Web content: Historical perspective: Breathless
KCTS.org, June, 1998
by Louis Broome

Breathless
Many film historians consider Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless a seminal work in the development of modern cinema. Godard, along with Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut, formed the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of filmmaking in post World War II France, a style that corresponds to the existentialist's view of the world.
Upon its release in 1960, Breathless joined the ranks of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as one of the three directorial debuts that permanently altered the course of cinema.
The New Wave school's signature elements--techniques such as the hand-held camera, jump-cut editing, compressed exposition, and non-linear narrative--have a direct influence on almost every film and television movie produced today.
Once considered an artist as influential as Picasso, Godard now works out of the basement of a non-descript apartment building in Rolle, Switzerland.