Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle) opened in 1960 and won the Jean Vigo Prize, becoming, alongside Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour, one of the foundational films of the French New Wave. The film was Godard's debut feature, made on a $90,000 budget over a four-week guerrilla shoot, with much of the dialogue improvised and a screenplay outline provided by Truffaut. It permanently rewrote what cinema's shooting style could be.

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in a star-making role) is a small-time Marseille car thief who shoots a police officer in the early minutes of the film and flees to Paris. There he attempts to persuade Patricia (Jean Seberg, the American star Godard had cast partly on the strength of her Otto Preminger collaborations) (a young American journalism student selling the New York Herald-Tribune on the Champs-Élysées) to run away with him to Italy. The film follows their last days in Paris in a sustained register of cigarette-smoking, jazz, café conversations and casual movement that rewrote what protagonists in cinema could spend their time doing.

Raoul Coutard's hand-held photography (shot from a postal cart on the Champs-Élysées, in cinematographers' rooms with bounced light) produced the visual register that defined the New Wave. The famous jump cuts in the Patricia bedroom sequence were originally a continuity-saving solution to a film that ran too long, and became one of the most-imitated stylistic gestures in the medium.