BREATHLESS- A Second Time

I feel it necessary to post my thoughts here about Jean-luc Godard's BREATHLESS because my earlier post was concerned with the characters and not the form and structure of the film. Although most writers mention Godard's use of the Jump Cut in BREATHLESS and other filmmakers of the French New Wave little is understood about the purpose of these 'jump cuts' other than the shock value such cuts had to audiences and critics at the time. I believe that Godard uses the jump cut both for its radical 'dejunctive' power (it violates the continuity rules of so called 'films of quality' that Truffaut despised in his article, A Certain Tendency of French Cinema) and for various pratical narrative purposes. If we consider the early scene of Michel driving from Marseilles to Paris in a stolen car we can note two important things: 1) the jump cuts here functions to accelerate the narrative; to compress the length of time where Michel is driving and talking to the audience. 2) Here in this scene the jump cut is used to startling effect as Michel is captured in various poses and thoughts like a cubist painting. The jump cuts here both compress time and destroys the temporal continuity without disturbing our sense of a unity of space. Later in the film, Godard and his cinematographer Coutard, create carefully controlled tracking shots that function as well timed sequence shots (e.g. when Michel goes to visit his friend at the travel agency). The camera literally waltzes around the characters and the space forwards and backwards in long takes (that is without a cut). But at the end of the long takes there is a jump cut, when actors appear in different positions from their positions at the end of the long take. Here we can also note two things: 1) the jump cuts at the end of the long take sequences were quite possibly motivated by the fact that the film inside the camera had reached its end and the camera had to be reloaded. Thus, the jump cuts at the end of long takes are not motived by a need to compress time, but instead by a need to maintain 'story' continuity. 2) The characters who change position at the end of a long take are most often shown at the destination of where they were going during the long take. For instance, when the Cops come into the travel agency to inquire about Michel, there is a jump cut that goes from them entering the establishment to the two characters standing at the counter making their inquiries. Here narrative continuty is maintained at the expense of spatial continuty. There are many examples in BREATHLESS where the jump cut is used to accelerate the narrative (e.g. the conversation between Patricia and her boss in the restaurant) by compressing time and fragmenting the presentation of a character or characters, but also we see the jump cut used as a way to call attention to the ending of a long take sequence shot where there was no physical cutting of the shot but rather a cselection and omitting of objects and actions within the frame. The jump cut and the long take (a signature of Godard's cinematic style) is an artistic sythesis of Bazinian realist aesthetics and Montage editorial effects. In effect, the jump cut and the long take are two forms of montage; the former is a dis-ruption of the shot and the latter is the disruption of the temporal arrangement of actions and objects within the frame. Both the jump cut and the long take/sequence shot are forms of artistic editing. With BREATHLESS Godard succeeds in removing himself from the Bazinian straight jacket of realism and retaining -indeed improving upon- the conceptualization of montage as first articulated by Eisenstein.