(Sunday) Movie Meetup — Breathless — Meet from 1 pm, film at 2 pm
Details
‘We barged into cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis the Fifteenth.’
— Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinéma 138.
We're going to see Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut Breathless—the second in a short season exploring the start of the French New Wave.
We'll meet in the Watershed cafe/bar from 1 pm, to say hello and chat. Afterwards, there will be time to stop and talk about the film.
Buy your own ticket from the box office or online.
ABOUT THE FILM
"Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary debut feature was this iconoclastic crime film, which almost singlehandedly changed the face of French cinema and went on to inspire countless New Waves around the world.
"A laid-back homage to Godard's beloved Hollywood B-movies of the 1940s, this simple story of an American student's (Jean Seberg) relationship with a charismatic young hoodlum (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is steeped in naturalistic and innovative touches, from pop-culture references and Seberg's androgynous haircut to the then revolutionary adoption of jump-cut editing."
— Watershed summary
"There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love."
★★★★★ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"Godard brought to the screen the jagged, intuitive temperament of youth in a way that nobody else had ever done before."
★★★★★ Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
"The thin, conventional storyline is swept along by the imaginative, urgent style with its then innovative jump cuts, overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork. A landmark film, it forever changed perceptions of cinema."
★★★★★ George Perry, BBC
"What shapes Breathless as such an influential and long lasting ‘classic’ of French cinema is Godard’s ferocious delivery of simplistic subject matter, his direction of iconic actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and his all-out gallantry in creating the first of many films that broke all the rules, both in his homeland and overseas."
★★★★★ Laura J. Smith, CineVue