Breathless is dedicated to Hollywood "Poverty Row" studio Monogram, responsible for many low-budget pictures, many of them action and adventure, between 1931 and 1953. According to critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Godard never reviewed the company's releases, so the dedication was not really a fan gesture but a statement of aims and boundaries and a declaration of Godard's affinity with "the aesthetic of an impoverished budget."

The style of the film, considered so radical and audacious on its release, has come to be part of the mainstream cinematic language. It's not uncommon today to see jump cuts, disjointed narrative, nontraditional uses of music and sound, hand-held camera, and other elements of this picture in the most ordinary movies, TV shows, even commercials. Godard's use of characters breaking the fourth wall by talking directly to the camera (and by extension, the audience), once so startling to viewers, is even a popular device now in American television sitcoms like The Office, Modern Family, and Parks and Recreation.

"It freed people who wanted to make pictures a different way, particularly some Americans. It certainly influenced French cinema-shooting inside houses, new lighting materials, Colortron, quartz lighting, for example-prepping the way for what TV would later develop. I was really surprised how it influenced so many people." - cinematographer Raoul Coutard, interviewed on the Criterion Collection DVD of the film

"There is a direct line through Breathless to Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands [1973], and the youth upheaval of the late 1960s. The movie was a crucial influence during Hollywood's 1967-1974 golden age. 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." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, July 20, 2003

Godard was not the first to use the cinematic technique of the jump cut, a type of discontinuous edit in film in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions (or time frames) that vary only slightly. The figures (people or foreground objects) seem to change instantly against a fixed background, or the background seems to change behind the fixed figures. Georges Melies used jump cuts to achieve his magical effects in the early days of silent films, and the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's landmark avant garde film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is almost entirely composed of such cuts. But Godard was likely the first to bring the technique, considered a violation of classical continuity, into commercial feature films, at least to such an obvious and frequent extent, drawing more critical and audience awareness to it and bringing the term into common usage. In 1974, a group of academics founded a journal called Jump Cut; true to the revolutionary nature of the technique as used by Godard and others, the journal approaches film analysis from a radical leftist perspective. Another interesting connection in this discussion is Godard's founding, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, of the Marxist-oriented film-video collective, the Dziga-Vertov Group.

Breathless was remade in 1983 in a Los Angeles setting starring Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky. Because the producers felt that audiences wouldn't want to see Gere killed off, this version differs from the original by ending on a freeze frame of Gere turning to face the police holding a gun he has picked up off the ground.

The film is frequently referred to as the favorite of female protagonist Sheeni in Youth in Revolt, a series of epistolary novels by C.D. Payne. In the stories, 14-year-old Sheeni is fascinated by Jean-Paul Belmondo and dreams of running away to Paris, which leads the boy who desires her, Nick Twisp, to adopt a bad-boy French persona, François Dillinger.

In the film The Doom Generation (1995), which shares a similar downbeat road movie theme and story, characters play the "smile or I'll choke you" game shown here between Belmondo and Seberg.

The Australian band The Death Set named their 2001 album after Belmondo's character Michel Poiccard.

A 35mm film reel of Breathless and Godard's later film Alphaville (1965) are seen in the third episode of the Japanese anime television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The episode references several other Godard works and uses dialogue from Breathless.

In Jacques Demy's film Lola (1961), a character talks about a friend of his named Poiccard (Belmondo's character in this movie) who went bad and was killed.

Godard himself referenced the film in his next feature, the musical A Woman Is a Woman (1961), by mentioning that Breathless is on TV. During pre-production on his film Numero Deux (1975), Godard said it would be a remake of Breathless, although the story, such as it is, and theme bear no resemblance to the earlier picture.

In Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451 (1966), one of the books seen on a burning pile is a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma with a still from Breathless on the cover. The journal is where Truffaut and Godard, along with several other Nouvelle Vague directors, got their start as film critics.

As Patricia is trying to elude the police, she ducks into a theater and watches a bit of Otto Preminger's film Whirlpool (1949). The two lovers take refuge in a movie theater later, which is recalled a few years after in a scene from Bonnie and Clyde, a movie that Godard was once in line to direct.

Breathless references a number of other movies, most notably those of Humphrey Bogart, whom Belmondo's character hero-worships. Among the other films specifically alluded to are fellow director and Breathless cast member Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur and Claude Chabrol's Leda (1959), in which Belmondo plays a character named Laszlo Kovacs, an alias he uses in Breathless. Although some have speculated that this is meant to refer to the famed cinematographer of the same name, this is highly unlikely, since the real-life Kovacs didn't begin his career until several years after both pictures were released.

Typical of Godard in his early period, characters are often seen standing in front of posters for other movies, including The Harder They Fall (1956), Westbound (1959), Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959).

In The Inheritor (1973), Belmondo closes his eyes with his hand as he does at the end of Breathless.

Homages and references to Breathless appear in many movies and television shows, too numerous to list in detail. It's sufficient to say that the film had enough impact on generations of filmmakers to be mentioned in their work.

Jean Seberg's look in this film became much sought after and imitated throughout the 1960s, by ordinary women as well as such celebrities as Twiggy, Mia Farrow, and Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.

by Rob Nixon