Breathless 5th Week Blues

  At the university that I'm at, there is a specific time in the term when the euphoria of the new term and start begins to fade away, the workload keeps piling up and  life seems like a never ending cycle of lectures, seminars, tutorials,
essays and reading. The end of term, 8th Week, seems so far away and making it to the end seems like an impossibility. This is know as '5th Week Blues'. 6th Week begins tomorrow (today) and I'm happy to say that I survived the dreaded blues!

  I'll admit that 5th Week was a tough week, probably my hardest week here so far because I got given more contact hours as we moved on to other parts of my French course- French Thought and Unseen Translation. As a result of this, I had a lot of reading to do (reading Philosophy books is even more difficult when you have to do it in French!), more translation work, two presentations to prepare and many essay questions. Ouch. 5th Week also happened to be the week of the performance of the play that my college has been working on for an inter-collegiate drama college and I was on the marketing team for it, so even more stress there! Out of over fourty plays, my college made the top ten, got nominated for five awards (Best Marketing being one!) and we won two- Best Supporting Actor and Best Technician, woooo! Thank goodness 5th Week stress is finally over though.

  In my film studies lectures during 5th Week, we started looking at some French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) films, Jean-Luc Godard's 'A bout de souffle' (Breathless) in particular. The film was released in 1960 and it was a ground-breaking work of art due to the fact that Godard introduced new film techniques such as using actual locations that are filmed with hand held cameras instead of studios (the film has many beautiful shots of Paris), realistic, natural dialogue between characters that often seems improvised and unscripted and what is known as 'jump cuts', which is when a scene suddenly cuts to a new scene, in a manner that seems rough and dizzying.

  Now, you're probably bored with me going on about film terminology but I am pleased to say that I am now familiar with most of the mumbo jumbo as a part of my course involves writing critical film essays where I analyse shots and the soundtrack etc. This week, I'll be doing a ten minute presentation on A bout de souffle so I thought I'd practice here by talking a bit about the film.

  The film tells the story of a petty criminal called Michel who kills a motorcycle policeman at the start of the film. On the run, he then spends the rest of the film trying to find money to flee the country and he also tries to convince his seemingly indifferent American girlfriend, Patricia, to accompany him. The film is very odd because nothing really seems to happen in it. The two protagonists spend most of the film talking at each other but not to each other and this lack of communication is one of the main themes of the film. My lecturer said that French New Wave films often seem pretentious at times and I laughed as that is exactly the case with this film. This is because the film's dialogue often consists of discussions on existentialism, questioning if we have a soul, what it means to love, be sad and feel grief and nothingness at the same time.

Deep

  Nevertheless, the film is still a nice introduction to La Nouvelle Vague and if you're interested in seeing more films in this genre, I'd recommend the works of directors such as Claude Chabrol and Robert Bresson. To conclude, even though it does sometimes verge on the pretentious, A bout de souffle is still a masterpiece from Godard and I hope that I can convey this during my presentation tomorrow on the film's love story. Aurevoir for now.

Rating 7/10