Movies

The 'French New Wave Film Cycle' opens this Sunday with a seminal work of the era: Jean-Luc Godard's gangster melodrama. Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo), a petty, anarchic criminal who also goes by the name László Kovács, steals a car in Marseille. When a motorcycle policeman spots him on the motorway and tries to stop him, Michel instinctively kills him. He then travels to Paris, where he hides out with Patricia (played by Jean Seberg), an American woman aspiring to be a journalist who currently sells newspapers on the street. Michel wants them to escape together to Italy, but Patricia tells him that she is pregnant — probably by him.

Breathless, one of the most influential films in French and world cinema, introduced a variety of new cinematic techniques, including quotation and self-referentiality, the blurring of genre boundaries, the combination of fiction and documentary, handheld camerawork, breaking the fourth wall and radical editing solutions, such as jump cuts. The film also anticipated the emancipation of youth and the revolutionary mindset that emerged in the late 1960s.