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I only watched his two early shorts, Charlotte and Veronique, or: All the Boys Are Named Patrick and Charlotte and Her Jules for the first time with this go, and they're cute little things. You can see where he's going in them, but they're of a lighter comedy than anything else he'd do, except maybe A Woman Is a Woman. They feel more like the silent movie sequence that Godard and Anna Karina act in in Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, with dialogue, but all dubbed over footage shot with a slightly-undercranked camera, so everything feels sped-up, jerky, and punchier.
It hadn't occurred to me that Godard may have been the inventor of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" type that has so overtaken independent film these days, but he may be (there are earlier "Manic Dream Girls" - Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby for example - but they generally didn't have the "Pixie" until Godard). Until seeing the early shorts, I would have imagined the MPDG started with Jean Seberg in Breathless (though she's barely manic, really), but Anne Collette's Charlotte in the two Godard shorts is massively MPDGing all over the place (especially in the second, where as Jean-Paul Belmondo - dubbed by JLG himself - delivers a monologue about Charlotte's faults, she wanders around the room, tries on hats, and makes "cute," non-sequitur faces all over the place until you want to puke). Watching these two early shorts, you would probably imagine Godard to go on to be a pioneer in a French New Wave version of the RomCom.
But instead, we get Breathless - which I'd only seen once before, and as on that occasion, it surprised me with how fresh and new and joyful it feels, even today. Godard would make better films, quite a few better films, but you can still look at Breathless and understand why it had the impact it did in 1960. I don't think it's a masterpiece, and I DO think JLG made a ridiculous number of masterpieces in the 15 features he completed in this 7-year period (at the very least, Contempt, Masculin, féminin, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and Weekend, if not more), all of them better movies than Breathless, but he never made a more important one, and maybe never one as purely FUN. You can feel his excitement in making his first film in every frame -- in the documentary on the Criterion DVD, they read a wonderful letter from JLG to the producer of the two early shorts, written as Breathless was shooting, where JLG notes that EVERYONE else working on the film thinks it's going horribly and will be a disaster, and JLG is both a bit concerned about this and at the same time not-at-all concerned as he thinks the footage is great and it's just the film he wants it to be (and he's also worried that this means he's nuts).
Sometimes you do have to think of the context to appreciate something like that. One day, after looking over a list of some films that came out in 1960, I realized that Hitchcock's Psycho had also been released that year, and it struck me that, in the middle of everything else that was playing in American movie theatres that year (mostly glossy color things designed to reassure), the Hitchcock film must have felt like a terrorist act -- nothing else on a USA screen looked or felt anything like Psycho. No wonder it had such an impact. Now, of course, it almost seems quaint.
As, in many ways, does Breathless, but it has a light-footed quality that separates it from all the films influenced by it ever since. Somewhere in looking at reviews of the film after watching it, someone noted sourly their confusion over the title . . . why À bout de souffle? No one in it is particularly breathless or winded in it. No, it's the movie itself that is at breath's end, barely able to get its story out in the rush of how excited it is to tell you that story. And you GO with it.
After that I got to Le Petit Soldat, which I thought I'd seen before and disliked, but I was wrong, it was completely new to me. It's a tight little Godardian spy drama about conflicts in Geneva between French and Algerian agents, with some nice twists (and a surprising and disturbing scene in which waterboarding is described as it is demonstrated on our hero). Nice and taut. And of course, it introduces Miss Anna Karina, who becomes JLG's muse (and wife) for the next few years, and boy can you see why -- before we meet her in the film, Karina's boyfriend bets the hero $50 that he'll fall in love with her less than 5 minutes after meeting her. After their first meeting, our hero hands over the $50 to his friend without another word. Many of us would, too.
A Woman Is a Woman was his third feature, and previously I'd found it just okay. Fun, but a little too precious. 
For some reason, this time it got me in just the right way, and I was swept up in its experimental silliness -- its tone of being an over-the-top Hollywood musical without any real songs. Even if it does worship the eminently worship-worthy Ms. Karina a BIT too much.
Next up for me, when today's work is done, are Vivre Sa Vie, which I've seen a few times, but many years ago, and I remember it as brilliant but grim and humorless, and Les Carabiniers, which I saw only the first 20 minutes of before I walked out on it, and am not looking forward to sitting through. Granted, it was 19 or 20 years ago when I last tried, it was a LOUSY print, and it was on the second half of a double-bill with the far superior Masculin, féminin, and after the first film's brilliance, the second's mix of heavy-handed political commentary and bad jokes (both massively subpar for JLG, as I remember) didn't sit well with me, when I just wanted to think about how great the first film was. I hope I was wrong about it then, and that it's not what I remember, but everything I've read about it since would seem to indicate I was correct in my first impressions.
More soon, as I get through this stack o' JLG. Wish I was watching them on a bigger screen. Maybe sometime this year, I'll carve out 8 days to watch them all in The Brick on the big screen, with whoever feels like coming by . . .
