BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, October 27 for the 4K restoration of director Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary French New Wave masterpiece “Breathless” (1960).
BREATHLESS | 1960 | DIRECTOR: Jean-Luc Godard | WITH: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Van Doude | RUNNING TIME: 1H 30M | IN FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | UNRATED contains adult situations and sexual themes | PROJECTION 4K DCP
There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.
“Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1960. No debut film since “Citizen Kane” in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard’s technique of “jump cuts” is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.
“Breathless” remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years. What fascinates above all is the naivete and amorality of these two young characters: Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a car thief who idolizes Bogart and pretends to be tougher than he is, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American who peddles the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune while waiting to enroll at the Sorbonne. Do they know what they’re doing? Both of the important killings in the movie occur because Michel accidentally comes into possession of someone else’s gun; Patricia’s involvement with him seems inspired in equal parts by affection, sex and fascination with his gangster persona.
“The film’s bold originality in style, characters and tone made a certain kind of genteel Hollywood movie quickly obsolete. Godard went on to become the most famous innovator of the 1960s, although he lost the way later, with increasingly mannered experiments. Here in one quick, sure move, knowing somehow just what he wanted and how to obtain it, he achieved a turning point in the cinema just as surely as Griffith did with “The Birth of a Nation” and Welles with “Citizen Kane.” — Roger Ebert
Tickets are $5 and available at link above. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show Cane card at the door).
