places the needle at the same passage. It was a gesture taken from something that Godard’s friends had seen him do.
17. L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, no.79, March 1968.
18. Letter from Godard to Truffaut (undated, July 1958), courtesy of Madeleine Morgenstern.
19. Ibid.
20. Raoul Coutard, interview by author, April 27, 2001.
21. Le Nouvel Observateur, September 22, 1965.
22. In a 35mm film camera, shooting 24 frames per second, one foot produced sixteen frames, or two-thirds of a second.
23. Pierre Braunherger, Pierre Braunberger, producteur: cinéma mémoire (Paris: C.N.C., 1987).
24. Filmkritik, July 1983.
25. Braunberger, Pierre Braunberger.
26. The difference is sometimes noticeable.
27. The main character of that film, a gangster named Bob Montagné, is mentioned in Breathless as a friend of Poiccard.
28. Film Culture, no.35, 1964—1965.
29. Richards, Played Out, p.85.
30. Seberg complained about Godard’s lack of hygiene; he wore his only suit, and she claimed that it smelled (Jean Clay, Réalités). Godard may have been relatively poor compared to professional filmmakers, but he is said to have had certainly enough money to buy decent clothing; he was simply neglectful of his appearance and had the habit of owning only one suit, wearing it out, and then replacing it. Seberg also complained that Godard had written a line indicating that her character had stolen money from her concierge; Godard removed the line.
31. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Trente Ans vingt-cinq films, texte recueilli par Gilles Durieux (Paris: Union Générale d’Editeurs, 1963), p.61.
32. Jesn-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1980), p.86.
33. Filmkritik (Munich), July 1983.
34. France-Observateur was the precursor to the contemporary Le Nouvel Observateur.
35. France-Observateur, October 29, 1959.
36. An expression that means something like “wild oats,” the not-atypical troubles of a spirited youth.
37. L’Express, December 23, 1959.
38. In French, propédeutique.
39. Rui Nogueira, ed., Melville on Melville (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 76.
40. What he decided at random, however, was the cutting of a scene where Belmondo drives and Seberg is the passenger. Godard had filmed both, separately, from the perspective of the back seat of the car, and had originally intended to cut back and forth between the characters in a traditional shot-reverse shot schema. But he decided that instead of trimming the shots of both characters, he would reduce the scene radically by flipping a coin to see which of the characters would be completely edited out.
41. There was the added psychological effect of suggesting that Michel was on the verge of doing himself in, symbolically, as well.
42. Concordia University, Montreal, March 12, 1977.
43. The Enforcer is credited to Bretaigne Windust but was directed in significant part by Raoul Walsh.
44. Prom a privately recorded audio cassette.
45. Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Seghers, 1963).
46, Réalités, January 1964.
47. Ibid.
48. Breathless failed to win the Louis Delluc Prize from French film critics for best film of the year because “only four or five jurors, out of about fifteen, had seen Godard’s first feature film.” The others did not even take the trouble to attend a private screening. “Thus it could not get a majority.” G.S. (Georges Sadoul), Les Lettres françaises, January 20, 1966, p. 31. (The prize went instead to On n’enterre pas le dimanche [We Don’t Bury on Sunday], directed by Michel Drach.)
49. This was understood by some to be an elegant deflection.
50. Positif, April 1960.
51. Gérald Devries, Démocratie 60, March 25, 1960.
52. Gilbert Salachas, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, April 3, 1960.
53. Jacques Siclier, “A Bout de Souffle, Le manifeste de la ‘Nouvelle Vague.’”
54. This is the newspaper that goes by that name today.
55. Simone Dubreuilh, Libération, March 23, 1960.
56. Pierre Marcabru, Combat, September 3, 1960.
57. D and F, Nouveaux Jours, March 25, 1960.
58. Siclier, “A Bout de Souffle, Le manifeste de la ‘Nouvelle Vague.’”
59. Dorsday, interview by author, May 21, 2001.
60. Le Monde, March 18, 1960.
61. André Bessèges, France Catholique, March 25, 1960.
62. This was known as the “Jaccoud affair.”
63. Tribune de Genève, February 3, 1960.
64. Philippe de Broca, ed. Alain Garel (Paris: Veyrier, 1990).
65. Chantal de Beauregard, Georges de Beauregard “ . . . Premier sourire de Belmondo . . . dernier de Bardot . . . ” (Nîmes: Lacour/Colporteur, 1991), pp. 99-102. (The title is taken from Godard’s eulogy for Beauregard.)
66. Ibid.
67. Quoted in Michel Vianey, En attendant Godard (Paris: Grasset, 1967), p. 196.
68. Ibid., p, 197.


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