BREATHLESS

(À bout de souffle)

Special Screening | France | 1960 | Drama, Romance | 90 min | In French with English subtitles |

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut
Produced by: Georges de Beauregard (Les Productions Georges de Beauregard)
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Original Score: Martial Solal
Film Editing: Cécile Decugis
Cast: Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel Poiccard), Daniel Boulanger (Inspector Vital), Henri Jacques Huet (Antonio Berrutti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zubart), Van Doude (himself), Claude Mansard (Claudius), Liliane Dreyfus (Liliane), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulsco)
International Sales: StudioCanal
US Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Synopsis

Belmondo, a girl and a gun… and modern cinema is born. The year is 1960. Thumbing his nose at every rule in the book, Jean-Luc Godard literally reinvents the medium with his very first feature. Teeming with jump cuts, Hollywood references, and a freewheeling hand-held camera style, Breathless recounts an anything-goes lovers-on-the-run story about a small-time hood and the wholesome American femme fatale who bewitches him on the Champs-Élysées. The film made Belmondo a star, earned Godard the Prix Jean Vigo, and changed the way movies were made from that day forward.

Director’s biography

Leading light of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard almost single-handedly rewrote the grammar of cinema with his first feature, Breathless, and is considered to be the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. The Swiss-born writer/director began his career as a film critic for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma magazine in 1952. A scholar of world cinema and Marxist philosophy, his films are filled with references to film history and his highly political views. His immense body of work (of 131 films) includes My Life to Live (1962); Band of Outsiders (1964); Alphaville (1965), which won the Golden Bear in Berlin; Contempt (1964 – TAFFF 2022); Pierrot le Fou (1965 – COLCOA 2010); Masculin Féminin (1966); Weekend (1967); Tout va bien (1972); First Name: Carmen (1983), which won the Golden Lion in Venice; Hail Mary (1985); King Lear (1987); Detective (1985); the comprehensive miniseries Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-99), which won an Honorary César Award; JLG/JLG (1994); In Praise of Love (2001); Film socialisme (2010), which won the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association’s Independent/Experimental Film Award; Goodbye to Language (2014), which nabbed a Cannes Jury Prize; and The Image Book (2018), which was awarded a Special Palme d’Or in Cannes. He has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement César Award and an Honorary Academy Award. Jean-Luc Godard died, at the age of 91, in September 2022. Breathless is presented at TAFFF 2025 following the festival’s Hollywood Premiere of Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s new comedy on the making of Godard’s first feature.