Breathless (À bout de souffle)

Breathless (À bout de souffle) is Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, a black-and-white French crime drama from 1960 and one of the defining works of the French New Wave. It premiered on March 16, 1960. It drew attention for its bold visual style and the then unconventional use of jump cuts.

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, a wandering criminal who steals a car in Marseille and kills a policeman on the road, a breakthrough role. Michel turns up in Paris and looks up Patricia (Jean Seberg), a young American working for the New York Herald Tribune; hunted by the police, he tries to raise money for Rome and take her along, though she is unsure of her feelings. Jean-Pierre Melville also appears.

The story rests on an idea by François Truffaut drawn from a newspaper report about the killing of a policeman, which Godard rewrote. Shooting lasted under four weeks without a finished script: Godard wrote the scenes in the morning and handed the actors their lines only as they were filmed. Raoul Coutard was the cinematographer. The film drew over two million viewers in France, won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival and the Prix Jean Vigo, and has been ranked among the best films ever made.