Choice B: Breathless: Popular film and the avant-garde
Filmed in 1959, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was created at a time when many European artists (like their American counterparts) had grown bored of the pretentious limitations that many Modernists had placed on the creation of art after World War II. As such, many became interested in objects/ideas from “vulgar” popular culture—rock-and-roll, film noir, comics, pulp fiction, and advertisements—to reinvigorate their work, resulting in movements like Pop and Nouveau Realisme that emerged at the same time as the “French New Wave” cinema Godard helped pioneer. Watch and research the film Breathless and its director Godard, and in an 8- 10-page paper (5000-level students, 10-14 pages), please address the following:
A brief biography of the film’s director and a very brief overview of the film’s plot.
In what ways does scholarship on Godard reveal how, like the era’s gallery art, Godard uses
ideas/imagery/genres from popular (and particularly American) youth culture, occasionally and knowingly juxtaposed with references to “high art,” throughout the film. Compare these strategies to some artists/works we’ve studied.
Discuss as well how scholars have addressed the period’s shifting gender ideals as reflected in the film’s male and female protagonists who were—like the film itself—viewed as scandalously modern by post-WWII standards but can today seem rather cliché.
(If you wish, feel free to explore further issues/ideas surrounding the film, its influences, and even how you feel it may have affected film or art history since it was first shown.)
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