The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean-Luc Godard · a film in French, À bout de souffle · 1960 · about 90 minutes · from an original story by François Truffaut
Mode
Crime picture turned against its grammar; B-picture, love story and cinephile manifesto in one
Mythos
The man who lives as though in a film and dies as in one; the outlaw run to the end of his luck and betrayed by a woman, evoked through the gangster picture
Phase
From a car stolen in Marseille to a street in Paris, the days between spent waiting for money and a woman; framed by a dedication card and a last look out of the screen
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, 35 mm, French dialogue with some English; handheld street photography, open jump cuts, a jazz score; two speaking roles carry almost all the dialogue
Register
Cool, quick and ironic; a killing and a flirtation at one temperature, from the address to the camera to the death run
Scale
Two people, one city, the image
Governing Proposition
A car thief kills a policeman on the road to Paris, waits there for his money and for an American student, is betrayed by her and shot in the street. The wager of the film is that a feature can break the grammar of continuity and still hold, and that the breaks can carry what it knows: a man made of borrowed images dies in the form he copied, and the woman who gave him up takes the gesture from him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a dedication. A card offers it to Monogram Pictures, the American studio of B-pictures, and the film announces itself as one of theirs: a crime picture, cheap and quick, about a punk and a girl. Then Marseille. Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, sits with his hat tilted behind a newspaper and says to no one that he is, after all, an idiot. A girl gives him a signal, and he steals an American car. The first line of the film is addressed to nobody, and its first act is a theft.
Driving north he sings, talks to himself and turns to the camera: “Si vous n’aimez pas la mer, si vous n’aimez pas la montagne, si vous n’aimez pas la ville… allez vous faire foutre!”
“If you don’t like the sea, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the city… get stuffed!” The lead speaks to the audience in the first minutes, and the film has already left the grammar it was dedicated to. He finds a revolver in the glove box and points it at the sun. Two motorcycle policemen follow him. In a few broken shots he shoots one of them dead, and runs off across the fields. The killing is given no more weight than the stolen car, and no suspense at all.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote the screenplay and dialogue and directed, from an original story by François Truffaut, with Claude Chabrol as technical adviser. Georges de Beauregard produced it. Raoul Coutard photographed it in black and white on 35 mm, much of it handheld and by available light in the street; Cécile Decugis edited it; Martial Solal wrote the jazz score. Released in France in March 1960, it was Godard’s first feature. Two people carry almost all of the dialogue, in French with some English: Michel, who also goes by László Kovács, and Patricia Franchini, an American student played by Jean Seberg. The others pass through.
Movement II
In Paris Michel takes money from a former girlfriend’s purse while she dresses. Then he finds Patricia on the Champs-Élysées, selling the paper and calling out its name: “New York Herald Tribune!” The camera goes down the avenue with them among real passers-by, so that the fiction walks through a city that is not acting. He asks her to come to Rome with him. It is the first of the film’s pleasures and the lightest, and it is shot as though nothing were at stake.
At a travel agency he learns that the money he is owed is in a crossed cheque that only Antonio Berruti, played by Henri-Jacques Huet, can cash. That is why he stays in Paris, and so why there is a film: the plot is a man waiting. The newspapers report the killing on the road. Outside a cinema he stops before a still of Humphrey Bogart and rubs his lip with his thumb. The gesture is a quotation, and he performs it for no one, as he spoke his first line to no one.
Patricia meets an American journalist at a café. Michel knocks out a man in a lavatory and takes his money. The episodes are interchangeable, a man filling time, and the film wants them loose: the same quick touch serves a robbery, a flirtation and a newspaper report of a death. The jump cuts run through the whole film; their best-known run, in a car, falls again and again on the back of Patricia’s head while Michel lists what he likes about her. Time skips because Michel skips, and a self that will not stay in one shot is cut so that it does not have to.
Movement III
Michel waits in Patricia’s hotel room, and she comes back. What follows is the longest continuous sequence in the film, a quarter of its length or more, in one small room: a Renoir print and other posters on the walls, a record player, a mirror. They talk, smoke, tease and dodge each other. The crime picture stops. The jump cut gives way to the long take, which holds two actors in a small space for minutes at a time.
Patricia reads him a line from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, in French, on the choice between grief and nothing, and asks which he would choose. Michel says grief is stupid; he would choose nothing. She tells him she may be pregnant by him. She does not know whether she loves him. Michel makes faces at her, and the film will need those faces again. They make love under the sheet.
The sequence is flat by intention, and it is where the film keeps its two people opaque to each other. They share a bed and a language, or two languages, Michel’s quick French against Patricia’s American-accented French and her English, and neither can tell what the other means. The room is a second grammar, the long take for a man stopped and waiting, and it gives the betrayal its weight. Without it the end would be a turn of plot.
Movement IV
At Orly Patricia attends a press conference for the novelist Parvulesco, played by Jean-Pierre Melville. Asked his greatest ambition, he answers: “Devenir immortel… et puis mourir”
“To become immortal… and then to die”. The film gives its motto to a guest. It names what Michel has been doing since the Bogart still: living toward a death already written for him in other films. The camera stays on Patricia’s face as she asks her own question.
Inspector Vital, played by Daniel Boulanger, visits Patricia at the newspaper and presses her. She is followed, shakes off the tail through a cinema, and meets Michel. In the street a passer-by, played by Godard himself, sees Michel’s photograph in the paper and points him out. Michel steals more cars, tries to sell one, and looks for Berruti. The police close in, and the film goes on at the same temperature, as though they were not there.
That night the two of them hide in a borrowed flat. Michel talks of leaving for Italy, and Patricia stays. The outlaw who runs to the end of his luck is the oldest figure of the gangster picture, and the film evokes him through the dedication and the still more than it rebuilds him. What it builds is newer: a man who lives as though in a film, carried by the plot toward the death his quotations promise.
Movement V
In the morning Patricia goes out for the paper, telephones Vital and tells him where Michel is. She comes back and tells Michel what she has done. Her reason is the film’s sharpest stated truth: since she has betrayed him, she cannot be in love with him, and so now she knows. Love is tested by its opposite, because she has no other instrument for knowing her own mind. Michel will not run.
Berruti arrives with the money and throws Michel a gun. Michel picks it up in the street and is shot in the back by the police. He runs, staggering, the length of the street, the camera framing the run down its whole depth, and falls at the crossing. Patricia reaches him. He makes the faces he made at her in the hotel room, says “C’est vraiment dégueulasse”
“It’s really disgusting”, and closes his own eyes. The death is staged straight and played in the game’s register, and the film keeps both.
Vital tells Patricia that Michel called her a real bitch, dégueulasse. She looks straight out of the screen: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, dégueulasse?”
“What is dégueulasse?” She passes her thumb across her lip, Michel’s gesture from the Bogart still, and turns away. The film that began by dedicating itself to a studio of B-pictures ends with a borrowed gesture borrowed again: the man made of images has died in the form he copied, and the image passes to the woman who gave him up, with his last word unexplained. With Les Quatre Cents Coups and Hiroshima mon amour the film founded the Nouvelle Vague, and its cut passed into the ordinary grammar of the moving image.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is one line: a man kills a policeman, waits in Paris for money and a woman, is betrayed by her and dies. Take out the killing on the road and nothing follows; take out the hotel room and the betrayal has no weight; take out the Bogart still and the last gesture means nothing. The travel agency is the hinge of the waiting: the money is in a crossed cheque only Berruti can cash, which is why Michel stays in Paris. Orly gives the film its motto and holds on Patricia’s face before the betrayal. What can go is scattered: the lavatory robbery, the car-dealer business, some exchanges in the hotel room. Looseness is the manner; the test asks only what is required.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is a meaning, not a mood: a self can be assembled wholly from borrowed images. Michel is made of Bogart, the gangster picture and the pose, and he dies in the form he copied, down to the thumb on the lip. The film shows this in gesture, not statement, and it is no less disclosed for that. The second is stated outright on the morning of the betrayal: Patricia tests love by betraying it, because she has no other instrument for knowing her own mind. A third is quieter: the killing on the road, given no more weight than a stolen car, shows a generation’s detachment as a fact, not a theme. Held a step above the gate because much of what the film gives is a stance, the cool of 1959, rendered more than meant.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height is kept rare by design, and the axis counts frequency. The summit is the death: Michel shot in the back, running and staggering the length of the street, the fall at the crossing, the faces, the closed eyes. It comes close to the tragic by refusing to ask for it. A second height follows at once in Patricia’s face looking straight out of the screen, a cold beauty the film has held back until then. Around them are lifts the axis counts, being indifferent to register: the address to the camera on the road, Seberg calling out the paper on the Champs-Élysées, the jump-cut drive with Solal’s score under it. The hotel room is flat by intention, and the summits are few.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not only evoked. The load-bearing structure is the film’s own: the man who lives as though in a film dies as in a film. The Monogram dedication, the Bogart still and the thumb across the lip are set down as quotations; the plot carries Michel into the death they promise; in the last shot the gesture passes to Patricia. That is particular, and it carries the film. The inherited myth beside it, the outlaw who runs to the end of his luck and is betrayed by a woman, is evoked as genre furniture, signalled more than rebuilt. Patricia is drawn lightly enough that the betrayal reads in part as a plot function rather than a fate. That holds the axis at the gate.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inherited form is the French studio film of the 1950s, the “tradition of quality” Truffaut had attacked in print, and behind it the American crime picture. The departures compound: jump cuts used openly, as a rhythm and not an error; a handheld camera and available light in the street, among passers-by; a lead who talks to the camera in the first minutes; a quarter of a crime film given to idle talk in one room; a killing staged in fragments, without suspense. The stake was real: a first feature on a small budget, staking a critic’s name and a producer’s money on breaking continuity. Held below the top by precedent: Rouch, the neorealists and, months before, Les Quatre Cents Coups and Hiroshima mon amour.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Cut in classical continuity, the same script is the minor B-picture the dedication promised. Time skips because Michel skips: the jump cuts are the impatience of a self that will not stay in one shot, and the drive on the back of Patricia’s head is desire too quick for continuity. The handheld street shooting is the freedom the film is about, with the real Paris passing behind the fiction. A borrowed gesture in a film made of borrowed films folds theme into form. The hotel room is a second grammar, the long take for a man stopped and waiting. A step from the top: the manner also covers errands that do not need it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise, and sixty-six years is a long demonstration for the medium. The readings have multiplied rather than settled: existentialist fable, an exchange of French and American myths, the cinephile manifesto, a study of Patricia’s independence or of the film’s indifference to her, a document of Paris in 1959. The formal yield holds on return: where the cuts fall, where the camera gives up a shot, how much of the hotel room is held in one take. And a question stays open: Michel’s last word is relayed to Patricia as an insult, and she asks the camera what it means. Held below the top because the well is formal more than semantic: the novelty is spent by being absorbed, and the characters are shallow by design. Citizen Kane is held at the same figure for a well of that shape.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. Continuity editing, the invisible camera and the polished studio image had governed the narrative feature since the 1910s. The film showed that a feature could break all three and still hold an audience, and that the breaks could carry meaning. The parts existed, in documentary, neorealism and the avant-garde; the force lies in putting them into a genre picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Les Quatre Cents Coups and Hiroshima mon amour it founded the Nouvelle Vague; its jump cut entered the grammar of cinema, television and advertising, and ordinary speech; and it fed the New Hollywood of Bonnie and Clyde and the early Scorsese, and through them later cinephile directors.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-six years: continuous exhibition, restoration, issue on every home format, an American remake in 1983 and a steady place in critics’ polls. Images from it have outlived the film as currency: Seberg’s cropped hair and Herald Tribune T-shirt, Belmondo’s thumb at his lip. The film has outlived the movement it began. The surface fixed to its moment is charged in full: the cigarettes, the slang, the American cars and B-pictures are of 1959 exactly, and once every film could jump-cut, these jump cuts became period. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium; what the film invented is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The command is complete where the form depends on it. Raoul Coutard’s handheld, available-light photography is grainy and quick, and tracks the Champs-Élysées among passers-by. The cutting is exact enough that the jump cut reads at once as rhythm, not error. The hotel room’s long takes hold two actors in a small space for minutes; the death run is framed down the length of the street. Elsewhere it is incomplete, and the costs run through the film: the sound is often loose against the image, some of the roughness is chosen and some is not, and the playing outside Belmondo and Seberg is thin. So it stands where The Starry Night stands, complete in the sky and incomplete on the ground.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a policeman shot dead in a field, and the long sequence of a couple teasing each other in one room. One law covers both: everything is treated at one temperature, so that a killing and a flirtation weigh the same. The law is the film’s subject as well as its manner, and it holds from the dedication to the last gesture, across a range from road thriller to chamber piece to press conference. The ending keeps it: Michel dies making the faces he made at Patricia in the hotel room, and she closes the film with his gesture. One seam shows, and it holds the figure: jump cut and long take are joined by idea more than by cutting, so the hotel room stands beside the rest as a second grammar.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Four orders are integrated through the couple: desire, at the centre; crime and the state, in the killing, the police and the informer; cinema and the image, in the Bogart cult, the Monogram dedication and the films within the film; and the traffic between France and America, in the newspaper, the language, the cars and the novelist at Orly. What keeps the axis lowest is what is touched or absent. Art beyond cinema appears as posters and a quoted line, journalism as Patricia’s ambition, and death arrives only at the end. There is no family to speak of, no labour beyond petty crime and selling papers, and nothing of the sacred; the Algerian war, then being fought, is outside the frame.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Made at 9.0. A first feature that broke the grammar of continuity on a real stake, a form in which the jump cut is the impatience of a self that will not stay in one shot, a founding work of the Nouvelle Vague whose cut passed into the common grammar of the moving image, and a command of camera and cutting that bears weight from the street to the hotel room.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: desire, crime and the state, cinema and the image, and the traffic between France and America are held through one couple; family, labour, history and the sacred are absent. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.4, a summit at the death and lifts around it in a film built to avoid elevation, and The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5: scattered episodes the line does not need, and the outlaw betrayed by a woman signalled rather than rebuilt.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5 meets it exactly. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of À bout de souffle (Breathless) as released in France in March 1960, about 90 minutes, in black and white, from the dedication card to the last shot of Patricia: directed by Jean-Luc Godard from his own screenplay and dialogue, after an original story by François Truffaut, produced by Georges de Beauregard, photographed by Raoul Coutard and edited by Cécile Decugis. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English renderings are given beneath the French for sense, are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The speed and slang of Belmondo’s French as Paris heard it in 1960 are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The American remake of 1983 is a separate work and is not judged; restorations are the same film. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and the exchange over Faulkner’s line is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, the exact length of the hotel-room sequence, the number of jump cuts and the scene and shot counts, are not given, and no account of the shooting is relied on beyond what the film itself shows.