I was very sad to read of the passing of Jean-Luc Godard. Reading the unhappy news made me flash back on the first time I saw Breathless.
It was a moment that changed my life. I had never seen a film that was anything like this before.
I realized that I was seeing something different, something that wasn’t like what had come before. After that experience, I started to see films differently.
And I realize that I have had that experience in other media as well. The first time I ever heard Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, I knew that the very idea of a song had been redefined for me.
It’s not so much that these radical acts in their respective media were right and more traditional approaches were wrong. It was more that they opened up new doors of possibility.
They got people asking questions about what a movie or a song could be, in ways that people had simply not been thinking about before. And isn’t that one of the best and purest functions of art?