À bout de souffle (Breathless in the english version) is a 1960 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc-Godard about a petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). It was Godard’s first feature-length work and represented Belmondo’s breakthrough as an actor. The film was one of the earliest, most influential examples of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague). Together with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 blows and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international acclaim to this new style of French filmmaking. At the time, the film attracted much attention for its bold visual style and the innovative use of jump cuts.
