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Death of a Hero, Birth of a Cinema or Who or What is A bout de souffleV Trista Selous T HE DEATH OF MICHEL POICCARD, anti-hero of Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle, in the film’s closing minutes hardly comes as a surprise. Firstly, Michel has shot and killed a policeman in cold blood in order to save himself from legitimate arrest, a deed which the conventions of crime fiction, being rather more rigorously enforced than extra-fictional laws, seldom leave unpunished. Further­ more, it is clear from the opening section, when he steals an American serviceman’s car and roars down the road from Marseille to Paris in search of his money and his girl, that Michel is one of those fictional characters out to live life to the full, regardless of the consequences, a variation on the romantic outlaw for whom any fate but death would be too sad. Michel himself constantly reinforces this image: he asks Patricia if she ever thinks about death and, when she does not answer, continues, “Moi j ’y pense sans arrêt” ; losing his footing in the hotel room reminds him of a joke about a condemned man mounting the scaffold who slips on the steps and says “ décidément...” ; when Patricia asks him, rather lightly, to choose between grief and nothing he opts for nothing, saying “ le chagrin, c’est idiot. Je choisis le néant. C’est pas mieux, mais le chagrin est un compromis. Il faut tout ou rien” ; lastly, shortly before he is shot he speaks directly to camera, saying, “ je suis fatigué, je veux dormir.” As if all this were not enough, there are the many other references to fast life and/or early death scattered throughout the film: Michel sees a man run over and killed; a cinema poster advocates: “ Vivre dangeureusement jusqu’au bout! ” while another reminds the reckless that the harder they come “ puis dure sera la chute” ; the author Parvulesco, whose press conference Patricia attends, gives an ironic echo to Michel’s attitude when he states that his own ambition is “ devenir immortel . . . et puis mourir” ; lastly, the breathlessness of “ à bout de souffle” has an air of finality lacking in its English translation, a finality reinforced, as MarieClaire Ropars-Wuilleumier notes,2 by its echo in the French version of the film-title “ Ten Seconds to Hell” quoted above—“jusqu’au bout.” 18 W in t e r 1995 Selous Michel is clearly courting death and die he duly does, with an almost over-determined inevitability. In retrospect, however, the fulfillment of so well sign-posted a destiny is itself surprising in a film which in other ways seeks consistently to undermine audience expectations. Why should Godard allow the rules of narrative and psychology that A bout de souffle so blatantly signals to remain unbroken, particularly when Truffaut’s original screenplay let the hero break his fictional fetters and get away with it all? Reading the film in the light of its relationship to film noir, Steve Smith explains Godard’s decision to change Truffaut’s ending as a reflection of his “ un­ willingness to transgress” 3the noir genre’s rule that the hero die, usually as a result of a woman’s actions, and this is a view to which Godard him­ self lends weight when he says, 20 years later, “je me souviens que je croyais quand je faisais A bout de souffle faire un film de ce genre-là” (i.e., film noir).* However, unwillingness to transgress a rule seems an odd motive to impute to the Godard of A bout de souffle, as the film­ maker suggests later in the discussion cited above, when he says, “ c’est un film qui n’avait pas de règles et dont la seule règle était: les règles sont fausses ou mal appliquées” (ibid., 33). I want therefore to argue here that Michel’s death is the culmination of a different logic from that of film noir, one which underlies the film and of which the director may or may not have been conscious when it was made. In accord with the main thrust...

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