Breathless (1960 film)
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'''''Breathless''''' (French: '''''À bout de souffle'''''; literally "out of breath") is a [[1960 in film|1960]] [[film]] directed by [[Jean-Luc Godard]]. | '''''Breathless''''' (French: '''''À bout de souffle'''''; literally "out of breath") is a [[1960 in film|1960]] [[film]] directed by [[Jean-Luc Godard]]. | ||
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- For the unrelated short story by Poe, see Loss of Breath
Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; literally "out of breath") is a 1960 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard's first feature-length film is one of the inaugural and best-known films of the French New Wave. He wrote it with fellow New Wave director, François Truffaut, and released it the year after Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Together the three films brought international acclaim to the New Wave.
Breathless shocked contemporary audiences with its bold visual style and editing—much of which broke the rules of classical Hollywood cinema. Most notable of its innovations were jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.
Postmodern psychopath
Jean-Paul Belmondo's iconic performance as the remorseless and self-consciously fatalistic car thief and cop-killer, Michel Poiccard, in Godard's À bout de souffle (1960), is perhaps the first cinematic example of the postmodern psychopath. Godard seems to suggest that it is the residually accruing collective memory of conventionalized portrayals of gangsters and underworld criminals in American B-movies and pulp fiction since the 1930s which have made Poiccard a kind of wannabe tough-guy psychopath-poseur through the cultural-ideological effect of osmotic suggestion and participatory facsimile.