“I thought I had made a realistic film like Richard Quine's Pushover, but it wasn't that at all.... I do like Breathless very much, but now I see where it belongs - along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface.” -Jean-Luc Godard, 1962 (in Milne, “Godard on Godard”).

In any case, Breathless belongs with those films which have changed the course of the cinema. The innovations that so shocked viewers in 1959 - hand-held shooting, improvised acting, jagged, “jump”-cutting - have become so incorporated into the basic grammar of contemporary filmmaking that, seeing Breathless today, one hardly notices them. What one notices more is the stunning depth Godard reached in the compositions and characters he created out of intentionally superficial images.