DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-105

Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece

nterzisn@yahoo.com

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to bring forward the innovative filmic devices that Godard, in a palimpsest process, introduced in filmic language, against the tradition ofcinema du papa, and the overall narrative reassurance of Hollywood’s pseudo-realism of verisimilitude.

More precisely, I am attempting to present the overall aesthetic, anarchic/revolution that Godard (the first famous, deliberately deconstructive, semiotician filmmaker, enigmatic especially in his latest period)   brought to the Cinema worldwide, with his debut feature film Breathless. 

In order to do so, I intend to use semiotics:

1. To analyze the very first & last shot of the film.

2. To attempt a close analysis (shot to shot) of the second sequence where the film noir icon protagonist Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel Poiccard, alias Laszlo Kovacs) drives off Marseilles on a country road with his first stolen American car.

3. To examine its first created,  famous, internal jump-cuts, that a film ever introduced to international audiences, a montage technique, that American television later on first adapted (European television followed), with the video clip artists universally integrating it in their work, alas, devoid its Godardian, first, radical usage! 

Breathless,  after all, although a well established monumental/breakthrough film some decades now,  it still strikes us afresh with its immediacy, existential aura, syncopated rhythm, meta-filmic dimension, its innumerous self-referential  elements, finally its inter-textual qualities (before the term inter-textuality was ever coined!).

My semiotic approach in accordance to Godard’s attitude will be one of combining the most appropriate tools that semiotic theory has to offer up to now for bringing forward the meaning of moving pictures and sounds, namely: denotation, connotation, paradigmatic/syntagmatic axis of creating meaning, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche. I will utilize Peirce’s theory about indexical codes (Peirce 1974) that Peter Wollen (I was very lucky to have him as a visiting professor in my first film course at Columbia University),  first brought forward in film theory (Wollen 1972).

À bout de souffle: semiotic analysis of an innovative sequence as to the handling of montage and the male protagonist/film noir icon

Hollywood’s dominant, classical cinema is based on a set of generic codes and conventional narrative devices which act as motifs and cognitive schemes, such that we as spectators are taught/conditioned through repetition to understand mainly the story and identify with the positive characters in a more or less passive process. This mainstream narrative orthodoxy is channeled through the cinematic genres and aims to bring about clarity and unity through goal-oriented protagonists who function in a godly star system that foregrounds individual problems devoid of any critical social context. They follow a storyline that, except for small gaps and clearly cued flashbacks, orders events in a naive linear chain of cause and effect, thus obeying the norms of narrative closure and bringing about a reassuring happy end.

Peter Wollen (whose student I was at Columbia University), in his article: Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est. Afterimage 4 (autumn 1972): p. 6-17, mapped theseven deadly sins of Hollywood versus the seven cardinal virtues of counter-cinema, as follows:

In my opinion, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless aligns so radically all seven cardinal virtues of counter-art cinema for the first time in narrative feature films. Breathless, a film that managed to reach vast audiences, propels toward an inimitable, innovative spirit of playful cinematic disobedience in departing from the tradition of spatio-temporal continuity that grounds Hollywood’s “invisible style.” Although a well-established monumental film for some decades now, Breathless still strikes us with its immediacy, existential aura, syncopated rhythm, meta-filmic dimension, its innumerable self-referential  elements and finally its inter-textual qualities (before the term inter-textuality was coined).

My semiotic approach to this film applies mainly the Peirce/Wollen trichotomy (Wollen 1972: 116-154), for it is Wollen the theorist who stresses for the first time “the relevance of the Peircean scheme to the study of film and makes some very suggestive remarks about particular examples of iconicity and indexicality [my emphasis], but the topic has not been widely pursued by other theoreticians” (Silverman 1983: 24).[1] This interpretation was sketched out two to three years before Silverman could anticipate Gilles Deleuze’s Cinéma 2, L'Image-temps, 1985 (transl. as Cinema 2: The Time-Image in 1989). [2]

But out of respect for materiality, let us first carefully examine the film itself. A detailed description of the introductory sequence is mandatory before we close examine the second sequence which will be our main focus. This is something that Deleuze, for example, never does when considering films in the context of his extremely ambitious general grand theory.

Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960): semiotic analysis of the first and second sequence.

The first sequence, which precedes the sequence whose semiotic/aesthetic analysis we are to focus on, amounts to 12 shots. The first shot is of the greatest importance for all 12 shots. The action goes as follows: We see the close up of the newspaper with the drawing of a young woman dressed in underwear, holding with coquetry a little doll behind her, while we hear Michel off camera exclaim, “After all . . .  I’m stupid. After all, yes, it must play that way, it must, it must.” The camera, tilting up, reveals amedium shot. Michel, lowering the newspaper, appears smoking arrogantly; he lifts his head up looking left, then turns his face abruptly right with a decisive, exaggerated, masculine forcefulness, removes the cigarette, rubs his lips in the style of Bogart as if he were signaling to someone (duration: 23ʺ + 16 frames).[3] We see a woman signaling to Michel with her eyes, while we notice a military officer parking his American car and walking away with his wife. Michel turns on the car’s engine with some cables; the woman on the lookout asks him to take her with him. Michel then asks her what time it is; she answers, and he takes off alone.

Let’s examine the very first shot. 1a. The close up of the newspaper with the drawing of a young woman dressed in underwear, holding with coquetry a little doll behind her, signals very early in the film, and as an index connotes and announces, Godard’s search for the woman’s code that will follow the film’s unfolding: the woman is thus conceived as a victim of language[4] and consumerism, kept in ignorance, a subject that the filmmaker will investigate/expose/present cinematically and more thoroughly in his subsequent films of the 60’s. 1b. Michel with his unnatural, overplayed Brechtian acting, as if he is inside his role and at the same time outside of it, commenting on it (as a connotative comment on his role/character) makes clear from the very beginning that he is nothing else but a French actor who impersonates a petit-gangster (first degree of displacement/doubling). Michel in turn rubs his lips (an index that works metonymically), imitates Bogart, the prototype of masculinity in American gangster films (second degree of displacement/doubling). Furthermore, Michel’s enigmatic words may function as symbols/indices that foreshadow cryptically/connotatively the outcome of the story, namely, his upcoming death. Here are a few observations:

With the exception of the first shot, the rest of the shots do not present us something innovative, other than the complete non-existence of a shot that informs us about thespatial associations of the action taking place. Furthermore, the first four alternating shots of Michel and the woman on the lookout do not present a clear eye line direction match in the order of visual communication, while we get the impression that the two of them are close to each other, which is a false impression as the next shots reveal. All these create an estranging, waking up and alienating effect on the viewer.

To summarize, this controversial film opens with a shot that is very peculiar, enigmatic, self-referential, intertextual and very semiotic, indeed. Instead of having an introductory shot followed by other that would introduce the main characters and progressively initiate the story with an analytical editing as in classical American film noir, we have a jump into the middle of a critical action. Furthermore, this shot is full of visual and aural connotative signs. First, in the visual/drawing in the newspaper of a young, coquettish woman holding a doll, we get the first visual connotative sign about the code of women as somnambulists. Second, the cryptic/enigmatic connotative utterance of the male protagonist (whose face is hidden by the newspaper while he speaks), proclaims cryptically of what is yet to come, namely, his doom, as we could expect, since his persona is an amalgam of film noir characters. Third, his post-Brechtian overplayed masculinity, expressed through the unnatural/unrealistic visual side of his performance, reminds us that what we see is a filmic construction (and thus, it functions connotatively/indexically as a self-reference and an alienating device). And last but not least, Michel, rubbing his lips in the style of Bogart, operates as an intertextual/connotative/indexical sign, creating a meta-language looming above the storyline and the diegetic elements yet to come. 

Now let’s examine the second sequence, which presents most of the aesthetic innovations of this remarkable film, warning that our experience seeing it will be like no other.

Let us now first consider the stylistic techniques that this sequence shares in common with Hollywood’s industrious, conventional mode of narration, before we examine how it specifically transforms cinematic language:

1) The use of short duration shots (42, 44) and their alteration with shots of longer duration, as with shots 41, 43, 45, creates pace, and then shot 46 allows a break in rhythm, with the policeman turning to the dirt road following Michel’s trails, climaxing in the intensity that the previous 5 shots had already developed.[6] 

2) The sound of the guns being cocked produces as an audible cut between shots 49 and 50, and heightens the intensity of the action.

3) The final loosening of intensity with shot 52, bringing the dramatic musical bridge at the end of the sequence—at least ten times longer than the average duration of the short shots (48, 49, 50, 51) that it supersedes.

In sum, the montage of this film seems to take serious liberties in deviating[7] from the rules of editing which the classical narrative paradigm strives to attain: hence, we are witness to Godard’s challenge to the spatio-temporal verisimilitude of Hollywood’s invisible style.

But it seems that we are jumping unnaturally from one part of the action to another. The shots often do not seem to connect with each other in accordance with mainstream Hollywood conventions. Let us remember, however, that the mere idea of cinematic verisimilitude is itself a convention, and certainly a manipulative one. What is, after all, the cinematic convention according to which cutting to a short shot of the pursuer permits the pursued to travel a distance incredibly long for the time that intervened, or again, the convention where the participants in a chase must be seen moving in the same territorial grounds? In general, cinematic conventions aim to sustain the omnipotent, narrative economy and the efficiency, clear cut, unambiguous, denotative semantic demands. Godard for certain does not aim to simply demolish those useful narrative mechanisms/devices, but to create more open and drastic ones, while pushing the existing ones to their limits.

Godard not only defies the never-ending repetition of classical narrative as it unfolds in commercial films. He also aims to employ alienation effects, on the level of acting and editing techniques that cause estrangement, thus pushing the viewer’s logic to extremes. Due to the overall impression of an elliptic, unexpected, narrative structure, we get only what is necessary; just as we, as oblivious observers, perceive things unfold in the midst of real life, having to decipher the meaning by putting bits and pieces together, with no indication or any hints about what is going to happen; finally, without the comfortable, hypnotizing aid of an omnipotent, self-effacing, invisible director.

Godard’s cinema does not offer us any kind of mystical insight, since it is enunciated and structured on the antipodes of the reassuring omnipotence of dominant classical narration. Hence, we must accept without any explanation that the policemen have tracked down Michel and that he suddenly decides to get off the main road without any clue of having to repair his car engine, and that he finds it proper—if not necessary—to kill the policeman! With this elliptical montage, Godard lures us to accept this sequence of events with the same ease that we accepted that Michel steals cars (exclusively American), that he refuses to take with him the woman on the lookout, although she was the accomplice who helped him steal the car, as well the two young women hitchhikers (shots 25, 26, 27, 28), not out of misogyny but simply because he found them ugly. All of this unfolds without any sociological or psychological explanation whatsoever.

The internal logic, the information and the insight that the omnipotent creator shares with his spectators in a classically constructed film is replaced for better or worse—by the spontaneous, discontinuous, and unguarded perception of a passerby who has much less knowledge about the action than we do. In a way, Godard seems to acknowledge that he knows his protagonist as much as we do and that it is impossible and inappropriate for anyone to pretend that he has the ability to predict the behavior of a character [whose nature is to be unpredictable even for himself] who invents himself moment by moment.

These remarks are the outcome of my detailed close analysis of this remarkable revolutionary montage sequence. We see the first innovative jump-cuts[8] in the history of world cinema in shots 25, 26 and 29, 30, 31, which, in becoming more extreme in shots 37, 38, demolish one of the most basic classical cinematic conventions, namely, spatio-temporal continuity. In shot 38, which has an identical point of view with shot 37, the truck that the patrolmen had appeared behind it pursuing Michel now disappears abruptly in the depths of the frame.  

 In shot 39, Michel’s car passes by a car with scenic direction left→ right, while last time as viewed in shot 36, it was heading the opposite way: right→ left. Then, in shot 40, the cοps who are chasing him on their motorcycles appear to drive after him in the opposite direction, breaking the 180◦ rule. Then again, in shot 41, Michel turns left on a dirt road, stops and off camera soliloquies undisturbed, justifying his stop that the cables he had connected to start the car in the first place have been disconnected. The previous shots of the chase connote that the distance between Michel and his pursuers is very little, thus justifying the unsuspected passing of the first patrolman in shot 42, at the point where Michel had turned off the main road, additionally creating the impression that the patrolman comes from the opposite direction.

All of these deviations seem like anomalies when set against the smooth flow and conventional, narrative logic of Hollywood’s classical paradigm, as in a film likeCasablanca (1942). But just as these deviations can at first be seen as defects, they acutely convey a sense of confusion because of the unexpected chase, the flight, fear, and underlying violence, while remaining within the borders of the potential configurations of real life. The use of montage in these shots presents the real visual experience of a passerby much better than would the style of a lesser director, who would bring to classical editing a conventional spatio-temporal continuity audiovisual scheme. Considering things on the plane of montage, Godard seems to wink at us, connoting that our usual perception of spatio-temporal continuity in cinema is simply an illusion, a subsidiary crutch in the mental process through which the spectator produces the meaning of a scene in a film.

Thus, by bringing to our awareness the essentially unrealistic nature of these classical conventions, Godard substitutes them with a fresher, raw, elliptic and direct recreation of the action. The action becomes even more elliptic, from the moment the second policeman turns back to follow Michel’s trails on the dirt road. We see Michel rushing to the car and bending inside through the open window, and with 2 jump cuts, we see his face, his arm and a pistol at the end of his extended forearm; we hear a gunshot and glimpse the policeman falling down, unsuccessfully trying to hold a frail branch from a tree in shot 51. Shot 52 shows Michel running away in the country fields. What we have is shorthand coverage of the action that is raw, direct and functional with lyrical overtones and a sharp sense of parody.

A conventional American thriller would have treated the same scene with a classical decoupage, conveying every detail and even expanding time to intensify dramatically the action with the policeman, who after all is going to die. Instead of Godard’s connotative treatment, we would at least have a shot of the policeman uttering the warning before the gunshot: “Don’t move or I’ll shoot” (that starts at shot 47—where if we are alert we can catch a glimpse of a shadow getting inside the frame—and ends at the beginning of shot 48). But due to the short duration of shot 51, we just see him the moment he falls from being hit by the bullet, as if we are catching an instance with the corner of our eyes, as if we were eyewitnesses, and glimpse the funny composition of a body falling back, trying in vain to hold himself from a branch that brakes.

Τhere is no sign of premeditation in Michel’s deadly action. Moreover, from the very start of the sequence, Michel resembles an impulsive anarchist who risks everything and lives dangerously in pursuing his freedom. In order for Michel’s actions to look unexpected, his deadly deed is presented indirectly and discontinuously by the additional intervention of 2 jump cuts between shots (48, 49 and 50). “Don’t move or I’ll shoot,” threatens the cop off camera one tenth of a second before the gun shot is heard. Although we don’t see the person who speaks, we attribute this warning to the policeman. We never see the surprise in the face of the policeman or even find out if he had a chance τοdefend himself. The director already, either at the stage of writing the script or at the cutting table, gave him no chance to do so. Nor does this kind of elliptical montage leave us spectators any chance to project our usually irrelevant or misleading thoughts. Instead of a threatening close up and a two shot focused on the victim at a safe distance, we have a tilt down from Michel’s hat to his face with shot 48 (providing a lyrical treatment of Michel’s profile), while we hear the warning without seeing the moving lips of the person who utters it.      

And with shots 48, 49, 50, we finally have a studied and lyrical treatment of Michel’s status as a film noir icon, face in profile, the extended arm, the gun, the ritual of his fingers while he cocks the gun, the superb click of the gun’s mill, the deafening gunshot. And instead of having 5¾ of the total duration of shots (48, 49 and 50) to conclude in a fetishistic, elegiac treatment of Michel’s persona as a gangster, the scene is saved by the comic nature of the cop’s irrevocable downfall in shot 51. But the released humor is mainly the outcome of this specific montage arrangement: in frames 8 and 11. We can enjoy an intentional demonstration of heterogeneity, incompatibility and disharmony in the directorial treatment of the action, which, while opposing the classical portrayal of such an event, warns us not to rush into conclusions about any cinematic event or character, based solely on a previous experience of our surrounding world—in this case, the conventional, stereotypical mode of presenting things on the screen to which Hollywood has addicted us, in a Pavlovian  manner, for long decades.

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