9111012Discontinuity editing in Breathless Consider this panel
of the movie’s opening images: [1] man A leaning against a
storefront background; [2] woman B, against another
background, who points her chin to signify something to
someone; [3] man A seems oblivious of the woman; [4]
woman B gestures more emphatically; [5] man C and woman
D exit a car, located against a third background; [6] another
shot of A against the storefront; [7] a shot of woman B, again
beckoning, with man C and woman D moving away into the
background; [8] man A, folding his newspaper and apparently
getting ready to move; [9] a boat in a harbor, confusing
because no spatial relationship was established between the
previous shots and this one; [10] man A hot-wiring the car
seen in [5], the first time we can reliably associate him with
his accomplice, woman B; [11] woman B hurrying toward
someone or something; [12] woman B asking the man, who is
now in the stolen car, to take her with him. He has no further
use for her and speeds away. Discontinuity editing has
become a familiar convention, so this sequence may not
seem as surprising as it did when the film was first released
some 50 years ago. Yet because Godard does not orient us
to the time or place of the action (see “Master Scene
Technique,” page 359) and disregards the 180-degree line,
the sequence still confuses us because we don’t know the
place, time, identity of the four characters, their
surroundings, or their relationship to them. Although [12]
reveals that the woman is an accomplice to the man’s theft
of the car, we have no sense of where the narrative is going
from here. Breathlesscontinues to tell the story of the man,
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a charming but ruthless
criminal who, within a few minutes, will kill a policeman and,
once in Paris, will lie and steal cars or whatever else he needs
whenever necessary. Eventually the police hunt him down
and kill him as he tries to escape. The opening sequence
helps us to understand the story, for it establishes that he
seems sinister, uses people, and takes life as it comes.
Equally important, the director trusts us to put the pieces
together.scene must move along a hypothetical line that keeps
the action on a single side of the camera; (2) the cam-
era must shoot consistently on one side of that line;
and (3) everyone on the production set—particularly
the director, cinematographer, editor, and actors—
must understand and adhere to this system.
This means that in a scene of dialogue, say, in
which character A is on the left and character B is
on the right, the viewer is oriented to that spatial
relationship between them because the camera
stays on one side of the imaginary line; however, if
the camera crosses the imaginary line between theMAJOR APPROACHES TO EDITING: CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY 361