Breathless may not have been the movie to "officially" kick off the French New Wave, but after its release there was little doubt it would be the standard bearer for the movement. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard based off a treatment by Francois Truffaut, Breathless leaps off the screen and tears into its story with a youthful exuberance that embraces its roots in American genre films while gleefully tearing apart the staid tenets of how those films are structured.
I suspect many of us knew Metropolis before we ever had a chance to actually see it. My first exposure to it as a complete (or as close as it was considered to be then) film came in the early 90s with the color tinted Giorgio Moroder version, edited (severely) and scored by the electronic music pioneer. But the images - those stark, expressionistic cityscapes rising to the heavens, the iconic "Other" Maria... those images echo and reverberate within my movie memory far longer than I have any right to claim to them.
The movie opens. A man stands in the foreground, his back to the camera. We don't know him yet, but the camera tells us everything. The mountains in the background are positively diminutive, telling us this man is larger than life, and over the course of the next two hours he's going to prove that perception correct...
Cinema Dual 