Return to Intro to Film syllabus
Updated 27 November 2006
ENGLISH 114: INTRODUCTION TO FILM, Fall 2006
Section 3: Thursday, 6:00-9:30 p.m., Professor Larsson
Week 12, November 16
6:00-6:30
Discontinuity Editing
6:30-8:00
View Breathless
8:00-8:10
Break
8:10-9:30
Discuss Breathless
Discontinuity Editing: Soviet Montage
Man with a Movie Camera (1929); directed by Dziga Vertov
There was no time for discussion of this film, but here are a few notes:
§ Example of “Soviet montage” editing (similar to Eisenstein’s Potemkin)
§ Set as “city symphony” documentary—record of a day in the life of a city, but actually composed of shots from several cities
§ The film is also about itself
o The “hero” of the film is the man with the movie camera whom we see going about from place to place and recording various events from many different angles and vantage points
§ The film itself begins as the audience that is about to watch the film enters a theater and takes seats (which obligingly unfold for them through stop-action animation)
§ The documentary becomes a film within the film as the orchestra begins playing
§ The events follow the course of the day in the city from early morning to late night
§ Records the whole cycle of life: birth, death, marriage, divorce, workers in factories and offices, the unemployed sleeping on benches, children at a magic show, workers relaxing in the state-run workers recreation centers
§ Creates visual jokes through use of movie posters that seem to comment on the setting
Editing creates special effects, makes comparisons, counterposes two sets of content:
§ Animation
o camera tripod moving around (stop-motion)
o crayfish dancing (pixilation)
§ Comparisons
o The well-off and the homeless
o Work and play
o Workers and idleness
o Eye and camera
o Eyelid and camera shutter
o Eyelid and window blinds
o Film editing and sewing machine
§ Compares images on basis of graphic content (similarities, conflicts)
§ Rhythm of editing (use of shorter-length shots) increases as pace of activity during day increases
Not concerned with narrative continuity
§ Day in “city” progresses from morning to night
§ But action begins as audience sits down to watch to the film that we are watching
§ We see the film being shot and edited (in one day!)
§ Intercut from specific scenes and shots of city to shots on editing board to audience watching shots being projected
Breathless (1959)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard; Script: from a story by Francois Truffaut; Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel); Jean Seberg (Patricia)
Synopsis:
Michel, a young, small-time crook, leaves the city of Marseilles in a stolen car. On the road to Paris, he kills a policeman. In Paris, he tries to raise money in order to leave with his American girlfriend, Patricia, with whom he hides out. In the end, Patricia betrays him to the police.
Questions for Discussion
1. How is Michel portrayed in the film? Are we meant to sympathize with him or react to him in some other way?
2. What is the relationship between Michel and Patricia like? What is Patricia’s character like especially? Why is she attracted to Michel?
3. How does the film remind us that we are watching a movie? What is the point of these devices?
4. What are some unusual ways in which the film presents the story? Why does it eliminate some actions and details and linger over others?
5. What does the film suggest about people’s roles in modern life? What does it suggest about the role of film, literature, “high” culture and “pop” culture?
Discussion Summary:
(Also see Barsam’s Case Study for Chapter 6 online: http://www.wwnorton.com/gateway/Entry.asp?site=movies)
Breathless was a landmark film that (along with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, made the previous year) launched the film movement known as the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague). This film movement was made up of primarily of film critics who wrote for the French journal Cahiers du cinema (which we see a student trying to sell to Michel in a scene in Breathless). Although they each had different styles and thematic obsessions, what they had in common was a belief that the film director should function like a literary author (auteur) who is marked by a strong literary style. In spite of the fact that filmmaking is a collaborative effort, the director’s role, they believed, is primary.
Godard had been one of the most opinionated of the Cahiers critics, with strong views about the potential of movies to be a personal art form, and his first films, including Breathless, suggest his desire to live up to his own demands. The story of Breathless was written by Truffaut, but much of the dialogue was written by Godard while the filming was actually occurring. The draws partly from low-budget American gangster films that Truffaut and Godard had suggested had more originality and vitality than more prestigious big-budget, big-studio movies. That is why Breathless in dedicated to Monogram Pictures, which had been at the very bottom of “Poverty Row,” the lowest of the low-budget production studios in Hollywood in the 1940s.
The story of Breathless offers some challenges to first-time viewers in the way it presents its narrative. First, we have scenes presented where the action is not deliberately set up for us, so we have to guess or infer what is actually happening. Moments in other films that would be key plot points, such as Michel’s murder of the police officer, are presented quickly and in a fragmented way, while other scenes where nothing special seems to happening (especially the long bedroom conversation between Michel and Patricia) are given extensive coverage. There are several reasons for the way these scenes are presented. First, Godard is taking it for granted that we can infer the details of some of the “important” action events. (Do we really need to see a more extended confrontation between Michel and the policeman to know what has happened?)
Second, Godard wants to make it clear that all aspects of life (including the parts that are usually not included or are edited out because they do not move the narrative along) are open to being filmed. Each moment is important in itself. In discussing North by Northwest, we noted Hitchcock’s use of the “government secrets” on the microfilm as the “McGuffin” that motivates everything that happened. Without secrets to steal, there’d be no spies and no story. In a way, the shooting is a kind of McGuffin. Without that event, there’d be no reason for Michel to be trying to raise money to get out of Paris, but the real focus here is on his relationship with Patricia.
Third, Godard doesn’t want us to forget that we’re watching a movie, and that movies are just a way of presenting aspects of life. So, he makes deliberate references to film and filmgoing: Michel admires and imitates Humphrey Bogart (drawing his thumb across his lip) and he often acts as though he is in a film. Even when he is shot at the end, he staggers in a lengthy “death-crawl” that seems to go on forever. When he dies, he uses his hand to close his own eyes. In addition, scenes from the film echo some of those low-budget thrillers that the film is based on. At one point, Michel even hides out in a movie theater, a common scene in some similar film noir thrillers during the 1940s. Other references include Godard’s casting of director Pierre Melville as the Romanian novelist that Patricia interviews at the airport. The man who points Michel out to the police is Godard himself!
One of the chief ways in which Godard reminds us that we are watching a movie, though, is in his editing of particular scenes. In particular, Breathless is famous for its use of “jump cuts.” In a couple of scenes, for example, Michel and Patricia are driving on the streets of Paris. Suddenly, the background changes (from light to shady; from one group of parked cars to another) without any shift in the dialogue or other indicator that time has passed, which such a cut would usually indicate. The effect is like a little shock and it draws our attention to the fact that we are watching a series of shots joined together that would usually give the illusion of unbroken time and space, except that the time now seems disrupted.
What’s finally at stake in Breathless, though, is Godard’s desire to convey a type of “anti-hero” who is contemptible in a number of ways but who attracts our attention as the main character. Michel cheats on Patricia, he steals money from other women, and he is a cop-killer, but he is also the isolated individual trying to find his own way and his own meaning in life. That’s hard, when it’s hard to communicate. Patricia, an American, often has to ask for translations of French words and phrases and Michel himself often mangles proverbs or sayings. At the end, he simply admits that life is a bitch. But the policeman nearby tells Patricia that he called her a bitch. She does not know the word, but she draws her own thumb across her lip, suggesting that Michel is still in some way a part of her.