A Film Canon

A foundational account of cinephilia, Breathless presents Michel's (Jean-Paul Belmondo) Parisian love affair with American cinema, deflected into a series of romantic and criminal pursuits - all of which centre on his relationship with American Patricia (Jean Seberg) - as an inability to conceive of himself outside of a frame, a compulsion to occupy either side of a cut, and, finally, a compulsion to inhabit and completely identify with the cut. To this end, Godard moves from including Michel in virtually every frame (his two longest absences take place while a policeman is elaborating his alternative identities, and when American English is spoken for the first time), to a series of elaborate, hand-held tracking-shots, in which the action balloons out from Michel's initial presence, only to contract to him again when a cut becomes imminent, producing an aesthetic of irising that is literalised twice - after the camera waits patiently and panoramically for Michel to emerge on the other side of a subway tunnel, and when Michel glimpses the first satisfactorily mediatised image of himself, and Godard enters the frame to direct police towards their consummation. However, the moment at which Michel fully disappears into the cut comes as the result of a spectacular sequence in which tracking-shot segues into literal tracking, progressively expanding Michel's presence to the caressing gleam of sunglasses, the cinema where the chase ends, the pure, "mysterious" celluloid nightscape behind it, and, finally, the concluding chase, in which he bleeds breath to finally catch up with his own image. That cinephilia is an extension of sexual and sensual liberation is suggested by the fact that Godard's most striking use of jump-cuts - the device which, more than any other, speaks to a desire both to maximise and disavow cuts - occurs in the extended bedroom scene, which takes up almost a third of the film. Here, looking and touching are fused into an all-encompassing, protective sheet, figuring the cut as the moment at which frames caress. Accordingly, the fantasy of sexual consummation segues into a fantasy of imagistic consummation, and Michel's fantasy of becoming the images he fetishises segues into the more general fantasy of two images becoming one, of an image becoming continuous with the image that follows; that is, the fantasy of the celluloid apparatus and screening process. It's here that Godard's radical imagism moves beyond incorporating and slackening action to perform an ideogrammatic transformation of language itself - or, alternatively, the construction of a new cinematic language - as whitewashed walls, an abundance of mirrors and jettisoned intertexts, and a pervasive media ambience provide an epitome of the loose contiguity that has characterised every previous trajectory, from car windows to comic strips, imbuing words with the concreteness, circularity and redundance of a foreign language; or, rather, of (cinematic) American English, as an uncanny fusion of screwball, noir and melodramatic registers distils thirty years of American sound cinema into a fetishistic idiom, and every statement speaks to the paradoxical, impossible desire for cuts within a frame, the simultaneous presence and absence of desire: "I want you to love me, at the same time I want you to stop loving me."