2025 | Historic Berlinale Debuts
À bout de souffle (Breathless) - Jean-Luc Godard 1960
There is hardly a work that divides film history as clearly into “before” and “after” as À bout de souffle (France 1960). Director Jean-Luc Godard makes his cinematic debut with the film on July 5, 1960 as part of the 10th Berlin International Film Festival. In one fell swoop, he throws the established laws of good taste overboard and redefines the rules for what can be shown and seen in the cinema. The director ignores the established and entrenched norms of invisible editing; instead, jump cuts and crossing the line fragment time and space. Raoul Coutard’s equally inspired cinematography uses natural light instead of large setups; the scenes are shot handheld. There is no fixed script: Godard writes the dialogue early each morning in a café and then the film is shot in the original locations – not in the studio. The shoot thus becomes fast and flexible. In short: free.
The film’s aesthetics are as feverish as the journey into misfortune and the ultimate death of its protagonist. Literally breathless, À bout de souffle tells the story of Michel Poiccard, a petty criminal and cop killer, and his brief affair with the American student Patricia. With wordy philosophising, the pair navigate their way through a life and love full of uncertainties and radical beliefs. The two lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, become pop culture icons overnight, symbols of cool elegance which enduringly shape the image and attitude of youth in the 1960s.
Even if first reactions to the premiere in Berlin are ambivalent – teetering between pure euphoria and fears for the morals of the young – after À bout de souffle, the triumphant progress of the Nouvelle Vague can no longer be stopped. It shakes world cinema like an earthquake, the seismic eruptions shaping cinematic forms all the way to distant (New!) Hollywood, where Godard’s films become the benchmark for directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
During the decade following 1960, Godard is a regular participant in the Berlinale Competition and on the verge of becoming the legend he is considered today. In 1961, he wins the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize for Une femme est une femme while Anna Karina, his long-time muse and wife from 1961 to 1965, also wins the Silver Bear for Best Actress. In 1965, the International Jury awards Godard the Golden Bear for his dystopian science fiction film Alphaville. With Masculin-Féminin (1966, Silver Bear for Best Actor for another Nouvelle Vague icon, Jean-Pierre Léaud), Weekend (1968) and Le gai savoir (1969), Godard returns to the Berlinale Competition three more times in subsequent years.