A Bout De Souffle

French Film Guide

Ramona Fotiade

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780765099
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the most charismatic feature films of the New Wave, A Bout de souffle (1960) has retained its appeal not only as the emphatic statement of a generational break with tradition, but also as Godard's earliest rendition of a set of thematic and stylistic motifs that would become his trademark. A Bout de souffle is now a cult film, propelled in part by the memorable coupling of its leading actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, whose story on screen seemed to portray the troubled love affair between French cinema and Hollywood. In this original guide to the film, Ramona Fotiade analyses in depth its production and reception, as well as its mise-en-scene and editing. She situates A Bout de souffle in relation to Godard's filmography and critical writings up to 1960, focusing on a narrative and visual discourse that is now identified with a distinctive strand in postmodern French cinema. She also explores the impact of Godard's early counter-narrative and visual strategies on the independent American filmmakers and the French Cinema du Look during the 1980s and 1990s.

‌1: Production Contexts

Before À bout de souffle

One of the best-known and most controversial directors of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard started off, like many of his generation, as a cinéphile, an enthusiastic film buff with a mission. Among the handful of youngsters who regularly attended the screenings at the Cinémathèque française during the late 1940s, Godard soon acquired the reputation of a maverick film critic. Following his formative years in the company of such emblematic figures as Rohmer, Rivette and Truffaut, Godard’s opinions often ran counter to the freshly established ‘orthodoxy’ of the Cahiers du cinéma team, which paved the way to the official launch of the Nouvelle Vague less than a decade later. The intellectual authority of its mentor, and founder of Cahiers, André Bazin, did not prevent Godard from expressing a highly individual stand on both technical and ideological issues, despite his acknowledgement of shared interests and mutual respect among the members of the group. ‘I have always had, through my education, the spirit of contradiction’ – he remarked in an interview with Alain Bergala in 1985. ‘I said to myself: they are sharp-tongued, but couldn’t one say the opposite? Bazin was saying: sequence-shot, and I was asking myself whether continuity editing was not good, after all. […] When everyone was berating a film or a director, I used to say to myself: I shall say all the good things that I think of it’.1 But the opposite was equally true, and Godard’s professed independence of opinion came out particularly well in his negative critique of Astruc’s Les Mauvaises Rencontres [Bad Liaisons, 1954], in an unpublished letter to Cahiers du cinéma. The author of the landmark essay, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo’ (1948), Alexandre Astruc, had become a highly respected critic and filmmaker of the Cahiers whom the 24-year-old Godard was taking to task over his choice and treatment of a conventional story. However, Godard’s apt remarks on the discrepancy between the ideology and practice of the caméra-stylo in Astruc’s work went on to be endorsed by film historians and critics such as Roger Boussinot who, in the Bordas Encyclopedia of the Cinema (1967), wondered what could be the meaning of the caméra-stylo ‘when a young cinéaste takes his stories from nineteenth-century Normand writers (Barbey, Flaubert, Maupassant)’.2 This move away from literary adaptations and classical subject matter came to represent a readily identifiable feature of the Nouvelle Vague, with groundbreaking first features inspired by autobiographical events (Les Quatre cents coups) or sensational news items, faits divers, such as Godard’s À bout de souffle, in the honoured tradition of B-movies and pulp fiction. But even before he acquired his reputation as the enfant terrible of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard can be said to have had more than one go at the maverick lifestyle of the young truant and occasional thief that Truffaut himself portrayed, less than a decade on, in his directorial debut.

Born on 3 December 1930, in Paris, the second of four children, Godard came from a wealthy French-Swiss bourgeois milieu against whose values and conceptions he found himself, quite early on, determined to rebel, even if one can say that his early education and voracious appetite for reading benefited from the vast family library and the wide range of cultural interests (from photography to drawing, from music to the cinema, painting and architecture). His father, Paul-Jean, the son of a jeweller, became a prestigious doctor, having studied medicine in France and England. His mother, Odile Monod, was descended from a family of bankers and investors who shared the Protestant faith and the double, French-Swiss, background of Godard’s father. Jean-Luc himself was to spend his childhood and most of his adult life between Switzerland and France. As he recalled in an interview with Alain Bergala, in 1985: ‘In fact, I have always lived between Switzerland and France. I’ve always had two countries ever since I was a little boy. I was born in Paris, I came to live here [Switzerland] when I was one year old. At three, I went back to Paris. Then I came back here, where I went to school until the age of thirteen. After that, I went to the Lycée Buffon until the age of twenty. I have always been between the two …’ Godard’s sheltered childhood and adolescence as part of an affluent and highly cultivated milieu (his maternal grandfather, Julien-Pierre Monod, was close to André Gide, and a lifelong friend and secretary of Paul Valéry), seemed – at first sight – to set him apart from the majority of the Nouvelle Vague aspiring filmmakers: ‘I have a feeling that I’m not asking for power or riches or anything, because I had more than plenty until I was fifteen. More than anyone. It was very different from Truffaut, for example’, as Godard declared to Colin MacCabe.3 However, it was not long before the young Godard turned against his strict Protestant upbringing to embark on a life of truancy and petty theft in post-war Paris, where he arrived in 1946 as a student at the Lycée Buffon and a boarder at a pension in the rue d’Assas. Welcomed by the extended Monod family into the high-bourgeois world of Sunday meals and family reunions, Jean-Luc started to steal, and invariably got caught, only to start again, until he eventually landed in prison in Zurich, in 1952, during an episode to some extent reminiscent of the typewriter theft in Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups. His adolescent criminality was mostly a case of petty theft that one would associate with Michel Poiccard’s cavalier manners when he visits his friend, Liliane, in À bout de souffle. Unusually though, Godard also claims he financed Jacques Rivette’s first film, Le Quadrille (1950) – in which Godard himself made an appearance – by stealing from an uncle.

To put such affirmations into context, it must be said that this is the time (during the late 1940s and early 1950s) when the future filmmaker undertook an intensive education in cinema by regularly attending the screenings of the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, where he met Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut. He was equally among the devotees of the Cinémathèque française, which acquired its new premises in the avenue de Messine in 1948, and began screening old-time French classics, such as Feuillade’s popular serials, along with B-grade American thrillers and westerns produced by the Monogram Pictures company that survived its early demise in the 1950s to enter cinema legend with Godard’s famous dedication in the opening credits of À bout de souffle.

As significant as the after-screening discussions at the Cinémathèque, where Truffaut, Rivette, Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol regularly met, was Godard’s decision to register at the Sorbonne, in 1949, for a certificate in anthropology. His first-hand contact with the theories of Claude Lévy-Strauss, and the revolutionary films of Jean Rouch, had an undeniable, if not fully documented, impact on Godard’s conception of cinema that film historians and critics have often pondered over. Luc Moullet’s perceptive review of À bout de souffle (published in Cahiers du cinéma, in April 1960) highlighted for the first time the close relationship between Godard’s debut feature and Rouch’s Moi, un noir, Les Maîtres fous and Jaguar. Godard’s passionate interest in Rouch, coupled with Henri Langlois’s own appreciation of Surrealism (and of the Surrealists’ favourite early productions, such as Feuillade’s Les Vampires), have led to much speculation on the possible cross-fertilisation between anthropology and the avant-garde’s appropriation of primitive culture, as a decisive factor in shaping the ideology of the Nouvelle Vague. MacCabe places Structuralism (as the heir of Surrealism and anthropology) and the New Wave among the concurrent manifestations of ‘Parisian intellectual and cultural dominance of the West’, while wondering about the apparent lack of interaction between ‘these two worlds’, despite their ‘geographical proximity’.4 Monaco states that, in the years following Godard’s registration at the Sorbonne, ‘the five Cahiers critics were deeply involved in developing what we might call a “structural anthropology” ‌of film […] expressed in terms of auteurs and genres’.5 Any coherent answer to questions relating to the cultural and ideological context that influenced the making of À bout de souffle, would also need to refer to Godard’s career as a film critic, and his contributions to Cahiers du cinéma in particular.

Godard the Film Critic

Filmmaking came as a natural extension to writing, in Godard’s case. More generally, though, the intimate relationship between writing and directing, literary and cinematic authorship was part of the politique des auteurs, promoted by Cahiers du cinéma team. It had also been most eloquently brought to light by Astruc’s ‌notion of the caméra-stylo, in his landmark essay of 1948.6 As a young man, Godard himself had aspired to become a novelist, and if he gradually turned his attention to cinema, he never lost sight of the significant transition from film criticism to filmmaking that – for him – seemed to relate one type of thinking to another: ‘Writing was already making films. […] As a critic, I already considered myself a cinéaste’ – Godard stated in an interview which came out in 1962, in the ‌special issue of the Cahie...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Synopsis
• Chapter 1: Production Contexts
• Chapter 2: The Film
• Chapter 3: Reception and Later Influences
• Conclusion