J. Hoberman highlights one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most distinctive innovations – treating the trailers for his films as works of art themselves. Hoberman argues that Godard “would seem to be the only major filmmaker who regularly assumed responsibility for cutting (and occasionally shooting) his advertisements for himself—developing a form that was aesthetically more advanced than the features they publicized”:
Predicated on a rhythm as relentless as that of Tony Conrad’s Flicker, Godard’s Breathless trailer is a barrage of three-second shots with voice-over captions: “the pretty girl,” “the bad boy,” “the revolver,” “the police.” That the voice is female is characteristic of Godard’s trailers (and one of many things that distinguish his from Hollywood’s). The montage of attractions is intermittently interrupted by a title card and the voice of Godard bestowing credit on friends François Truffaut (for the screenplay) and Claude Chabrol (as technical adviser), as well as identifying himself and the movie’s stars.
Even more than Breathless, its trailer is a kind of manifesto. Narrative parameters established, its subsequent attractions include both the specific (“Humphrey Bogart,” “Picasso,” Jean Seberg’s “nice buns”) and the abstract (“tenderness,” “adventure,” “love,” the last accompanied by the image of a book of photographed nudes), and it ends with the filmmaker’s ringing declaration that Breathless is the “best film out now!”
The Dish 