MPAA Rating: NR
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
"Breathless (A bout de souffle)" Video
"In a way, the cinema I know, the one I live in, has always felt like the cinema of an occupied country. And the occupier has always been Hollywood. At Cahiers du cinema, we defended low-budget movies and auteur films against Hollywood, we declared that Hitchcock and Hawks was the real cinema, completely contradicting the American and French critics of the day. So it's hard to accuse me of anti-Americanism! We did for Hitchcock what Lafayette and Louis XVI did for George Washington! But people don't know history. Faced with a French cinema that had descended from the Occupation, we felt we were resistance fighters, and we supported other resistance fighters—the Hollywood Resistance, who were fighting the studios. But we quickly found ourselves exiled, just as some writers become exiles in their own language when it's seized by others."
—Jean-Luc Godard, interview, Film Comment, January-February 2005