I did this experiment first time in December, 2022. Those were the early days of ChatGPT. Now it’s September, 2025. I had the same conversation with ChatGPT 5 (Auto mode) today. It has many new features compared to 2022. It can search the web and the large language modals improved significantly. I called our initial conversation ‘mediocre’. I cannot say that anymore. I’m sorry for the energy consumption that my conversation caused. It’s a guilty pleasure.
The current ChatGPT did not tell me that it’s an LLM and cannot answer personal questions. It answered them all as if it’s a real person. At the end of each message, it adds some questions to keep the conversation going. This is the good-old attention economy trick in my opinion. I sometimes enjoy it. But here, instead of falling to its traps, I kept all my questions same as I asked three years ago.
The degree of ‘going along’ of ChatGPT amazes me. Whatever you say, it will find a way to say that ‘you are right’. The term echo chamber was being used in the earlier times of Twitter but this is another level of an echo chamber. Talking to these chatbots feels like you’re alone and continuously agreeing with yourself.
First experiment: https://yalpertem.com/blog/2022/12/14/breathless-with-chatgpt/
I copy/paste the conversation I had with it today below. Enjoy.
me: Write an essay about À bout de souffle. Include an introduction, a summary of the plot and themes of the film, an analysis of the film’s techniques and elements, and a conclusion that ties everything together.
chatgpt: Here’s a structured essay draft on À bout de souffle (Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard:
À bout de souffle: Breaking Breath, Breaking Cinema
Introduction
Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), often translated as Breathless, stands as one of the defining films of the French New Wave. At once anarchic, playful, and deeply cinematic, the film redefined what cinema could be—breaking conventions while simultaneously paying homage to them. Through its fractured style, loose narrative, and bold aesthetics, Godard challenged the polished formalism of Hollywood and the French “tradition of quality.” More than a crime story, À bout de souffle is a meditation on youth, freedom, and the contradictions of modern existence.
Plot and Themes
The film follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young criminal in Paris who steals a car and impulsively kills a police officer while on the run. Charismatic and reckless, Michel drifts through the city, hiding out with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student and aspiring journalist. Their relationship oscillates between romance, manipulation, and philosophical banter. Michel dreams of escaping to Italy, urging Patricia to join him, but her loyalties and desires remain uncertain. Ultimately, Patricia betrays him to the police, leading to his capture and death in the streets of Paris.
At its core, the film explores themes of existentialism, alienation, and the instability of identity. Michel performs his life as if imitating Hollywood gangsters—especially Humphrey Bogart—yet beneath the swagger lies fragility and aimlessness. Patricia embodies ambivalence: she is curious and independent, yet torn between attraction to Michel and a desire for autonomy. Together, they illustrate the volatility of youth, caught between fantasy and disillusionment. The film also critiques modern society, exposing the gap between cinematic myths and the realities of urban life.
Analysis of Techniques and Elements
What made À bout de souffle revolutionary was not just its story but how Godard chose to tell it. The film’s most famous innovation is the use of jump cuts, an editing technique that disrupts continuity by abruptly skipping forward in time or space. Originally born of necessity (to shorten a long sequence), the jump cuts came to symbolize the fractured rhythm of modern life, giving the film a nervous, improvisational energy.
Godard also rejected traditional cinematic polish. He used lightweight handheld cameras, natural lighting, and on-location shooting in Paris to create a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. Dialogue often meanders into philosophical musings, blurring the line between scripted drama and casual conversation. This emphasis on everyday speech and real settings reflected the New Wave’s commitment to capturing life as it unfolded.
The film is also rich with intertextuality. References to literature, painting, and especially American cinema abound—Michel’s gestures toward Bogart, Patricia selling The New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, the posters and headlines that fill the mise-en-scène. Godard constructs a world where cinema reflects life and life imitates cinema. The soundtrack, dominated by Martial Solal’s jazz score, further amplifies the film’s improvisatory mood.
The performances of Belmondo and Seberg anchor the film’s style. Belmondo exudes charm while simultaneously undermining it with absurdity and vulnerability. Seberg, with her cropped hair and enigmatic expressions, became an icon of modern femininity, embodying both innocence and betrayal.
Conclusion
À bout de souffle remains a landmark not only because of its story but because of how it reimagined cinematic language. Godard took a familiar genre—the gangster film—and dismantled it into fragments of philosophy, jazz, and jump cuts. The film’s disjointed energy mirrors its characters’ restless search for meaning, while its stylistic rebellion heralded a new freedom for filmmakers worldwide. Ultimately, À bout de souffle is about breath itself: the rhythm of life, fleeting and fractured, yet undeniably alive. In breaking the rules of cinema, Godard breathed new life into it.
Would you like me to make this more academic (with references to film theory and critics like Bazin or Cahiers du Cinéma) or more creative (written almost like a film review/essay hybrid)?
me: What’s your favourite scene?
chatgpt: If I had to pick one, I’d say the long bedroom sequence between Michel and Patricia is my favorite.
It’s a stretch of nearly 20 minutes where almost nothing “happens” in a traditional sense—no chases, no gunfire, no suspense in the usual gangster-movie way. Instead, the two of them lie around talking, teasing, smoking, drifting between playful banter, philosophical musings, and small revelations. The camera doesn’t force a climax; it just lingers, shifting as if it’s eavesdropping on fragments of a real conversation.
What makes it powerful is how it captures the essence of the film: that À bout de souffle isn’t about the crime story at all, but about living in a moment that feels both weightless and fragile. Michel is always posturing, trying on Bogart-like gestures, while Patricia keeps slipping between attraction and detachment. You can almost see her deciding, slowly, that she won’t go with him—and that subtle undercurrent is more devastating than the final chase.
For me, that scene feels like Godard breaking open cinema: showing that characters don’t need to rush the plot forward, that watching two people talk can reveal whole worlds.
Do you want me to expand this into a close scene analysis (camera work, editing, lighting, dialogue) the way a film studies paper would?
me: What novelties did it bring to film editing?
chatgpt: Great question — À bout de souffle changed editing forever. Godard didn’t just tell a gangster story; he rewired the grammar of cinema. A few key novelties stand out:
1. The jump cut as a stylistic choice
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Before À bout de souffle, jump cuts were usually considered mistakes—continuity errors to be hidden. Godard made them central to the film’s style.
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He shot long takes in a car or on the street, then simply chopped out the “boring” parts in the middle, leaving visible gaps in time and motion. This created a staccato, restless rhythm.
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The effect matched Michel’s erratic personality and the film’s improvisatory energy, making editing feel alive rather than invisible.
2. Editing as disruption, not invisibility
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Classical Hollywood continuity editing (the “invisible style”) aimed to make cuts seamless so the viewer wouldn’t notice.
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Godard deliberately broke that illusion. He reminded viewers they were watching a film, shattering immersion to make them think about form and content at once.
3. Collage-like rhythm
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The editing resembles jazz improvisation—abrupt shifts in tone, rhythm, and pacing.
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Instead of building suspense in a linear way, Godard would cut to an unexpected angle, linger on a face, or interrupt with sudden montage-like inserts.
4. Economy and freedom
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Many of the innovations came from necessity: the film had too much footage, and Godard cut freely to shorten it. But that necessity became an aesthetic—showing filmmakers that you didn’t need to follow traditional continuity rules.
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This gave later directors (Scorsese, Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, and countless others) permission to treat editing as expressive, not just functional.
5. A modern sense of time
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By fragmenting sequences, Godard captured something essential about modern life: speed, disjunction, restlessness. Editing was no longer about smoothing time, but about showing its fractures.
In short: À bout de souffle turned editing from an invisible servant into a visible authorial voice.
Would you like me to give you concrete examples from specific scenes (like the car ride, the newspaper stand, or the chase at the end) where the editing style is most radical?
me: What about the performances of the actors?
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Belmondo embodies Michel as a mix of swagger, parody, and vulnerability. He struts through Paris, imitating Humphrey Bogart, rubbing his thumb over his lips, and tossing out wisecracks as if life were a movie.
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What makes his performance striking is how it shifts: beneath the gangster pose, there’s a boyish recklessness and even fragility. His coolness feels like a mask that keeps slipping.
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Belmondo’s casual physicality—slouching against walls, wandering the streets with his collar up—gave the film a natural, improvised feel. Instead of polished, theatrical acting, it felt lived-in and immediate.
Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini)
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Seberg’s performance is quieter, more enigmatic. With her short haircut, New York accent, and youthful detachment, she embodies modern cosmopolitan cool.
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Patricia is elusive: at times flirtatious and playful, at others distant and unreadable. Seberg plays her with a mix of spontaneity and restraint, so the audience never fully grasps her motives.
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Her moments of hesitation—especially when she betrays Michel—feel understated but decisive, giving the film its emotional core.
Their chemistry together
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What makes their performances unforgettable is how natural their conversations feel. The long bedroom sequence, where they drift between philosophy, teasing, and desire, works because both actors deliver lines as if they’re half improvised.
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Belmondo pushes energy outward, always performing; Seberg often pulls inward, making her character unreadable. This contrast keeps the relationship dynamic, unstable, and alive.
Impact
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Both performances contributed to a new style of screen acting: less theatrical, more casual and fragmented, reflecting everyday rhythms.
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Instead of characters being fully “explained,” Belmondo and Seberg gave us people who are contradictory and mysterious—modern figures who live as much through gestures, silences, and moods as through words.
Would you like me to expand this into a comparison with Hollywood acting styles of the 1950s (e.g., Bogart, Method acting) to highlight why Belmondo and Seberg felt so fresh?
me: Was the cinematography of the film also noteworthy?
chatgpt: Yes — the cinematography of À bout de souffle is just as revolutionary as its editing, and it’s a huge reason the film feels so alive and modern even today. Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer, worked closely with Godard to reinvent how a movie could look and move.
1. Handheld, lightweight shooting
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Coutard often used handheld cameras, which gave the film a loose, restless energy. Instead of fixed studio setups, the camera roams the streets, apartments, and cafés with the characters.
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This choice captured Paris with immediacy — not as a polished backdrop but as a living, breathing city. It also aligned with the New Wave ethos: take the camera outside, into real life.
2. Natural light and available locations
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Instead of heavy studio lighting, the film often uses daylight or practical lights (like lamps or shop windows). This made scenes feel raw and spontaneous, closer to documentary than to traditional cinema.
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Shooting on location — along the Champs-Élysées, in cramped apartments, in bustling cafés — gave the film authenticity. Viewers weren’t seeing constructed sets but the real city of 1960.
3. Mobility and improvisation
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Coutard and Godard improvised solutions to technical problems. For example, to film inside a moving car, they used a lightweight Éclair Cameflex camera and sometimes even a wheelchair to create dolly-like movement.
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The result was a dynamic visual style that felt free, unrestrained by equipment or convention.
4. Framing and composition
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Many shots feel casual, almost accidental — characters drift in and out of frame, the camera lingers on faces or gestures without “explaining” them. This broke from classical framing rules where every shot was carefully balanced.
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Yet these “loose” compositions gave the film its charm, echoing Michel’s and Patricia’s own drift through life.
5. Black-and-white realism with poetic touches
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While grounded in realism, the cinematography still has moments of beauty and stylization: reflections in windows, shadows across faces, the play of sunlight on Paris streets.
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This mix of roughness and lyricism became a New Wave signature: cinema that felt both everyday and poetic.
Why it was noteworthy
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At the time, most French films were shot on soundstages with controlled lighting and static cameras. Coutard’s approach looked radical: jittery, raw, immediate.
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It influenced not just French directors but world cinema — from Scorsese’s street-level Mean Streets to Wong Kar-wai’s fluid handheld work.
Would you like me to pick out one or two specific shots/scenes (like the Champs-Élysées sequence with Patricia selling Herald Tribune or Michel’s final street collapse) and analyze how the cinematography makes them so striking?
me: How does this film relate to the earlier Hollywood cinema? Are there references to other films?
1. The gangster/noir tradition
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Michel Poiccard is modeled on the Hollywood gangster/antihero: a man on the run, living fast, doomed to die young.
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His whole persona is performance — he copies Humphrey Bogart, rubbing his thumb along his lips in imitation of In a Lonely Place (1950).
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The plot — car theft, cop killing, the woman who betrays him — recalls dozens of American noirs (They Live by Night, Gun Crazy, The Big Sleep).
2. Explicit references to actors and films
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Bogart is the clearest reference, but there are others: posters and names of American stars appear throughout Paris, as if Hollywood shadows the entire city.
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Michel and Patricia’s conversations are peppered with movie allusions — they talk about Renoir, Faulkner, and film stars as casually as about their own lives. Cinema itself becomes part of their language.
3. Narrative structure borrowed and twisted
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The “on the run with a girl” setup echoes American crime dramas, but Godard refuses to follow the conventions. Instead of suspense and escalating action, he gives us long digressions, philosophical chatter, and abrupt editing.
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Where Hollywood smoothed over continuity, Godard disrupts it. Where Hollywood built tension to a climax, Godard undercuts it with irony or sudden shifts.
4. Intertextual mise-en-scène
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Godard fills frames with American cultural imports: Patricia selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, jazz filling the soundtrack, movie posters on walls. Paris is both itself and a cinematic collage.
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These references don’t just decorate the film — they remind us that Michel and Patricia live in a world already mediated by cinema, newsprint, and pop culture.
5. Homage and critique in one
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Godard admired Hollywood cinema but also wanted to expose its formulas. À bout de souffle deconstructs the gangster film by slowing it down, fragmenting it, and letting characters drift into philosophy instead of plot.
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The result is both a love letter and a rebellion: Godard saying, “I grew up on Hollywood, but now I’ll make cinema my own way.”
So yes — the film is full of references, but they serve a double purpose: to celebrate the vitality of American cinema and to break free from it.
Do you want me to put together a list of specific Hollywood films and genres referenced (like a mini annotated filmography) so you can see the intertextual connections clearly?
me: You seem like you love the film. Didn’t you find it a bit pretentious?
chatgpt: Great point — and a fair criticism. Short answer: yes, À bout de souffle can feel pretentious — sometimes intentionally so — but whether that bothers you depends on what you want from a film.
Here’s a balanced take:
Why it can feel pretentious
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Self-conscious quotation. Michel’s constant Bogart affectations, the film’s name-dropping of writers and directors, and its visible cinematic references can come off as posturing — like the characters (and Godard) are performing an identity rather than being “real.”
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Intellectual playfulness as showmanship. The long, talky bedroom sequence and many philosophical asides sometimes read as cleverness for its own sake — enjoyable if you like the game, irritating if you want emotional depth over verbal wit.
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Form over feeling. Godard’s insistence on showing the filmmaking process (jump cuts, ruptured continuity, deliberate ruptures of illusion) can alienate viewers who prefer to be absorbed in story rather than reminded they’re watching a constructed object.
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Affective distance. Patricia’s coolness and Michel’s stylized bravado keep us at a remove; some see this as cool modernity, others as calculated aloofness.
Why that pretension can also work for the film
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It’s part of the point. Godard is interrogating cinema, myth, and identity — so the showing-off is often a method, not merely decoration. Pretension becomes critique: the film exposes how people live through imported images and roles.
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Inventive energy. The same self-consciousness fuels innovation. Jump cuts, handheld camerawork, intertextuality — these “showy” choices reshaped film language.
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Emotional truth in fragments. Even if the characters feel performative, their contradictions produce an emotional realism of its own: people who hide behind postures, who articulate themselves in borrowed lines. That’s a portrait of modern alienation, not merely a game.
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Influence and freshness. What might read as mannerism in one viewing can feel revolutionary in the context of 1960 cinema — and still feels alive today.
My stance (brief): I love the film’s risk-taking and formal bravado, but I don’t dismiss the charge of pretension. It’s precisely that mix—showy, challenging, and occasionally self-indulgent—that makes À bout de souffle a film people argue about decades later.
Want a quick list of moments that some viewers call “pretentious” (so you can judge them yourself) — e.g., the Bogart imitations, the long monologues, the jumps to title cards — and why Godard might have put them there?
me: Are there any critics who found the film pretentious?
chatgpt: Yes — although À bout de souffle has been widely praised, there are critics who have found it pretentious. It’s not always the dominant view, but it shows up in the reception over the years. Here are a few critics/statements, plus what they objected to:
Criticisms / Critics Who Called It Pretentious
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John Simon
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In an essay “Godard and the Godardians: A Study in the New Sensibility,” John Simon critiques Breathless as one of the films evidencing what he sees as a problematic “new sensibility.” He objects to techniques he perceives as “pretentious, disjointed,” especially the way Godard juxtaposes unlikely elements in the film — for example, the scene where Michel and Patricia go to see a Western, and voices recite the poem “Cors de chasse” (by Apollinaire) over or around that genre film within the film. Simon asks: what purpose does this poetic overlay serve except to show off? eNotes
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“The Potency of Breathless” (The American Scholar)
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This essay describes Breathless as “more pretentious in its low-key way than any film-noir production it could parody.” The criticism here is that the film downplays its artifice but still shakes together many high-brow references, attitude, and disruptive style — and this mixture can feel like pretension masquerading as cool irreverence. The American Scholar
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What They Usually Object To
From those criticisms, some recurring complaints:
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Self-conscious references: Poetic lines, literary or artistic allusions do not always feel organically integrated; critics feel they’re there more to signal the filmmaker’s artiness than to deepen character or theme. (Simon’s example of the poem during a Western movie-scene is one.)
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Style over substance: The judgment is that Godard sometimes privileges aesthetic and formal innovation at the expense of narrative clarity or emotional depth; it’s seen as clever, but maybe less grounded.
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Fragmentation / disjointedness: The non-linear flow, jump cuts, the looseness of plot and character motivation are sometimes deemed to create alienation or distance rather than insight.
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Cool detachment: Michel’s posture, Patricia’s ambiguity, the ironic tone — some critics feel this creates an affect of aloofness, of showing-off, rather than connection.
Counterpoint
Of course, many critics defend that very looseness, self-consciousness, and formal disruption as the point — that pretension (if you want to call it that) becomes part of the message. The idea that identity is performative, that cinema is a collage of images, that modern living is disjointed. What some see as pretentious, others see as expressive, even essential.
So yes — while many love Breathless, there has always been a strand of criticism that sees it as pretentious. If you like, I could pull up a few original reviews from 1960-61 to show how the response at the time included that criticism, so we can see how people reacted when it was new.
me: What were the films that À bout de souffle had an influence on?
chatgpt: The influence of À bout de souffle is enormous — it didn’t just inspire a handful of films, it changed the way filmmakers everywhere thought about cinema. It opened the door for more personal, fragmented, low-budget, and self-aware filmmaking. Here are some notable films and movements that show its impact:
Direct influence on filmmakers of the 1960s–70s
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Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
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Often called the American cousin of Breathless. It combines violent outlaw lovers with a French New Wave–inspired jump-cut rhythm and ironic tone.
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Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973)
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Scorsese credited the New Wave (especially Godard) for freeing him to use handheld cameras, raw urban settings, and improvised dialogue.
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Robert Altman’s films (e.g., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971)
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Altman absorbed Godard’s looseness: overlapping dialogue, digressive scenes, and anti-genre play.
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Hollywood New Hollywood movement
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The whole New Hollywood generation (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Schrader) learned from Godard and Breathless. They saw that you could take genre (gangsters, cops, lovers) and explode it with new styles.
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De Palma especially, with films like Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), uses direct address, fragmentation, and satire straight out of Godard.
European directors
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Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 1975) and Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities, 1974) were shaped by the freedom the New Wave brought — handheld realism, digression, and the mixing of American pop culture with European settings.
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Bernardo Bertolucci cited Godard as crucial in his development (Before the Revolution, 1964).
Later directors
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Quentin Tarantino (he even named his company A Band Apart after Godard’s Bande à part). His films (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) take Godard’s jump cuts, pop-culture dialogue, and genre playfulness and push them into the 1990s.
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Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984) and Hal Hartley absorbed the minimalist, cool detachment and dry humor.
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Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express, 1994) owes a lot to Godard: urban settings, handheld energy, fragmented time, and lovers caught in drifting, unresolved relationships.
Formal innovations that spread
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Jump cuts → used everywhere since, from commercials and music videos to mainstream cinema.
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Naturalistic street shooting → became standard for low-budget indie films.
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Digressive, talk-heavy scenes → inspired everything from Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) to mumblecore.
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Characters living through film references → Michel imitating Bogart is echoed in Tarantino’s cinephile characters, or Jarmusch’s cool antiheroes.
In short: Without À bout de souffle, it’s hard to imagine Bonnie and Clyde, Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, Chungking Express, or much of American independent film. Its DNA is everywhere in world cinema.
Do you want me to build a timeline (1960s → 1990s → 2000s) that maps out which major films visibly carried its influence at each stage?
me: What are the earlier influences of the jump cuts in the film? Were they Godard’s inventions?
chatgpt: Excellent question — the jump cut is the single most famous thing about À bout de souffle, but Godard didn’t invent it out of thin air. His use was radical, but there were earlier influences and precedents.
Earlier uses of the jump cut
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Silent cinema experiments
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Georges Méliès, as early as The Vanishing Lady (1896), used jump cuts accidentally (as trick effects). When the camera stopped and restarted, things would “magically” appear or disappear.
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This was about illusion, not narrative rhythm, but it shows the cut’s disruptive power was known from the beginning.
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Soviet Montage (1920s)
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Directors like Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) used abrupt cuts to create meaning through juxtaposition.
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Vertov in particular embraced discontinuity: his film is full of visible jumps, rhythmic disjunctions, and playful editing experiments.
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Avant-garde & surrealist cinema
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Films like Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) fractured continuity for shock and poetry.
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These weren’t quite “jump cuts” in the Godard sense, but they did break the smooth flow of narrative editing.
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Documentary/newsreel practice
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By the 1950s, newsreels and cinéma vérité often had rough splices where film was shortened for efficiency. They weren’t meant to be stylish, but the jagged cuts existed in everyday media.
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Godard, who had worked as a critic and loved documentary practice, absorbed this.
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Godard’s twist in À bout de souffle
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Godard applied the jump cut not as trick (Méliès), not as propaganda montage (Eisenstein), and not as surrealist rupture (Buñuel), but as a way to condense time inside a continuous scene.
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For example, in the car sequence with Michel, instead of showing a smooth ride, Godard simply chopped out “boring” sections while keeping the same camera setup. The result: Michel appears to jolt forward in space.
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This gave the film a nervous, fractured rhythm — perfectly matching the restless spirit of Michel and the New Wave ethos.
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Importantly: the jump cut became a stylistic signature, not an accident or a one-off effect.
So: was it his invention?
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No, Godard didn’t invent the jump cut.
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But he redefined it: he turned it from a mistake or marginal experiment into a central aesthetic principle of a feature film. After Breathless, jump cuts weren’t just tolerated; they became cool, modern, and expressive.
Would you like me to give you a scene-by-scene breakdown of where the jump cuts appear in À bout de souffle and how they affect the mood? That way, you can see how Godard deploys them differently from his predecessors.