How Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless' is Basically a Warning Against Idolizing Hollywood | No Film School

Being the first feature film by the rebellious auteur, Breathless, or À bout de souffle, was bound to get people's attention. It was unruly. It was meta. It flew in the cinematic face of Post-WWII French convention with its low-budget approach and acerbic commentary on Hollywood's influence on France's cinematic identity.

In this video essay by Evan Puschak, we get to explore the deeper existential meanings and political and societal themes behind one of the most quintessential films of the French New Wave.

The beautiful thing about Breathless is that it's so multifaceted. Enjoy it for its humor and levity and adorkable love scenes. Enjoy it for JLG's master craftsmanship -- even as a first-time filmmaker. Enjoy it for its boldness in taking a hard look at late-1950s French cinema, criticizing it, starting a dialog about it. Enjoy it not for being a film, but a statement. (We find so few of those these days.)

Hell, enjoy it for the simple fact that it did all this to explore something deeper that was happening to French cinema after the war. After WWII, Hollywood films flooded France, which means Hollywood conventions flooded French films, which means The Young Turks of Cahiers du Cinéma were going to have something to say about it. And what a beautiful statement from Godard -- what is the French identity?

This is a question that Breathless, as well as the other iconic films that came out of the Nouvelle Vague, answered so unapologetically. And because of that boldness and desire to make films their way, the French New Wave directors unintentionally started a movement that ended up changing everything people thought they knew about cinema.

Source: Nerdwriter

breathless Jean-Luc Godard French New Wave Video Essay videoessays video essays

What's the Hype With 'Interstellar' Revisiting Cinemas After a Decade in 70mm IMAX?

Here's Why You Need to Revisit 'Interstellar' in 70mm IMAX

Celebrate the love and hope at the center of Nolan's space epic in the format it was meant to be seen.

If we know anything about Christopher Nolan, he likes to go big. Nolan started with smaller-scale stories (as many of us do) with early noir adjacent works like Following, Memento, and Insomnia, then started going and staying big with his illusionist drama The Prestige. Since then, the scale has been various degrees of massive, with the biggest scope in his time-and-space sprawling epic, Interstellar.

While Interstellarmight not be everyone's favorite Nolan outing, there's no denying it's an impressive feat of filmmaking and his most emotional—if watching Matthew McConaughey's Cooper desperately try to reach his family through quantum space-time doesn't make you cry at least a little bit, what's going on, dude?

With Interstellar'sIMAX release, it's a great time to shed some tears in a public setting in one of the most prestigious film formats around. As we mentioned in our film gauge piece, Nolan loves shooting on film and utilizes 65mm intentionally to provoke a tone of massive scale. In that regard, Interstellar was made for 70mm IMAX. That goes without saying, dawg. That being said, other factors make Interstellar a perfect movie to revisit in theaters while you can.

Let's break down the release further below.

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