Continuing my Godard thread, I came across a very amusing and irreverent reading of Godard’s Breathless by a certain Dan Schneider who first excuses himself (and I concur) by saying that “the historic importance of such a film is indisputable”

[Breathless] would still be a bad film because it is so self-conscious, so poorly written, and so poorly acted that while watching it I thought I was actually watching a Roger Corman cheapo horror flick.

Now, let me add that there is more ‘art’ in your typical Corman piece from that era, say, The Last Woman on Earth, than in Breathless because Corman’s commentary on the state of filmmaking and art was more subtle (and often unintentional). Godard, by contrast, is so garishly dying to show his audience how hip and intellectual he is that he somehow failed to put any of that hipness or intellect — or any substance, for that matter– into his film.

Godard attempts to capture ‘reality’ on film without realizing that anything filmed becomes unreal — or irreal. In fact, any form of art can never be real. To convey reality most aptly, art needs to be most affected. By shooting his film with a handheld camera while Parisians gawk at the filming-in-process, Godard ends up making the most artificial of films while trying to show the most boring aspects of life. He thus focuses on the two worst aspects of film — the artificiality of cinéma vérité and the reality of tedium — rather than the two best ones: the ‘reality’ of film as artifice and the ‘artifice’ of poetically chosen reality.