Planting the Seeds of Artistic Subversiveness in À Bout De Souffle: Godard’s Trailblazing Cinematic Language

The following article frames a particular case study: Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), referenced in the paper with its American title, Breathless. Foraging through the dense and sophisticated thicket of narrative, visual and textual features, the present study will attempt to untangle the overall intrinsic complexity of Godard’s film, as it exceeds simple commonalities between genre conventions or traditional stylistic approaches.

The abrasive dialectical opposition that Breathless enacts against classical storytelling is indeed central to the specific cluster that can be examined under the labels of “experimental cinema”, “auteur cinema”, “art cinema”, predicated on Godard’s abundant departures from cinematic (mainstream) norms.

The methodology adopted in the article will encompass both a cultural studies approach and the visual strategies of textual analysis from the perspective of film studies. This will spur a close examination of Godard’s directorial style, paying attention to a rich plethora of technical devices inscribed within salient sequences and offset against the matrix of creative options presented by the French Nouvelle Vague.