he uses them. Breathless, a movie that asserts
Godard’s personality and ideology, virtually defines
what is meant by an auteur film. It tells a conven-
tional crime story in an unconventional manner,
rejecting the traditional cinematic values of unity
and continuity in favor of discontinuity and con-
trast. Godard called his work a cinema of “reinven-
tion,” meaning that he generally kept all kinds of
cinematic language in mind as he created his own.
Consequently, by employing the iris-out, Godard
not only offers homage to D. W. Griffith but also
reminds modern audiences of a seldom-used visual
device. Dedicating the film to Monogram Pictures
(one of Hollywood’s “B” or “Poverty Row” studios),
Godard evokes the Hollywood film noir through
allusions, direct and indirect, to tough films with
tough leading men. He also pays homage to French
film director Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influ-
ence on the New Wave, by casting him in the movie
and patterning the role of his leading male charac-
ter on the model in Melville’s Bob le flambeur(1956).
Finally, Godard includes allusions to writers, com-
posers, and painters. Through this broad range of
intertextual reference, or pastiche (making one art-
work by mixing elements from others), Godard
audaciously links his low-budget film noir with the
works of some of the greatest artists of all time.
Most important, though, is Godard’s editing,
which is central to the telling of this narrative.
Here, working in the radical tradition started
by Eisenstein and his contemporaries—collision
between and among images—Godard consciously
and deliberately manipulates the images with such
editing techniques as jump cuts and nondiegetic
inserts. Thus he deliberately avoids such devices as
crosscutting—which traditional directors would
have used in cutting between the good guys and bad
guys in the film’s chase scenes—and the familiar460 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
Hitchcock’s influence on the New WaveAlfred
Hitchcock’s movies were greatly admired by New Wave
directors. Claude Chabrol, who carefully studied the movies
of the master of suspense and surprise, is noted also for
movies that combine romance with gory murders. In The
Butcher(1970), thought by many to be his masterpiece, a
group of schoolchildren accompany Hélène (Stéphane
Audran), their teacher, to see a magnificent cave that
contains prehistoric drawings. Afterward—in the image
here—as they enjoy their picnic lunch, blood drips onto one
girl’s bread from a fresh corpse on a cliff above. When Hélène
sees the body, she suspects that it is yet another woman who
has been victimized by the local butcher, a man with whom
the teacher has a platonic relationship. After that, the
suspense—the effect of which Chabrol learned well from
Hitchcock—becomes almost unbearable.
Time and mortality in the New WaveAgnès Varda, one
of the very few women in the New Wave movement, was a
unique force in shaping it. Her experiments in the handling of
cinematic time influenced such contemporaries as Jean-Luc
Godard and Alain Resnais. And her concern with the
cinematic perception of women is beautifully realized in Cleo
from 5 to 7(1962). It follows two hours in the life of Cléo
(Corinne Marchand), a pop singer who wanders aimlessly
around Paris while waiting for the results of a biopsy. Told in
near–real time, she grapples with such issues as the meaning
of friendship, her work, and mortality. Just before going to the
hospital to meet her doctor—fearing that she has cancer—
Cléo drops her purse; picking up the pieces, she interprets her
broken mirror as an omen of death. To call attention to Cléo’s
ordeal of killing time, Varda titles each episode and indicates
its precise running time (here, translated into English):
“Chapter 11—CLÉO from 6:04 to 6:12.”