À bout de souffle

Godard’s first feature-length film attracted international attention thanks to the uninhibited acting of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. À bout de souffle, based on François Truffaut’s idea, was the manifesto of the nouvelle vague. The handheld camera follows Patricia (Seberg) a salesperson for the New York Herald Tribune who casually engages with the advances of fugitive car thief Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Poiccard falls in love, Patricia betrays him to the police and he dies breathlessly in the streets of Paris.

"À bout de souffle was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about. Anything people did could be integrated in the film. As a matter of fact, this was my starting-point. I said to myself: we have already had Bresson, we have just had Hiroshima mon amour, a certain kind of cinema has just drawn to a close, maybe ended, so let’s add the finishing touch, let’s show that anything goes."

4K restoration

À bout de souffle has been restored in 4K by STUDIOCANAL with the help of the CNC, and supervised by the laboratory L'Image Retrouvée. The teams restored À bout de souffle from the original film negatives, which were originally shot on two types of film: Gevaert Belgium and Ilford Pancromatic. Due respect was given to these two different textures of film during the restoration process, resulting in a fully realized 4K restoration, with full appreciation of the original artistic intentions of the director.