Jean-Luc Godard (dark glasses, immediately above) in 1959 directing Breathless, his first film and the earliest commercial feature made with a hand-held camera. Truffault wrote the screenplay.
Aleda Shirley's poem posted here a couple of days ago got me thinking about French post-war films and what they have meant to my generation of Americans.
Millions of words have been written about Breathless. This afternoon I even stumbled across an elaborate analysis of the horizontal versus vertical stripes in the clothing of Seberg and Belmondo above. After fifty years people still loathe the film, people still adore the film. Its vitality is assured.
It seemed wonderful but dated in the early 1970s when I first saw it as a college student. Today it seems wonderful and not dated.