Breathless

I was reading Richard Brody, film blogger for The New Yorker, and thinking about a couple of things that he mentions:

The photo above is of Godard -- the guy with the loose tie in the center of the crowd -- filming the last scene of Breathless. The bystanders are just people who wandered by. No crowd control, no crew. If you've ever fantasized about making a revolutionary masterpiece this moment is what you were dreaming about. (The corruption of this dream is why I have so much contempt for indie cinema and Sundance.)

If you need help with math, that was fifty years ago.

When Breathless was released, it was reviewed for The New Yorker by none other than Roger Angell, later to become fiction editor and baseball writer. He sure got it right:

This, of course, sounds like a routine policier, but it is immediately evident that M. Godard and his associates have something vastly more fascinating in mind, which is nothing less than to make comprehensible, and therefore touching and serious, the lives of two disorderly, disconnected, nihilistic young moderns—and to do so, moreover, by seeing and hearing their unlovely world with exactly the same nervous glances and flighty inattentiveness that they themselves must rely on. To say that the film almost entirely succeeds in this awesome undertaking may explain why, in my estimation, it achieves the heights and confirms the men of the New Wave as the makers of a powerful new tradition in the art of the film.