For the first 20 years of my life, my mom bought me DVDs for my birthday. I think it was a continuation of a tradition she had enjoyed as a young person: Her father managed a chain of movie theaters, and growing up, she was treated to the supreme privilege of screening a movie at home every birthday. This was at a time when watching movies at home was unheard of, unless you had a projector and access to the celluloid reel of a film.
I don't remember too many of the movies she got me—Children of Paradise by Marcel Carné, plenty of Hitchcock—-but I do know that when I turned 14, she gifted me one by a director I'd never heard of: Jean-Luc Godard. This was before Criterion, so the cover of the DVD was not sleekly designed. It featured a black and white image from the film, but with a weird overlay of what looked like a chessboard. The film was called Breathless.
I did what most teenagers do when their parents dispense wisdom and advice: I promptly forgot about it. I must have stashed it in the stacks of books and movies that littered my bedroom. It was only later in college when I heard film nerds bragging about their extensive Godard knowledge that I finally unwrapped the cellophane and popped the DVD into my laptop, back when laptops still had disc drives. I was, unsurprisingly, blown away. I’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, I became aware of two things: firstly, that French New Wave cinema, of which Godard is possibly the most famous example, and Breathless the most famous example of his example, would be deeply formative to my burgeoning creative sensibility; secondly, that I needed to listen to my mom more often.
-Eugenie Dalland