Godard, Coutard, and Cinematography
When first watching Breathless and Pierrot le Fou, I honestly felt like I knew nothing about cinema or storytelling whatsoever. It’s not hard to understand the thematic existentialism that seems to be present in every line of dialogue (or the rare occasion where it’s contradictory) but technically these films are like nothing I’d ever seen. I think any film enthusiast will tell you that the technicalities of a film are just as important as the narrative and, more specifically, the dialogue in making a meaningful piece, but I found the cinematography and editing more jarring and arbitrary then relevant and beneficial. Yet after researching more about Godard and the evolutions in film technology at the time, both films’ “construction” became much clearer.
Because I find cinematography so interesting in the way it becomes it’s own language in the context of a narrative, it is normally the element that I spend the most time in observing and trying to understand. In Breathless, I was actually quite underwhelmed. Nothing seemed to stand out and appeared to only serve the purpose of just recording what the actors were doing, which is boring and bland. There was no real lighting aside from what was available naturally, which failed to aid the mood of any scene. In Pierrot le Fou, I found these traits to be less of a problem, most notably the scene where Ferdinand is driving Marianne home. The shots were a straight on of Marianne first, then Ferdinand, and then both of them together, which foreshadowed where the rest of the film was going, as it had yet to be revealed that they had previously known each other. Lighting wise, the colors were magnificent, with Marianne being lit in alternating hot and cool colors of red and green and Ferdinand in blue and yellow. It was very disorienting but in a good way, almost creating a sort of surreal element during a normal activity. Yet this scene is an exception, with most of the film being made in a similar fashion to Breathless.
I originally judged these observations negatively, yet when I discovered the true guerilla nature of the productions, I saw the films in a whole new light. There was little pre-production other then a few notes, and crews often consisted of two or three people. Godard was also at this point making on average two films per year, which meant that they were made, according to Giannetti’s Flashback: A Brief History of Film, “quickly, cheaply, and spontaneously”, a staple of the French New Wave movement. Because of this, Coutard (the cinematographer for both films) was running around Europe with Godard and the actors using a handheld camera, making up the film as they went along. When one considers this style of filmmaking, the level of sophistication in the shots along with the spontaneity of improvised lines, locations, and often plot, and the desire of Godard to focus more on idea then on narrative, it is actually quite incredible that he was able to shoot anything coherent at all. And when you do watch both films knowing this, you see that they do indeed look different; Breathless being overall much more physically closer in to the actors (which contradicts Godard’s not so subtle desire to purposefully alienate his audiences from the characters), while Pierrot le Fou seems to focus more on the scenery, the idea of being on the run and becoming “a part of the world”, which relates to the existentialist themes in the film.
