Breathless (1960) - The Criterion Collection

Synopsis

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, crackling personalities of rising stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and anything-goes crime narrative, Jean-Luc Godard’s debut fashioned a simultaneous homage to and critique of the American film genres that influenced and rocked him as a film writer for Cahiers du cinéma. Jazzy, free-form, and sexy, Breathless (À bout de souffle) helped launch the French New Wave and ensured cinema would never be the same.

Cast

Patricia Franchini	Jean Seberg
Michel Poiccard	Jean-Paul Belmondo
Inspector Vital	Daniel Boulanger
Antonio Berruti	Henri-Jacques Huet
Carl Zumbach	Roger Hanin
Van Doude	Van Doude

Credits

Director	Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay	Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography	Raoul Coutard
Producer	Georges de Beauregard
Based on an original treatment by	François Truffaut
Assistant editor	Pierre Rissient
Camera operator	Claude Beausoleil
Technical advisor	Claude Chabrol
Editing	Cécile Decugis
Music	Martial Solal

Disc Features

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director of photography Raoul Coutard
Archival interviews with director Jean-Luc Godard, and actors Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and Jean-Pierre Melville
New video interviews with Coutard, assistant director Pierre Rissient, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker
New video essays: filmmaker and critic Mark Rappaport’s “Jean Seberg” and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Breathless as Film Criticism”
Chambre 12, Hotel de suede, an eighty-minute French documentary about the making of Breathless, with members of the cast and crew
Charlotte et son Jules, a 1959 short film by Godard, starring Belmondo
French theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring writings from Godard, film historian Dudley Andrew, Francois Truffaut’s original film treatment, and Godard’s scenario

From the Current

“The Face of the French Cinema Has Changed”

by Jean-Luc Godard Apr 21, 2009

Fifty years ago today . . . Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows being selected to represent France at the Cannes Film Festival (thanks to the machinations...

Bazin Season

by Colin MacCabe Dec 21, 2008

André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the most influential film magazine ever published. And yet at the...

Breathless Then and Now

by Dudley Andrew Oct 22, 2007

The opening of Breathless is “unprecedented,” in that we never learn what route brought Michel Poiccard to the Vieux Port of Marseille, where he surveys the future from the very edge of France. This first shot strikes a match to touch off an oil fire that will race through the film’s incidents...

Breathless

by John Powers Jul 8, 1992

Many great movies are classics. A few stand as landmarks. The merest handful—perhaps four or five in a century—deserve to be called revolutions. Breathless belongs unequivocally in the final category. Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of...