Jarring jump cuts, long takes with a hand-held camera, often cryptic dialogue that sounds improvised, characters directly addressing the audience, sly cinematic in-jokes and references, an ending made ambiguous by its "lost in translation" final snippet of dialogue... Audiences at the initial screenings of Breathless might well have asked, as the headline of a review in Newsweek did: "What is it?" What it was, was the most audacious, startling directorial debut since Orson Welles unleashed Citizen Kane (1941) two decades earlier. What it still is, is one of the most influential films of the second half of the 20th century.

There are certain works in film history that are recognized as game changers, movies that suddenly pushed the language of cinema into virgin territory and established a new standard for what film can do. The Birth of a Nation (1915), for all its odious racism and pandering to white supremacist notions of American history, was nonetheless a pioneering technical and aesthetic advance, a synthesis of all the lessons of the early days of filmmaking that ushered in a new era of how films were made and how we watched them, setting the standard for classical Hollywood film style. Citizen Kane pushed things ahead still further, integrating bold techniques with a modernist story structure built on multiple perspectives. Like them, Breathless opened our eyes to an entirely new way of experiencing movies, and if, like the earlier pictures, we may look back on it now and find it far less startling than audiences did in 1960, even lacking in the sophistication exhibited by current movies (and TV shows and commercials) that employ the same techniques and styles, it's only because Jean-Luc Godard's little "gangster picture," again like Griffith's and Welles' breakthroughs, has been so influential and so widely imitated that we think movies have always been like this and see nothing all that innovative in its methods.

What Godard did here was create what may be the first "mainstream" feature (as opposed to the short experimental avant-garde films of the years preceding it) that is expressly about film: how we see it, how it works, what we expect from it, laying bare its language by fracturing and twisting it into new shapes and rhythms. Some critics at the time-and even still today, when the movie is widely recognized as a landmark-dismissed it as a young artist's display of bravado, a nose-thumbing, show-off gesture. Godard didn't totally deny that. "I was out to attract attention," he said in a 1961 interview. "I wanted to end the old tradition in a spectacular way, so I made a gangster film, using all the effects that were supposed to be impossible. It's a film where anything goes."

Breathless was an immediate international sensation and, with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), established the French New Wave as an exciting new film movement. It liberated the cinema in terms not only of how you could tell a story but what kind of stories you could tell. Its rule-breaking, improvisatory style brought a speed and freedom to the screen that fit perfectly with its story of young life and love lived on the edge, a thematic trend that would come to dominate movies over the next 15 years or more (and some might argue, to this day). It was a crucial influence on Hollywood films of the late 1960s through the mid-1970s; without it, for example, there may never have been a Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a film for which Godard was initially considered as director. As critic Roger Ebert pointed out, "You cannot even begin to count the characters played by Pacino, Beatty, Nicholson, Penn, who are directly descended from Jean-Paul Belmondo's insouciant killer Michel."

Like every significant work of modern culture, Godard's film brought a new awareness of the very art form of which it is an example, a self-reflexive, self-critical event that reoriented the emotional and aesthetic response of the movie-going audience. This should be enough to make it essential, but if it were that alone, it might simply be an academic curiosity for the initiated only (as some of his later works are regarded). But with the iconic performances of Belmondo and Jean Seberg, its jazzy pace and anti-authoritarian air, its allusions to the American genre picture, and its wry humor, Breathless also happens to be just plain fun to watch.

by Rob Nixon