À bout de souffle: Godard Big Leapt into the Void

 

A “real and simple” story. A young man steals a car, kills a policeman and flees. François Truffaut, one of the early heroes of the so called French New Wave, wrote a short story based on that news item. That story by Truffaut would become the foundation of Jean Luc Godard’s debut film in 1960, À bout de souffle. 

Godard was determined to make something more than a movie. He wanted to create a cinematic manifesto. He had worked as a film critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, everyone expected a film that would make history. At 29, Godard made history in his own way. 

Truffaut’s brief story was only the beginning. Just a first step. From there, Godard leapt into the void and discarded the script. In the mornings he wrote the scenes they would shoot in the afternoon. The actors did not know what would happen next, and that gave the film its naturalness. Godard allowed them, and at times demanded, that they improvise. 

There were no permits for locations, which added urgency to the scenes and an extravagant element whenever passers by turned in surprise at seeing the actors in the street. There were no sets. The streets, hotels, shops and restaurants of the city were the sets. 

War photographer Raoul Coutard carried the camera by hand or hid it in a baby carriage. À bout de souffle was the work of a guerrilla unit that arrived, struck and withdrew in minutes. The story was merely an excuse for Godard to smash every known paradigm in the world of cinema. Godard preferred natural lighting, as in real life. Godard made the film as if he was shooting a documentary. 

Then there were the famous jump cuts, which seemed like heresy against the smooth, discreet editing of the time. Godard used to watch films and skip the boring parts. The jump cuts were his way of accelerating time and conveying a great deal in a few seconds. À bout de souffle was the improvised jazz of Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy, turned into cinema. 

Jean Paul Belmondo, the protagonist, is more a retired boxer imitating Humphrey Bogart than an actor. Jean Seberg contributed her hairstyle, her way of dressing and her American accent. Seberg nearly quit the film several times because she could not understand that way of making cinema. It is said that when shooting ended she detested the movie. Yet À bout de souffle would become one of the films for which she is most remembered and the most important she ever made. 

Godard hated the linear and with this film set out to challenge it. À bout de souffle approaches the collages of Kurt Schwitters or the Cubist paintings of Picasso. The dialogues between Belmondo and Seberg are for the most part improvised and range from the trivial to the existentialism of Albert Camus or Jean Paul Sartre. 

Godard annihilated formality in the way of making cinema, and improvisation, as in jazz, became the manifesto. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and Sean Baker, among others, would take Godard as their principal inspiration for making films.