Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Week 5: Ideology, Auteurism & Counter Cinema: The Disruption of Classical Narrative
A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)
Country: France
Year: 1960
Director: Jean-Luc Goddard
Length: 87 min
Language: French
Awards:
Critical Comments:
Breathless is a very difficult film to read because I am not exposed to foreign films especially one that comes from the French New Wave. However, my experience with Breathless came from an earlier and different source in which it became a novelty film. Therefore, Breathless to me is a timeless film but it is too contained with its own context that only through the readings that I am slightly able to understand the novelty of it and what are the meanings involved.
The representation of love takes in many forms in Breathless. We have Michel who goes around freeloading from women who he presumably slept with. The romantic expectations of love is absent except to use as a contact of past acquaintence. This changes when Michel comes to Patricia who he wants to take to Italy after he is pursued for a crime. Michel follows Patricia around like in the scene where she is selling the New York Herald. Michel is only able to relate with Patricia about serious issues like the long talk they had in her room.
The relationship between Michel and Patricia represents how man can have love to a single woman when love can be easily expressed to others. The convention (that are antithectical to the classical narrative) used to give that meaning by the director (auteur) is a mark of presenting meaning with style.
Readings:
Country: France
Year: 1960
Director: Jean-Luc Goddard
Length: 87 min
Language: French
Awards:
- Best Director - Jean-Luc Goddard (Berlin Film Festival)
- Best Film - Jean-Luc Goddard (French Syndicate of Cinema Critics)
- Feature Film - Jean Luc Goddard (Prix Jean Vigo)
Critical Comments:
Breathless is a very difficult film to read because I am not exposed to foreign films especially one that comes from the French New Wave. However, my experience with Breathless came from an earlier and different source in which it became a novelty film. Therefore, Breathless to me is a timeless film but it is too contained with its own context that only through the readings that I am slightly able to understand the novelty of it and what are the meanings involved.
The representation of love takes in many forms in Breathless. We have Michel who goes around freeloading from women who he presumably slept with. The romantic expectations of love is absent except to use as a contact of past acquaintence. This changes when Michel comes to Patricia who he wants to take to Italy after he is pursued for a crime. Michel follows Patricia around like in the scene where she is selling the New York Herald. Michel is only able to relate with Patricia about serious issues like the long talk they had in her room.The relationship between Michel and Patricia represents how man can have love to a single woman when love can be easily expressed to others. The convention (that are antithectical to the classical narrative) used to give that meaning by the director (auteur) is a mark of presenting meaning with style.
Readings:
- Cook, Pam, ed (1985) 'Authorship and counter-cinema' The Cinema Book, New York: Pantheon, 192-195. The reading describes about some of the methods of studying films by Jean-Luc Godard as an auteur and its relations with history. From this reading, the French New Wave and the Dzigo Vertov group were about making films that were a social practice. Such films would be thought provoking and this would be a great shift from the classical Hollywood narrative. To the French New Wave, films should be political that addresses social issues, in which Jean-Luc Godard spent most of his filmmaking career centered on Maoism. Jean-Luc Goadard makes films that are emphasised on relationships. Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard first attempt in filmmaking, was essentially about the relationship between man and women. Another interesting point made in the reading is how directors as auteurs are evolved by the history and circumstances that surround them. At the time when Breathless was made as a counter-cinema to the Hollywood cinema, it had a cynical tone of reference to Hollywood cinema, like the idolization of Humphrey Bogart which the French New Wave movement sprouted from but as an opposition to it.
- Buckland, Warren (1998) 'Film Authorship: the director as auteur' Teach Yourself Film Studies, London: Hodder, 72-100. This reading gives a very comprehensive history of the auteur policy and what does it represent. The example given to examine Breathless is very much applicable and speaks very much about how it is a film made by an auteur and not simply just another director. I find the concentrated emphasis of the difference of the narrative and the director very interesting. Directors as auteurs can stand seperately from the narrative of the film. Once it is done right, this is how an auteur can transform a mediocre script into a stylise film. Auteurs are about trying to place a signature styles in their films and that is why they have consistency in their film. The most prominent style that Jean-Luc Godard had displayed in Breathless is mentioned in the reading, the discontinity editing when Michel shoots the police. This is already an imprint of him as an auteur who wants to change the way that we see scenes being shot. Auteurs in search of creating their own style find ways on how to shoot a scene differently from different angels to different editing.
# posted by KC @ 7:47 AM 
