A Bout de Souffle (DVD)

It?s not easy being the only French film fanatic in your family and immediate social circle. The following is something I have heard many, many times, sometimes in jest, but far too often in deadly earnest. ?You know that Jean-Luc Godard you like? I heard something about one of his films the other night. The food one, I think. It was called ?About a Soufflé?. We could speculate for hours about what kind of film About a Soufflé might be. A Jamie Oliver bio-pic, perhaps. Or a Nick Hornby pastiche in which Colin Firth or Hugh Grant nurture an emotionally vulnerable dessert while coming to terms with their own immaturity. A Bout de Souffle, ...  Read the complete review

Film Only Review A Bout De Souffle (translated to Breathless in English) Details: Directed By: Jean Luc Goddard Release Date: 7 February 1961 Runtime: 90 minutes Language: French (English Subtitles) Starring: Jean-Paul Delmondo Jean Seberg Plot: Filmed in black and white despite the use of colour coming into use in the film industry in 1935 with the film Becky Sharp by Rouben Marmoulian (this was the first film which was considered a real full length film, but colour was used before this too between the 1920s and 1930s.) A Bout de Souffle is about a small time criminal Michel Pioccard, who is living ...  Read the complete review

Breathless (official title A Bout de Souffle) is a fantastic film. Althoug it can be said that those film fans who hate foreign films may find it dificult to swallow, Breathless is, and will always remain, a landmark movie. There are other opinions here on this film that do it justice, films that talk of the brilliance of Godard's work, and therefore I have come to the conclusion that I will not write a similar opinion. Instead, I will write an opinion on French Poetic Realism, citing other movies from around the same time and also before it. I hop that this is useful to anyone who reads it, and I look forward to your comments. French poetic realism was the ...  Read the complete review

A bout de souffle, or Breathless, is probably one of the most innovative films that I have ever seen. Jean-Luc Goddard has looked at the aesthetics of cinema and completely changed them. Whereas previous films desired to stitch the viewer into the dialogue so that they felt like part of the action, and could identify with the characters, and easily pick out heroes and villains, Goddard has created a situation where we are made to feel disorientated, and to believe that the characters are not real. This is largely done by the use of natural lighting and the use of non continuous editing and jump cuts (where the connection between two pieces of action is not seamless, ...  Read the complete review

There are plenty of straight forward film reviews for this, so here is another angle. The film has the look of a documentary; this is largely due to the use of lightweight hand-held cameras. These cameras, usually used for television, gave more mobility that made shooting on location a lot easier, as well as cheaper and quicker. A distinctive feature of the French New Wave films is location shooting on the streets of Paris. Where Classical Hollywood Cinema strictly adhered to the principles of continuity editing; 180° rule, 30° rule, shot/reverse shot etc. The French New Wave directors disregarded these rules in favour of long, fluid tracking ...  Read the complete review