Word: breathlessly
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...presence of only two genuinely operatic voices: the Don of Sean Barker and the Donna Anna of Donna Roll. Barker displayed all the necessary magnetism and menace, but without the grand air of defiance appropriate to his eventual damnation. His Champagne Aria was most exuberant, if a bit breathless; and the Serenade was one of the few instances all night of fine sotto voce singing. Roll's soprano, while raw and occasionally off-pitch, was clearly the biggest voice of all, and was used to best advantage in her massive revenge aria of the first act. Eleanor Edward's Donna...
Band of Outsiders, another backward-looking venture into crime, is a prank by France's prolific Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), a wayward but talented wonder who fills the gap between his more inspired movies by sketching out such trifles as Outsiders. Heroine Anna Karina plays a wistful student who meets two ne'er-do-wells and helps them plan the robbery of her aunt's chateau. They bungle the job, but meanwhile abandon themselves to a couple of amusing Godardian escapades-taking over a cafe with an impudent little dance of alienation, romping through the Louvre...
...films set the style for the New Wave: Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows and Godard's Breathless, both shot in 1959. Both were the first feature films of established film critics, and both provided their directors with the opportunity of realizing ideas about film which for years had been confined to expression on paper...
...Breathless also featured an alienated hero treated without sentimentality. But unlike Truffaut, Godard created an entire revolution in technique. Godard and his superb cameraman, Raoul Coutard, used a hand-held camera for the entire film, giving the director an unheard-of flexibility. Instead of planning the shooting meticulously as convention dictated, Godard created the film through the viewfinder and often used candid shots. Most of all, through both the camera-work and the editing, Godard insisted upon a constant impression of energy which was to infuse the enthusiasms of an entire generation of film-makers...
Godard made Breathless on a budget of only $100,000, but soon producers were willing to gamble much larger sums on nascent directors. By 1961, Georges de Beauregard, who had produced Breathless, endowed Godard with a cinemascope camera and with color film for A Woman is a Woman. Godard, contemptuous as ever of artifice, created a film with no meaning, a huge in-joke designed for dedicated cinema buffs. The director constantly used his worst shots to insure that slickness would not prevail over the natural effect he sought. The result at once delighted his friend Truffaut and antagonized Stanley...