The French New Wave Film That Changed American Cinema

For the first half of the 20th century, most filmmaking followed established rules of the craft. Studios controlled production from top to bottom, directors adhered to classical storytelling conventions and visual style was governed by a polished aesthetic.

“There was one way you could do things. There were people who protected it like a copyright, a secret cult only for the initiated,” French director Jean-Luc Godard once said of the film industry. Making the movie Breathless, he added, meant “blowing that all apart.”

With his 1960 feature debut, Godard unleashed a radical energy that transformed cinema. Today, Breathless stands as a defining work of the Nouvelle Vague—the French New Wave—a movement of audacious young directors who reinvented filmmaking in the early 1960s and left an indelible mark on generations of artists around the world.

Godard and his fellow critics at the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma felt that French filmmakers were trying to make Hollywood-scale films on smaller budgets. They criticized French films as uninspired imitations aimed at middle-aged audiences, and argued they failed to reflect the seismic cultural changes in music, theater, literature and art that had emerged after World War II.

“What they rebelled against really was the system as it existed in France,” film historian Richard Neupert explains.

Critics like Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut wanted to prove that movies could—and should—be made cheaply, and reflect the lives and perspectives of the French New Wave generation. Godard in particular, the last of this cohort to make a feature film, wanted to prove that cinema could be more than just a product; it could be an adventure.

Godard compared his filmmaking style on Breathless to the “action painting” of mid-20th-century artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. These painters who emerged in the 1940s and ’50s revolutionized art through works that highlighted spontaneity: drips, splatters, sweeping gestures and bold strokes that made the physical act of painting visible.

“[Godard] wanted to make an action cinema just the way there was action painting. You don’t really know where you’re going with it, you splatter on a canvas,” explains Neupert, author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema.

To that end, Godard famously worked without a script. Breathless grew from a story idea by Truffaut about a petty criminal who kills a cop before traveling to meet his American girlfriend in Paris. The director showed up to set each day with rough notes for his stars and shot the film without synced sound—the way directors of the silent era did. This allowed him to shout directions and feed lines to his actors as they filmed. All dialogue was recorded and dubbed afterward.

Collaborating with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who had cut his teeth as a war photographer, Godard aimed for a documentary style by utilizing low-budget, guerrilla filmmaking techniques. He even described Breathless as “a documentary about [actors] Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.”

Coutard “scorned fancy lighting,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert in his 2003 review of the film. Instead, he used handheld techniques long before lightweight cameras were available. At one point, he held the camera while being pushed in a wheelchair because the production could not afford to lay down tracks for a tracking shot. Following the film’s release, “every film department has a wheelchair!” says Neupert.

“There was this sense of improvisation, and it was exciting for the crew, but also terrifying for them," Neupert explains. "They’re all jumping in the pool together and they don’t know if they’re going to sink or swim.”

Perhaps the most significant innovation came in the editing room. When the finished film was roughly 30 minutes too long, Godard came up with an unconventional solution. Rather than excising whole scenes, the director instructed his editors to cut within each scene. This produced jump cuts, which break continuity and draw attention to the filmmaking process. It created a jagged style critic Bosley Crowther described as a “pictorial cacophony," in his 1961 New York Times review of the film.

"I think that’s really what made it have this kind of unusual and exciting pacing at the time," says Neupert.

Breathless was considered revolutionary upon its release, even among the films of the French New Wave. “Modern movies begin here,” Ebert wrote, “No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential.”

Young cinephiles and future directors around the world reacted strongly. In a 1972 Village Voice piece, Oliver Stone recalled that he “fell in love with ‘Breathless’” immediately. In 2022, Martin Scorsese wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma that he was “stunned” when he first saw it.

“The movie brats of the '70s were very inspired by it,” Neupert says. Breathless taught filmmakers like Scorsese, Stone, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and many others to rethink the norms of movie making: that you could shoot on location, that you didn’t need a helicopter to get high-angle shots or tracks to get a tracking shot; that you could cast an unconventionally attractive antihero and an inscrutable heroine.

American independent cinema wouldn't be the same if not for the generation inspired by Breathless, concludes Neupert. Working with small crews, borrowed locations, improvised dialogue, handheld cameras and a production model built on flexibility, he created a blueprint for the American indie boom that arrived decades later. The film's influence can be felt in movies like Sean Baker's Tangerine, Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. All of whom cite Breathless as inspiration.

Godard “wanted to show that people shouldn’t be trying to replicate a studio production on a small budget," says Neupert. His core message was that they should "find a new way to do it.”