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, ...

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 ...

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, ...