Blu-ray, DVD Release: Breathless (1960)

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 25, 2014
Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95
Studio: Criterion

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg are Breathless

As the Criterion press release puts it, “There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless.”

Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend) burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy crime drama, an homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.

With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (Leon Morin, Priest) as a gangster and Jean Seberg (Bonjour tristesse) as his American lady friend, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo release of the classic movie includes the following features:

• Restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director of photography Raoul Coutard, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Archival interviews with director Jean-Luc Godard and actors Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and Jean-Pierre Melville
• Contemporary interviews with Coutard, assistant director Pierre Rissient, and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker
• Two video essays, one on Seberg and one on Breathless as film criticism
• Chambre 12, Hôtel de suède, an eighty-minute 1993 documentary about the making of Breathless
• Charlotte et son Jules, a 1959 short by Godard starring Belmondo
• Trailer
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Dudley Andrew, writings by Godard, François Truffaut’s original treatment, and Godard’s scenario

Buy or Rent Breathless(1960)
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