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?