Two or three things I know about him

Harry Jennings attacks one of cinema's most "overrated" directors, Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun". If there is a snottier, more pretentious gurgling about filmmaking, I have yet to hear it.

The speaker was, of course, Jean Luc Godard and with those twelve words he opened the gates to every sub-Tarantino hack who thinks that all they need for their breakthrough are some tits and a phallic weapon.

Thanks Jean Luc. This is, perhaps (and only perhaps) not a railing against the entirety of Le Nouvelle Vague (or, as it shall henceforth be referred to, 'The New Wave', seeing as you're sitting on your arse in Cambridge, not on Le Rive Gauche). No, it is more a polemic against a certain director - Godard - and some of his movies. Specifically Breathless, or A Bout De Souffle, which is French for overrated.

It's undeniable that Godard and his chums had done their homework: there's no faulting their grounding in Hitchcock and what they called Film Noir. But their greatest assets are also their greatest problems, and Film Noir is a perfect example.

By ascribing meaning and connection between a bunch of gritty, gloomy but otherwise coincidental pictures (say, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard), they epitomise their greatest flaw: the desire to ascribe some kind of deep artistic significance to Hollywood movies (a slippery slope if ever there was one). These particular movies may have been well crafted, but they were not and will never be adequate foundation for a whole cinematic movement.

Jean Luc decided to try, anyway and he co-wrote a film with Francois Truffaut: Breathless. Never has a movie come in for more undue praise. Not only have the "hilariously" anarchic subversions of technique - the jump cut, the poorly edited conversations - become either hackneyed or subsumed into the norm, but the overt praise of the film itself has seriously stunted our understanding and appreciation of cinema in the 20th Century. Breathless is cited willy-nilly as being a great, revolutionary picture.

But look at the films being made in Britain in 1960. Take, for example, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or Peeping Tom. Both of these are movies with more social comment and insight in a single frame than in all ninety, interminable minutes of Breathless.

Take, too, Italian cinema in 1960, which produced La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura; again, films with more verve and depth than Godard could hope for. When we turn to America, the list goes on: The Apartment, Psycho, etc. So what's the deal with Breathless?

That question is really unanswerable. It is, perhaps, useful to look at what it went on to influence. "New Hollywood" was partially founded on inspiration from New Wave cinema, and was all the better for it. Watch a film like Five Easy Pieces, though, and you'll see Bob Rafelson telling a story that's far more interesting and socially aware than one about some cad stealing a gun and shooting a cop.

Jumping a little further forward to our current state of affairs, we come upon Wes Anderson, whose generally good work is otherwise let down by his references to Truffaut, which provide some of the most arsey moments in his films.

His frequent collaborator, Noah Baumbach, seems to have got it right, though. At the conclusion of his raw portrayal of a mid-Eighties divorce, The Squid and the Whale, he has the crushingly pretentious father quote a scene from Breathless to his unimpressed ex-wife. And then there is Tarantino.

Everything that is wrong with Tarantino's work - the heavy-handed film references, the overblown camera movements (Godard once claimed that "a tracking shot is a moral act" - excuse me while I vomit), and the consideration of style over substance - is a direct result of his idiotic infatuation with Godard.

There is, ultimately, no point in style for style's sake, no matter how many Marxist analyses Godard's films lend themselves to. Similarly, there's no point in controversy for controversy's sake. That said, if you want subversion and controversy, it's not hard to do it better than Godard: take Breathless, and burn the negatives: Jean-Paul Belmondo can't smoke, and the Richard Gere version is better.

Breathless is on at the Arts Picturehouse tonight at 5pm.

Harry Jennings