Well, here it is. The birth of the French New Wave, at least part of that birth. Along with Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard was at the head of a wave that crashed over movies and changed how they were seen. Half out of financial necessity and lack of experience, and half out of the first real intellectual view of film since Eisenstein, the New Wave worked against everything that Hollywood films had come to represent.

The story is rather simple. Michel, a young French punk played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, gets into trouble in Paris trying to collect some money he is owed. He steals a car, kills a policeman, and hits on Patricia, an American girl played by Jean Seberg. He wants to get her in bed again, she isn't sure she wants anything to do with this guy who is obviously going nowhere. They hang around Paris, have a good time, and she decides to turn him in. He is killed by the police in a really good and unconventional finale. The actual translation of the French title is "Out of Breath," which is a more accurate summation of what the story is about. But it's not really about the plot.

What it was about was turning film on its ear. Godard wanted to shake up audiences, make them constantly aware that they were watching a constructed reality that had little to do with actual reality. Hollywood filmmaking up to this point worked to make viewers forget that they were watching movies; so-called "invisible editing" that preserved continuity in such a way that you don't really notice cuts, music cued to push your emotional reactions around to what the filmmakers wanted, and an attempt to present a heightened reality onscreen were the norm. Godard threw this out the window. He used so-called jump cuts, which were jarring and made it impossible to immerse yourself into the narrative so much that you forgot it was a film. He used handheld cameras and recorded the sound on site, instead of dolly and crane shots and sound dubbed in at the studio. He used music that did not necessarily reflect what was going on in the scene. He used an elliptical storytelling style that precluded any real identification with the characters. He used what looked like outrageous storytelling devices at the time: Belmondo often addresses the camera to explain motivation (or lack thereof), and a narrator (Godard himself) comments on the actions onscreen. It was like a bolt of lightning to the film industry, and much of it came from the budgetary constraints of the filmmakers.

The French New Wave directors were among the first school of filmmakers who were educated in film theory and history before stepping behind the camera. Because they didn't have a lot of money, they couldn't afford fancy dollies and cranes. In some scenes, cinematographer Raoul Coutard pushed Godard around in a wheelchair with the camera in his lap to achieve something resembling a tracking shot. Because they weren't expert filmmakers, they often made mistakes that they couldn't afford to go back and reshoot. So, they developed a fragmented editing style using shock and jump cuts to both delete the mistakes and further their efforts to remind viewers that they were watching a movie.

My problem with it is that it works great on a theoretical level, but it doesn't really make for an exciting or all that interesting viewing experience. I couldn't identify with either character, which is probably what Godard wanted. But it kept me from enjoying the movie on an emotional level, while I was able to appreciate it on an intellectual level. I guess I need both, which I got in what I consider Godard's masterpiece, 1966's Bande à part (called Band of Outsiders in America, and the inspiration for the name of Quentin Tarantino's production company, A Band Apart).