Cinematic Innovations in A Bout de Soufflé
A bout de soufflé by Jean-Luc Godard (1960) is full of new attempts both in its form and contents as he made it with such intention:
A Bout de Soufflé was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about. … What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done.
Apparently, the film has novel, innovative features in almost every aspect of cinema including shooting, editing, narrative structure, and characters. It achieves such creativity by breaking stereotyped rules of film-making. Godard’s shooting style was innovative. It was rather that of documentary. He used location shooting, which means shooting in real geographical locations, like real, uncontrolled streets in the city, not in artificial studio sets built for filming. As A bout de soufflé was filmed in famous locations in Paris such as the Champs Elysées, uncountable number of ordinary people appear in the film. They look back at Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) with curiosity in their faces, some even stare directly at the camera, or some cut in front of the camera. All these things blur the border between the reality and the diegesis, making the latter imperfect. So, the film not only shows real city countenance of contemporary Paris—streets crowded with busy people and roads occupied with an endless cycle of cars, but also remind the audience that they are watching a film, a fictional construct, revealing its identity by itself. Natural lighting was another innovation in shooting. Godard didn’t use any artificial lighting. The only light he used was the sunlight. For that, the cameraman Raoul Coutard, who was once a still photographer, suggested using llford HPS stock, which was a still camera stock, not a movie one. So Godard and he linked stocks to make reels lengthy enough for filming. As the sun is the sole light source, the shooting mostly took place in daytime. Some scenes are filmed against the light, such as the café scenes where Van Doude and Patricia have conversation and the scenes where Michel and Patricia escape through a building without paying taxi fee. In the scenes where Michel and Patricia are in the car after watching a western movie, the screen is almost black as the time is night and the camera shoots from the inside of the car. Natural lighting resembles real visual experience but in such scenes the audience might feel inconvenient since they can hardly see the faces of the characters and distinguish things. Again, as in location shooting, it makes the audience take a step backward from the film, convincing them that they are watching a film. Hand-held shooting is another feature. Freed from immobility, the camera was carried by Raoul Coutard on his shoulder. The screen keeps wavering along with his walking and breathing, never staying still. It was for speed, as Godard himself said. He meant reducing the filming schedule, as the Cameflex, the camera used for filming, was light and easy to move. It has a ‘rough’ and ‘tumble’ sense like documentary, shaking constantly and busy tracking characters walking. But at the same time, the camera itself got speed as well. Its rapid panning delivers high moving speed and chaotic sense of the scene where Michel trying to run away from the cops in the Route nationale 7. Also, high mobility enabled complicated, signifying camera movement. At the Inter-American Agency, Michel is ‘trapped’ in the frame as the camera keeps following back in front of him through the entire scene. In the Swedish woman’s flat, as the camera follows Michel and Patricia respectively, they look like wandering satellites trapped in a room which never meet each other. Editing is where Godard achieved the biggest innovation. The rules of continuity editing were broken—establishing shots are often omitted and the famous ‘jump cut’ was born. When Michel is humming while driving in the beginning of the film, when Michel and Patricia are talking to each other in the car, and when Van is telling a story with his girlfriend to Patricia in a café, there are time and spatial leaps, which leave uneven connection between shots. The pace of film becomes literally breathless compared to long shots. Some parts are removed from the middle of sequences because Godard wanted to shorten the first edited version of the film. Such rapid skipping makes the shots seem not worthwhile or meaningful to ponder upon. Indeed, Michel’s humming is pointless, Van’s story is ridiculous, and conversation between Michel and Patricia also doesn’t make sense. All of them are saying something but communication is not established. The fragmented form visually externalizes pointlessness and unstableness of its content. Also, as such obvious discontinuity is impossible in reality, it strongly interrupts the audience’s projecting themselves into the film. Sound is another remarkable part. The whole film was made without sound. Sound was recorded and edited separately. It has autonomy against image. Michel’s voice is in fact Godard’s, not Belmondo’s. Michel’s narration at the very beginning of the film is like the destiny’s word echoing in the air. Michel’s humming while driving on the Route nationale 7 is relatively more continuous than corresponding jump cuts. Such discordance between image and sound shows that it is a film, not reality. At the same time, sound itself, in terms of language, is also fragmented, carrying sense of absurdity of reality on its own. When Michel is humming, fragments of various languages appear without logical relation. In dialogue scenes of Michel and Patricia in her hotel room, irrelevant topics pop up like jump cuts. They’re having dialogues but don’t communicate. Sound also often interrupts understanding the film. Sudden mysterious sound track makes the scene confusing in a high-angle shot where Patricia runs to Michel to give him a kiss in the beginning of the film. Ambient noises interfere in dialogues between Michel and Patricia when they are walking down street and when they are in Patricia’s hotel room. Usage of language is also innovative. As the film allows ambient noises to kick in, it also rejects refined language. Michel, who was the first to break ‘the refined sound conventions of 1959 French cinema’, uses various languages. For example, he uses popular slang and the most trivial spoken French, which show contemporary language usage in France, American phrase in French, and Italian and Spanish words. But his intention of using each language seems aimless. In chaos of languages, only fragments of them flash and then disappear. Throughout the film, Patricia keeps asking Michel the meaning of the words he uses. She doesn’t understand his words even at his very last moment, death. It is an extension of impossibility of communication. The narrative structure of A bout de soufflé is also far from conventions. It has loose, fragmented narrative. It is a thriller filmed differently, as Jean-Pierre Jeancolas (1985) wrote. With its dedication to Monogram Pictures, a minor American gangster movie studio, the film belongs to film noir concerning its plot. Michel is a French gangster whose destiny is to be dead and it is Patricia, his beloved girl, who gives him away to the police. He becomes a wanted criminal in the beginning of the film, since he shot a policeman. However, the shot which killed the policeman seems pointless just like previous shots aimed at passing cars and the sun. It is even meaningless to Michel. To him, love affair with Patricia is more important. His another crime, robbing a man for diner money also becomes pointless since Patricia cannot have dinner with him. So the main text of the film, Michel’s gangster acts seem silly attempts to make approaches to Patricia. The relationship between Michel and Patricia is rather more significant. It is in their dialogues—rather ‘double soliloquy’—where the true incommunicability unfolds. The characters, Michel and Patricia are unconventional as well. They are not stylized, plain gangster and femme fatale in conventional thrillers. Michel is a tangled character, who has mysterious past, likes making puns, and loves Mozart’s clarinet concerto. He is an aimless and unpredictable young man. He is even apathetic of his death even when it is imminent. As he said previously in the film, he chose ‘nothing’ instead of grief. Patricia is also an equivocal character. She is not sure about her feelings of Michel, nor shows clear emotions. She worries about her future career and desires to be independent. They are ambiguous like real people. By this, they have ‘life’, a very rare gift. They represent their generation in contemporary France, reflecting the existential and social climate, changes in gender roles, and the collapse of existing morality. After all, all of these attempts are concerned with ‘truth’. A bout de soufflé captures truth—reality—as it is. The shooting style such as location shooting, natural lighting, and using ambient sound capture reality intact. François Truffat, another director of French New Wave, said that such manner ‘captured more of the truth, the truth of the streets, the truth of performance and the actor. … In any case one reaches a profound truth by a superficial one and sophisticated cinema had lost even superficial truth.’ Also, seeking ‘truth’ meant ‘breaking down the barriers that had long divided documentary and fiction’. A bout de soufflé is a fiction, but it surely has an attribute of documentary in that it literally captures raw reality. At the same time, the film expresses truth. In terms of seeking truth, Godard wanted to ‘strip reality of its appearances’. The deliberately fragmented and discontinuous form of the film shares absurdity with its content such as impossibility of communication and ambiguity. As the film is about disorder, making its structure also bear disorder is a perfect way to show it. As a result, Godard’s new attempts serve to express truth of human relation, young generation, and atmosphere in contemporary France. Also, there is another truth that it is a film that the audience are watching. Godard keeps reminding them that they are watching a film, an artificial construct through his new style. Even actors often stare directly at the camera and Michel even talks to the audience. This prevents them from identifying themselves with the fictional characters. Thus, Godard does not construct a delusive fantasy of Hollywood style movies. Instead, he induces the audience to actively think about the film. After A bout de soufflé more than 50 years have passed. But it is still young. It is a big bang of cinematic innovations. They are still fresh in the history of film as if they are at the moment of birth.

Bibliography
Borde, Raymon, ‘A bout de soufflé’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009)

Godard, Jean-Luc, in Tom Milne (ed.), Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986)

Greene, Naomi, The French New Wave: A New Look (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)

MacCabe, Colin, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: British Film Institute, 1983)

Marie, Michel, ‘”It really makes you sick!”: Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959).’ Chapter 15 of Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990)

Neupert, Richard, ‘Breathless’, in Jefferey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013)

Sadoul, Georges, ‘Le quae des brumes 1960: A bout de soufflé by Jean-Luc Godard’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009)

Wilson, Emma, French Cinema Since 1950 (London: Duckworth, 1999)

Filmography
A Bout de Soufflé (France, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

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[ 1 ]. Jean-Luc Godard, in Tom Milne (ed.), Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), p.173.
[ 2 ]. Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: British Film Institute, 1983), p.111.
[ 3 ]. Georges Sadoul, ‘Le quae des brumes 1960: A bout de soufflé by Jean-Luc Godard’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009), p.231.
[ 4 ]. Jean-Luc Godard, in Tom Milne (ed.), Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), p.173.
[ 5 ]. Richard Neupert, ‘Breathless’, in Jefferey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p.570.
[ 6 ]. Michel Marie, ‘”It really makes you sick!”: Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959).’ Chapter 15 of Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.207-208.
[ 7 ]. Ibid., p.208.
[ 8 ]. Richard Neupert, ‘Breathless’, in Jefferey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p.577.
[ 9 ]. Michel Marie, ‘”It really makes you sick!”: Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959).’ Chapter 15 of Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990), p.203.
[ 10 ]. Ibid., p.209.
[ 11 ]. Ibid., p.211.
[ 12 ]. Emma Wilson, French Cinema Since 1950 (London: Duckworth, 1999), p.71.
[ 13 ]. Ibid.
[ 14 ]. Richard Neupert, ‘Breathless’, in Jefferey Geiger, R. L. Rutsky (eds), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p.572.
[ 15 ]. Georges Sadoul, ‘Le quae des brumes 1960: A bout de soufflé by Jean-Luc Godard’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009), p.237.
[ 16 ]. Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A New Look (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p.85.
[ 17 ]. Georges Sadoul, ‘Le quae des brumes 1960: A bout de soufflé by Jean-Luc Godard’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009), p.236.
[ 18 ]. Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A New Look (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p.85.
[ 19 ]. Ibid., p.9.
[ 20 ]. Ibid., p.10.
[ 21 ]. Ibid.
[ 22 ]. Raymon Borde, ‘A bout de soufflé’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009), p.222.