There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless.
Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, he helped change the face of cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard, died on the 13th September at the age of 91, he was the filmmaker who changed everything. He directed “Breathless,” the 1960 landmark that helped to launch the French New Wave, employing a new, fast, leaping-ahead technique and style — the jump cut — that altered the DNA of how movies were made. In the ’60s, he took his camera out into the streets and into cafés, stores, offices, and apartments, so that a Godard film often seemed like a documentary about fictional characters. He drew many of those characters from Old Hollywood, a world he’d grown up on and remained obsessed with, but one that he always made seem a million miles away, like some black-and-white Garden of Eden the world had fallen from.
"In the wake of 'Breathless,' New Waves that sprang up across the planet, from Brazil to Czechoslovakia to Japan, owed a major debt to him, as did generations of American directors, including Scorsese, De Palma and Tarantino."
