(A Bout de Souffle) The outlaw artifact of the nouvelle vague. In Breathless, Godard captured the spirit of a disillusioned generation and fashioned a style-a melange of past movies, books, jump-cuts, film noir posters and postcards-to parade that disillusionment. The theme of the film, like the essence of its driven hero, is precisely the futile struggle to be original "in the manner of something or someone else." The notion of individuality and of forthrightness is as American as the movies, and as fully processed. As Dudley Andrew has remarked, "Here we reach the necessary commonplace concerning Godard's postmodernism. Utterly opposed to the organicism and moralism of the cinema of quality, Godard would deliberately emphasize the heterogeneity of culture, of its texts and artifacts, and of its social organization. If literature is to appear in his films, it is as a thing apart...It sticks out of Godard's films, the way pieces of newspaper stick out of cubist collages." Russell Merritt