Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Bachelor of Communications Honours

School

School of Communications and Arts

Faculty

Faculty of Education and Arts

First Supervisor

Tania Visosevic

Abstract

Auteur, Jean-Luc Godard directed his first feature film Breathless (A bout de soufflé) in 1959 after a decade of working as a film critic for the contentious journal, Cahiers du Cinema. Central to my thesis is the assertion that Breathless is contentious in critical dimension to Godard’s literary criticism. It takes a certain breed of individual with a genuine passion for the state of the French film industry to sustain a politically charged critique of cinema from literary film criticism to filmmaking. The breed of individual is known as a cinephile – an avid moviegoer who may also engage in critical activities in cine-club cultures. A very early, influential example of this cine-culture is Les Cahiers du Cinema, of which Godard was a member and critic of. The scholarship on cinephilia circumscribes literary film criticism as the central outlet of cinephilic expression. Godard’s Breathless can also be categorised as film criticism and therefore, an example of cinpehilia. I argue that Breathless, through it’s very deliberate intertextual construction, aims to interrogate and critique the classical Hollywood production, presenting a continuity of expression from literary criticism to filmmaking. By applying the framework of metatextual analysis to Breathless, I will contend that Breathless as an expression of film criticism, is therefore, an expression of cinephilia.

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