Pacific Cinémathèque begins their 16-film retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre tonight with a screening of his 1960 feature-length debut Breathless (À bout de souffle) at 7:30 p.m.
A young Raoul Coutard got the job of cameraman on the film because most “professionals” were leery of working with the rookie Godard using unconventional techniques. Handheld cameras and street locations were not part of most productions but Godard saw things differently back in 1959.
Breathless cost the equivalent of approximately $90,000 (when the average budget for a French film at the time was $250,000) with $10,000 of that going towards Jean Seberg’s salary. When they started shooting there was no script but to shoot on the streets of Paris Godard had a mock script put together to appease city officials.
Godard told the New York Times when Breathless was released in North America in February 1961, “Every morning before we went to work, I would write scenes for the day. Some days we had to stop work at noon when we ran out of script.”
Coutard was interviewed by The Telegraph in 2010 on the 50th anniversary of the film and in his view “(Godard’s) main aim was to demonstrate that there could be a different way of making films — he attacked film grammar, as it had been perfected by D.W. Griffith, by crossing the eye line or breaking continuity with jump cuts. Each time we made a movie, he set out to do something other people didn’t do: it was a sort of provocation.” See the complete interview here: telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/7819078/50-years-of-Breathless-Raoul-Coutard-interview.html.
See trailer for Breathless (À bout de souffle) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqlfRR1rpmU.
