Fifty-five years ago this spring, in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless changed cinema forever. Breathless wasn’t the first film of the French New Wave, but it was the first popular hit that brought the energy of the new filmmaking to a global audience, impacting American cinema and paving the way for our own New American Cinema of the mid-1960′s through the 1970′s.

Here’s a great BBC doc that provides a thorough 101 on some of the most exhilarating, and visually energized films ever made. It also goes on to document key films of the New American Cinema like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and Taxi Driver that nod back to Godard, Truffaut and the New Wave films that inspired them…

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Today we remember American actress Jean Seberg who was born on this day in 1938. Seberg isn’t a household name, but her iconic turn as an unlikely femme fatale in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless made her a screen immortal even if her activism and the FBI harassment it attracted proved she was all-too-human.

Here’s Roger Ebert‘s take on this fascinating, impressionistic documentary about the actress, From the Journals of Jean Seberg…

If it is true, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, that “cinema history is the history of boys photographing girls,” then one task of movie historians should be to find out what happened to the girls in the process. Mark Rappaport, who uses the Godard quote in his new film “From the Journals of Jean Seberg,” takes it to heart in a unique way. He presents Seberg as the narrator of her own life.

Some of it may be based on things she said or thought. Most of it, incon women in the movies, politics, and her fellow actresses, is invention. Rappaport’s mixture of fact and fiction is more audacious than Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” – but the movie makes it perfectly clear that it is using both history and imagination, and the result is a tough, intelligent look at the grueling job of being one of those girls photographed by the boys.

Here’s the film…

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Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.