I was feeling somewhat bold last night and decided that I would watch Breathless. It’s been about 10 years since I first saw it and my memory of it, what little I did remember, was a positive one. This was the first Jean Luc Godard film that I ever saw and in the 10 years between then and now I’ve watched quite a few of his movies, most of which I did not like. With Breathless I made it about 10 minutes in before that old familiar feeling came back to me, the feeling of boredom, of nausea, of wanting to gouge my own eyes out. I’m just going to come out and say that I’ve evolved to the point where I simply do not like Godard’s films. I do not find them interesting, unique, fun, clever, revolutionary, intelligent — not cute, not hip, not funny — nothing at all. I attribute my initial reaction to Breathless to my being young and dumb maybe. The older I get, the more films I see and study, the more I learn, and, hopefully, the smarter I get the less I respond to his films. It is mind-boggling to me how he has remained the prominent figure he has for the last 50+ years, held in higher regard than his peers like Truffaut, Malle, and Melville. Apparently a lot of great filmmakers where influenced by him and he sort of opened their minds to the possibilities of what you can do on film. Okay, fine. Now lets get over it. All those filmmakers who cite Godard as an influence, such as Scorsese and DePalma, fortunately for the world, didn’t regress into creating Godardian-style cinema and instead went on to make great films, much better and more interesting films than Godard ever made. What is there really to say about a Godard movie or a Godard moment? There’s a scene early in Breathless where Belmondo, wearing a fedora tilted down to cover his eyes, brushes his thumb across his lips and we’re all supposed to go “Ooooahhhh, he’s doing Bogart. Bravo Godard. We get the reference.” This is basically the highlight of a Godard film. It’s rubbish, it’s drivel, it’s empty-headed, film-geek nonsense. I’ll end this rant with a few quotes by a couple really great filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog, and their thoughts on Godard’s films, which I couldn’t agree with more:

Bergman: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin féminin (1966), was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”

Herzog: “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good Kung Fu film.”