Breathless First Draft

Complete first draft for Acropolis Cinema.

James Benning is no stranger to remakes, whether of his own films or the work of others. In an interview with Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk for Film Comment, he pointed to his interest in painting, seeking to replicate the work of outsider artists that he admired in order to understand their artistic principles and predilections, which grew into his own practice of copying and tweaking. The film that occasioned this interview, The United States of America (2022), is perhaps Benning's most acclaimed of the decade so far, acting as a quasi-remake of his 1975 short co-directed with Bette Gordon while inverting and expanding its relatively straightforward travelogue scenario. Other remakes include various short works in his mammoth 52 Films (2015) project, the found footage homage to John Cassavetes with Faces (2011), and Easy Rider (2012), which captured each filming location used in Dennis Hopper's counterculture classic in the present day. These predecessors help explain Breathless (2024), but only to a certain extent. Once more, a 1960s era-defining classic is invoked, but the stakes and scale feel different. With all due respect to those New Hollywood landmarks, few films have as strong a claim for establishing cinema's Anno Domini as Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature, which not only blazed a trail for its American counterparts but also had a palpable effect on virtually every major filmmaking movement that followed in its wake. Hugely influential in both cinema and the wider popular culture, it is a film whose look, ethos, and attitude are instantly recognizable, a cool incantation that Godard himself rarely tried to directly evoke again. Three score and four years later, Benning's Breathless arrives as something of a challenge, even a provocation in its stubborn refusal to yield anything close to the—atypically for Godard, let alone Benning—relatively coherent narrative and taut genre thrills of its so-called predecessor. The production parameters of the film, at least, have been made clear by its director: Benning went to the Upper Kern River on November 28, 2023 to film a tree with orange leaves, only to end up capturing unplanned events by chance. That these events were the result of forest fires adds to the woozy, nondescript yet oddly eerie feeling of the film's single shot. Benning's own quote appears to sum up at least his intention, if not the overall effect of his film: "My film was to be a non-narrative the length of Godard's Breathless, but I ended up with something else. It's breathless." Strangely, he seems to echo a quote Godard made about his own Breathless, three years after he recast cinema in his own image: "Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like Breathless, but now I can see where it belongs: along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface." Both Breathless films, in a certain sense, find their directors on opposite ends of legendary oeuvres, operating according to certain strictures—the B-film noir for Godard, the landscape film style that Benning himself helped pioneer—that proved, if not impossible, then challenged and shaped by what transpired in front of them. What does happen in Benning's Breathless? For one, it's easy to see why he gave up any semblance of non-narrative immediately: after a title card, the film begins as abruptly in media res as Godard's, with the tree trimmers already hard at work on the foliage that had caught Benning's attention in the first place. Their efforts will dominate most viewers' attentions during the film's first quarter, for good reason: even though they are only seen at a distance, speaking a few Spanish phrases, their constant movements and especially the bobbing of the truck crane stand out vividly against a largely unchanging landscape. Fortunately, though, after they (mostly) vacate the premises, there's still plenty left to observe, even on a sunny day with little wind: the endless crags on the mountainous backdrop, the slowly moving shadows, the tangled webs of branches strewn across the frame. Occasionally, screeching airplanes can be heard but not seen, an invasion on the quietude that Benning describes as an attack "from the air. War games." which isn't so far from the largely offscreen manhunt that eventually brings down Michel Poiccard. Most tantalizing of all is the road—arching off in a trajectory pleasingly askew from the traditional notion of the vanishing point—which unavoidably recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo's pell-mell ride through the French countryside, lasting about six minutes before he stays in the city for good. The road is central to Benning's practice, his many years of driving around the United States frequently providing him the knowledge of where best to film his canvases. This, in turn, invokes some of the other odd commonalities between these two filmmakers' working methods: frequent use of asynchronous sound, a belief in the destabilizing decisiveness of the cut (even though it's decidedly not used here), an abiding interest in the effects of popular culture. Both the beginning and the ending of Benning's Breathless invoke Godard plainly and directly, yet with no small amount of mystery. First is the title, which almost acts as Benning's version of the 1960 film's dedication to Monograph Pictures, which Jonathan Rosenbaum described as a "critical statement of aims and boundaries." Those boundaries, as mentioned before, are upended by what follows in both films, but the sentiment, and more importantly the sensation—not for nothing is Breathless among the most sensorially evocative titles in the canon—lingers long after the simple title card. Then, in the closing seconds, there is an intervention, a direct lifting of audio which not only heralds the end of what may seem to some as an infinitely long experience, but also calls to mind that which had been largely absent: a close-up on a beautifully unreadable face, a few phrases which still lack an agreed-upon translation, a rush of shivery emotion, a half-century of filmmaking that still must be grappled with, even and especially in such cryptic and subtly generative works as these.