BREATHLESS
JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1960
FRANCE | À BOUT DE SOUFFLE | FORMAT: 35MM | 90MIN MINUTES
The film (along with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows) that gave rise to the French New Wave tsunami, making Jean-Paul Belmondo a star and morphing the face of an affectless American blonde gamine--Jean Seberg--into that of a heartless noir femme fatale. Belmondo imagines himself a Bogart or a Cagney, but is really a two-bit Parisian hood who falls hard for the little girl in a T-shirt peddling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées. The debut feature by former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard, Breathless moves, sounds, and looks like a love story--with cinema. Commissioned for the film’s 50th anniversary in 2010, this 35mm restoration, with freshly revised subtitles by Lenny Borger, was the first in Breathless history.
Founded in 1997 by legendary exhibitor and programmer Bruce Goldstein (joined one year later by partner Adrienne Halpern), Rialto Pictures quickly established itself as a new gold standard in the distribution of classic world cinema—from reissues of landmark works like The Third Man and Grand Illusion to the rediscovery of little-known masterpieces never before released in the U.S., including Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso, Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. On the occasion of Rialto’s 15th anniversary, we are pleased to present an exclusive weekday matinee series of 15 treasures from their remarkable library. Series programmed by Scott Foundas, Eric Di Bernardo and Adrienne Halpern.
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