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Only known script of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless to be auctioned online

About 70 pages of director’s handwritten notes for the New Wave classic were found after more than 60 years

Breathless, which follows the doomed affair between an American student in Paris ( Jean Seberg) and her hoodlum boyfriend who is wanted for gunning down a police officer ( Jean-Paul Belmondo), is a keystone of France’s Nouvelle Vague movement that shook the cinema world, including Hollywood. The original outline for the story, based on a news event that enthralled France in 1952, had been written by Godard’s friend and fellow New Wave director François Truffaut, who allowed him to develop the plot. Sotheby’s says it is describing the manuscript as “partial”, not because anything is missing but because Godard did not submit a full synopsis and script to the ministry of culture’s National Centre of Cinematography and Animated Pictures, as would have been normal at the time, and made much of it up as he went along.

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