Breathless

As we will discuss this week, the FNW folks wanted a cinema that departed dramatically from that offered by dominant French cinema. As the Neupert chapter makes clear, these filmmakers hoped to dismantle the industry by producing films that were profoundly self-aware (in opposition to the bourgeois studio cinema that masked its craft and pretended to be up-to-date but was actually stifled in tired retreads).

Breathless achieves this aim in a recognizable fashion. Through its elliptical editing (jump-cuts), asynchronous sound, non-standard narrative grammar, and partially developed characters who often act against themselves, the film presents almost every major tenet the FNW wanted to forward. Though its stylistics (issues of editing, cinematography, etc) are often frustrating to audiences at first glance ("this dude makes crappy films"), further study finds that comment like this actually says more about the speaker's subject position than it does about the film. That is, we have been trained through repetition to "know" what a (good) film should look like (fluid, eg) and what it should contain (recognizable characters engaged in the world in manners consistent with their character traits, eg). Though some of the stylistics may look familiar in some way (elliptical editing is not that rare today), we cannot underestimate the radicality of this film in 1959.