Breathless

Jean Luc Godard's entrance into the cinematic landscape marks a peculiar point in the history of cinema. Not only is the mirror turned on the gamut of practices and conventions, but the entire fashion is swallowed into a fissure of artificiality. What strikes me as the most remarkable aspect of Breathless, and even Godard's cinematic oeuvre for that matter, is his contentiousness with certain cinematic codes, i.e., operating within a given framework and rarely ever escaping it. His remarks toward the cinema are not scathing, he quotes his professors (with all of his allusions to B-movie and classic Hollywood directors/films), and weaves in and out of genre, but as is abovementioned, he turns the mirror, and furthermore skews it a little. In fact the film is more synesthetic than anything; it's visual jazz, pure and simple. Breathless marks Godard as one of the most enigmatic (cinematically) lyrical improvisers ever. His genius, like that of Coltrane or Davis, is in the way he careens and caresses the nodes of each cinematic turn, all the while making you feel the verve and spontaneity of the experience. In his case, the film is not the script, the film is an explicit liberation of text; it says, "I can cover everything text does and more, I can move you like no text can move you; watch how I play with these elements." It is precisely in this play of elements where Godard achieves his glorious pet, and charms us with his horn. His disjunctive methods-- the jump cuts, the interlaced and jarring dubbing, the narrative jump from action to affect and back again-- these all render a new and inventive cinematic practice (and potential). Even his lighting, with its maximization of natural light, calls attention to the artificiality of classical cinema, which tries to sell itself as seeming natural. All of this runs against the grain of things prior, as far as cinematic conventions are concerned. He is making the classic seem so much more artificial, and his work so much more self-referential that it creates a sort of schism. Professionalism of classical cinema is precisely that, a type of "professional" code with which to render the entire cinematic experience. Godard debunks that, he denaturalizes the whole breadth of it, and laughs at it, much in the way Michel addresses the camera, when he is driving into the city from the provincial freeway, "If you don't like the sea/ and don't care for the mountains/ and don't like the big city either/ go fuck yourself!" and that is that.