Letters from Vienna #60
À bout de souffle
Breathless
In December 1956, François Truffaut, who we met in our previous letter, had a long discussion with Jean-Luc Godard in the metro-station Richelieu-Drouot. The result was a four-page scenario that Truffaut penned almost immediately afterwards. The protagonist of the story, a character by the name of Michel, missed his last train for Le Havre from Gare Saint-Lazare and decided to steal an American car instead of waiting for the next day. The disastrous consequence was that a gendarme pursued him on a motorbike. Michel ended up shooting and killing the gendarme before returning to Paris to see his fiancé, a pretty, young, American journalist. The police chased him through the city and eventually he hid on a barge. His fiancé was arrested and, under immense pressure, decided to turn him in. Michel claimed to have taken a deadly dose of Aspirin but nobody believed him. Only when he arrived at the police-station, collapsed and died did the truth of his statement become clear.[1]
“The pages were based on a story that had fascinated tabloid France in 1952, when a man named Michel Portail, having spent a summer living the high life on the Côte d’Azur with an American girlfriend, shot a motorcycle policeman while driving to Brittany to see his dying mother. He was turned in to the police by the girlfriend.”
“The four pages were enough to convince (Georges) Beauregard. With the hot name of Truffaut attached, the penniless producer persuaded a major distributer, René Pignières, who like everyone else after Cannes was looking for a New Wave film, and another producer with money in the CNC bank, Gérard Beytout, to provide the extraordinarily modest budget of 510,000 FF (a third of the average cost of a French film at that time).”[2]
Given that it was Godard’s first major movie Beauregard persuaded Claude Chabrol to act as technical director.
Seberg & Belmondo
“…a young lawyer called Francois Moreuil heard that the film was casting. Moreuil, who himself had ambitions in the cinema, was married to the 21-year-old actress Jean Seberg.”[3] The fact that she was famous helped the project but it also meant that she got a quarter of its meagre budget.
“If Godard had one star when he started the movie, he had two when he finished. His initial meeting with Jean-Paul Belmondo was less than auspicious. Belmondo, the much-loved son of a famous sculptor, and an actor with almost certain success before him, was less than impressed when they first met in the Latin Quarter. Godard’s dark glasses and Vaudois accent left him cold, and when three weeks later Jean-Luc sidled up to Belmondo at the Brasserie Lipp and asked him if he’d shoot a short in his hotel room, Belmondo thought he was dealing with a homosexual pass. Belmondo’s wife thought differently when he related the encounter, and Belmondo soon changed his opinion after a day’s shooting at the hotel, where Godard’s casual style entranced him.”[4]
“It is crucial to realise that the reason Godard could make a film for a third of the normal cost was because he was working with an extremely reduced crew. This was partly due to developments in the technology (an Éclair Cameflex was used, which meant that “À bout de souffle” was the first ever feature made with a hand-held camera), but also to a definite easing of the union restrictions… it is also important to understand that for Godard…a reduced crew increased the possibility of capturing reality on the run.”
“The crew for “Breathless” was so small and worked so fast that the passers-by on the Champs Élysées didn’t know they were there.”
“The other reason for the speed of the shoot was that almost no artificial lighting was used (occasionally a rack of 500-watt bulbs was directed toward aluminium foil glued onto the ceiling). Godard was determined to use as little artificial light as possible, because the lighting of a set both takes the most time and makes filming more conspicuous, thus destroying the environment that is being filmed…as a war cameraman having to seize images, (the cameraman) (Raoul) Coutard was familiar with the fastest, that is to say the most light-sensitive, of stocks. For the night shoots on “Breathless” they used a stock (ilford hps) which only existed for still photography. The crew had to stick together as many rolls of 17.5 meters (which translated into 15 seconds worth of filming) as would make up a magazine of film.”
“Godard’s apprenticeship in the cinema had been very thorough…Godard’s devotion to the science and technology of his art is without obvious comparison. His apprenticeship had also included, as well as editing, the writing of dialogues which he had done for Beauregard and others. Jean Seberg was initially amazed when she discovered that she would get her lines on pieces of paper given to her in the morning of the shoot or even shouted at her in the middle of the scene…”
“Godard could shout because “Breathless” was shot mute, and the sound and dialogue were dubbed on later in a mixing studio…Later in his career Godard would shoot in sync…but in the summer of 1959 there was no money and no time, and the shoot had to be completed in an extraordinarily short four weeks.”[5]
André Bazin and Reality
Godard’s subjective “reality” was: “the snack-bars on the Champs Élysées, a girl one liked, everything and anything, lies, the treachery of women, the shallowness of men, playing the slot-machines.” We know that this was Godard’s personal “reality” (or at least a part of it) because he was criticised for spending too much time playing slot-machines at bars on the Champs Élysées while his life-style hardly conformed to the bourgeois ideals of his parents!
Of course, his experience of reality was tinged by his difficult relationship with his bourgeoise family, not made easier by the death of his mother in a moped accident in April 1954 (This fact is not uninteresting when thinking of how “Weekend” begins (10 minutes of motor accidents on the road!)).
The term “reality” was important for the members of the Nouvelle Vague all of whom were to a greater or lesser extent influenced by the critic André Bazin. Truffaut’s debt can be measured by the fact that he walked off his set on his first day of shooting “Les Quatre Cents Coups” when he heard Bazin was dying in November 1958. Truffaut took the term “reality” literally and filmed his own childhood (and later dealt with his life as an adult). Godard went a step further and focused not only on autobiography, such as his difficult relationship with his wife Anna Karina (“Une femme et une femme” (“A Woman Is a Woman”) & “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”)), but also applied Brechtian methods of alienation (e.g. characters speaking directly to the audience) as a way of showing that the medium wasn’t reality; by speaking truth he was pointing out the lie. He also dealt with the brutal, bitter and vicious three cornered clandestine conflict being waged between the French government, the OAS & FLN in “Le petit soldat” (“The Little Soldier”), a film which was so realistic that it was banned.
Another aspect of the contemporary world which fascinated Godard were radios, records, books, posters, paintings and newspapers.[6] In “À bout de souffle” Godard portrays the consumer culture of the 1950s, a culture which still dominates today: with its cars, planes, radios, pop music and film.
Truffaut and Godard
Raoul Coutard, who worked with both Truffaut and Godard, once compared the two. Jean-Luc, he opined, was perhaps the only director who was continually willing to take risks (Fritz Lang once said that he himself would never have had the nerve to do so) and who was forever trying to do something completely different. Truffaut used a screenplay in traditional fashion while Godard never worked with one. Truffaut sat in his director’s chair and gave direction while Godard thought quickly and spontaneously on his feet. Truffaut dwelt on the figures in the plot while Godard was more interested in camera movement. Truffaut made classical films, which told stories while Godard quite simply refused to do so.[7]
It is perhaps superfluous to speculate but this might well have been due to the differences of their respective backgrounds: “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.”[8]
“Raoul Coutard emphasises: “There are only two subjects in Jean-Luc’s films: death and the impossibility of love.” The four pages that Truffaut dashed off for his friend stressed the perfidy of women – Godard added death. The conclusion of Truffaut’s treatment focused on the media fame that descended on Michel Portail/Poiccard in his final days. Godard’s fifteen-page development emphasised the physical reality of Poiccard’s death and led to the only creative disagreement between the two: “He had chosen a violent end because he was sadder than me. He was really without hope when he made that film. He needed to film death. He needed the end he had chosen. All I asked him was to cut one terrible sentence. At the end when the police shoot, one of them says “Quick in the spinal column!” I told him “You can’t put that in.” I was very insistent. He took the line out. I like the end as it is.”[9]
Another element, which needs mentioning, albeit a highly speculative one on my part, is the fact that the de Gaulle government, which came to power in May 1958, and especially its extremely powerful minister of culture: André Malraux, made the Nouvelle Vague possible to begin with. It was, for example, Malraux’s decision to send “Les Quatre Cents Coups” (see letter #59) to Cannes as the sole representative of France which paved the way for that film’s success. At the same time the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma, who then went on to be directors, such as Truffaut and Godard, were noticeably pro-American at a time when Communism was at the height of fashion (even Picasso was a Communist, albeit for a short while only). Given that the CIA was (and is) deeply involved in culture (I was told from a reliable source for example that the Sissy films in Austria were financed by the CIA) it is highly likely that the success of the Nouvelle Vague in America was by no means an accident.
“À bout de souffle”, which was released in March 1960, is still worth seeing today not merely because it’s an invaluable document of its time but because it remains extraordinarily honest, direct, realistic, playful and fascinating.
The movie is the creation not just of Godard but of a true family of film-makers: most notably the cast: Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as well as the brilliant camera-man Raoul Coutard and equally clever François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. Film, like theatre, is invariably a collective effort. This sense of collectivity (the Nouvelle Vague film-makers often acted like a gang), the arguments and discussions Godard later regretted losing later in life, mainly on account of the burden and curse of fame, was undoubtedly one of the keys to its success.
[1] pp. 180-181 François Truffaut, Antoine de Baecque, Serge Toubiana
[2] p.110 godard, Colin McCabe
[3] p.111 Ibid
[4] p.113 Ibid
[5] pp.115-119 Ibid
[6] p.89 godard, Colin MacCabe
[7] p.64 Filmkünste: Kamera Peter Ettedgui
[8] p.18 godard, Colin MacCabe
[9] p.123 Ibid