Cahiers at a Film Set

In March and April 2024, for practical reasons, the production of Linklater's movie moved the sites associated with the origins of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo's Champs-Élysées was moved to the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, which better resembles the Champs-Élysées of the 1950s, where Cahiers was located at the time.

These legendary offices were moved to Rue de Liège, to an apartment that was opulent enough to house the editing team of the era. That's where the modern-day Cahiers team first went on March 15, 2024 for a visit that felt like a pilgrimage.

Gathered around the table are all the familiar faces – the driving forces and historical friends who have shaped the magazine: François Truffaut, who welcomed the master of neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, ("Cahiers du cinéma is your home!"), but also the likes of Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda

… right down to the interns waiting in the shadows of the story. And then, of course, there was Godard, better known as JLG, almost hidden among the others behind his black glasses.

Even more striking on the monitor producing the black and white images sought by cinematographer David Chambille (a Bruno Dumont devotee), these reincarnations were fascinating. At the same time there was the almost worrying feeling of being caught up in a reconstruction, a term that can be noble, as well as horrifying.

This fear quickly disappeared as the imaginary Nouvelle Vague came to life, with nothing seeming forced.

The director "asked only one thing of them," recalls producer Michèle Halberstadt, in the form of a note addressed to everyone before shooting: "Keep in mind that we aren't making an 'important' movie or a historic movie, we're not even paying tribute to the history of cinema. In the story, you don't know what you're doing by throwing yourself into Breathless. Every day, Guillaume (Marbeck who plays JLG), you're pulling out what little hair Godard has, asking yourself what you're doing here."

It's tangible: faced with the inspirational masterpiece, there is no pretension. The ethic and aesthetic of Godard's debut offers a moral compass, rather than a model to imitate at all costs. You could sense the whole team was keeping the images of Breathless in mind as something significant, but not a template to be followed blindly.

In a bold but skittish move, drafted without any guarantee of making history, JLG's first feature-length movie consisted of telling a story while rejecting imitation. So here, they weren't imitating either: the evocative element being enough.