GODARD: Le Petit Soldat (1960)

If À bout de soufflé is the work of a young filmmaker, then Le Petit Soldat is as well. In many ways a surprising choice after À bout de soufflé, Le Petit Soldat is a dark and pessimistic film about the ongoing Algerian War of Independence, which ran from 1954 to 1962. The film was made in 1960 - it was banned for three years and ultimately released as Godard’s fourth film – and it can be considered his first political film and a bold attempt to address the crimes of his own country.

Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is a twenty-six year old secret agent working for a French paramilitary organisation in Geneva during the Algerian War of Independence. He does not seem to have many serious political convictions and seems to have wandered into his role. When he is ordered to kill Professor Palivoda, whose only crime it seems is to have not chosen a side, he refuses. Either from apathy or from the distraction of falling in love with Veronica (Anna Karina), he is unable to get away in time.

With Le Petit Soldat, Godard addresses politics for the first time, but instead of identifying himself with one side or another as he would later on, here he identifies himself with Bruno, a member of the French secret service who nonetheless has sympathies for the other side and talks about uniting Right and Left. He is horrified by the violence done on both sides, as is Godard. He opens the film in the aftermath of a French terrorist atrocity and will show both sides committing torture. Godard’s awareness that the French were guilty of violence and terrorism is the main reason the film was banned and is a brave and provocative statement for a young filmmaker to make against his own country in wartime.

However, Godard also suffers from Bruno’s confusion and apathy. Admitting that both sides have done evil, Bruno is left with nowhere to go and no one to help. The film has a pervasive sense of a murky world full of secret agents and double agents. Godard heightens this with many of the techniques from À bout de soufflé, using some disorientating jump cuts and a discordant score to increase the sense of Bruno’s, and the viewer’s, confusion – both political and moral. In one early scene on a train, Bruno listens in on a man telling a friend a long-winded joke. Godard cuts seemingly key sections of the joke, leaving the rest as mere gibberish. The two men are laughing away, but it means nothing to us and it leaves an odd alienating and eerie impression, furthered by the sound design throughout which isolates separate sounds and favours voices disembodied and layered over silence. The plotting, though fairly simple, is kept fairly discreet. Throughout the film, we are never quite sure what is happening and what is about to happen, Godard having achieved a wonderful (dis)harmony between form and content.

This film contains one of Godard’s most famous aphorisms – ‘Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times per second’ – though it feels like a statement that has been taken wildly out of context, given the confusing and undecided nature of the rest of the film. Add also the fact that Bruno says this whilst trying to distract Veronica enough to contrive an ‘authentic’ photo of her. Rather than affirming cinema, Godard may instead be trying to interrogate truth. Bruno’s final monologue towards the end of the film is one of the key moments of the film, given that here we see the end result of Bruno’s involvement in this dark world. This diatribe, which moves from a refutation of nationalism to talk of having no convictions to the pointlessness of revolution to the inability to know oneself. After denying anyone’s ability to know what he is thinking, Bruno turns to the camera and tells us what exactly he is thinking, but even he cannot hold onto his thoughts for very long. He has been emptied. His dalliance with this dirty war (compared negatively to the seemingly more virtuous Spanish Civil War – a can of worms there) has left him with nothing, only total apathy and existential confusion. The scene ends with the image of people looking for truth (that word again) by sifting through words, eventually being left with only one – silence.

So key to the film’s sound design, this silence is also what prolongs Bruno’s torture at the hands of the FLN. Captured by the Algerians, they torture Bruno for information and he keeps quiet, without thoroughly understanding why. This torture sequence is the most famous sequence in the film and it is unremittingly bleak and disturbing. Moving from burning to near-drowning to waterboarding to electric shock, it is long, uncomfortable, drawn-out. Godard here had in mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the ‘banality of evil’ and so this sequence is fairly subdued, near-silent apart from Bruno’s voiceover, almost dull. It is horrible to watch and there is a strong sense that the torture is degrading for both of Bruno and his torturers.

There is one thing that cuts through all of this pessimism and that is love – although, as we have seen already with À bout de soufflé, love is not enough against the pressures of this world. Bruno falls in love with Veronica, despite their political differences and there is a real feeling of optimism in their plans to escape everything and go to Brazil (though even their love is expressed through indirection – Bruno asks her to tell him lies and Veronica replies that she does not love him). However, this love ends up being used by the French as a means to get Bruno to finally kill Palivoda. Here, at the end of the film, Godard may well be at his most pessimistic. Bruno shoots Palivoda in front of a street full of witnesses and runs away. While he flees, we learn in voiceover that Veronica has already been tortured to death and that Bruno is shortly to learn of this. Bruno is left with nothing and will not be able to do anything about it – whether from the range of forces pitted against him or because of his own apathy is left unknown. All he has left to do is learn to not be bitter about it. With these closing lines and a shot of a hunted Bruno disappearing around a corner, the film ends – this sudden, shocking, intentionally dissatisfying ending leaving us with Bruno’s sense of anger and loss. 

Le Petit Soldat is amongst Godard’s best films because it is a challenging, committed, bold and angry work from a young filmmaker who was still finding his voice in cinema and in politics. Ultimately giving way to pessimism and apathy, Godard’s critique may not have the sophistication of hindsight, given that it was made during the Algerian War of Independence, or of his later work but it is nonetheless a brave work. With only his second film, Godard had proven that he would not be a filmmaker who would try endlessly to repeat an earlier success nor one who would remain differential to his country in the face of their crimes at home and abroad, but one who would make films after his own interests and would continue to innovate. Godard would not follow the caprices of the audience, he would ask that the audience follow him. And, next, Godard felt like making a musical comedy.

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GODARD: A bout de souffle (1960)

This review is the first of an intended series that will look at the feature films of Jean-Luc Godard, starting here with À bout de souffle and continuing through to the present, if I can manage to get a hold of some of his more obscure films. It should, I hope, be a reasonably comprehensive and largely chronological look at the work of one of the most important, innovative and challenging filmmakers.

À bout de souffle, then, is a story about Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time car thief who kills a policeman and is forced to hide out in Paris. While there, he tries to make contact with some fellow criminals and reconnect with former lover Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student first seen selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysées.

The first five minutes of À bout de souffle is a great opening and clearly signals this film’s agenda – to break every rule in the book. The film uses a lot of jazz music in its score but the film itself is noticeably jazzy, moving along to its own rhythm, not afraid to throw in some discordance whenever possible. The film begins with a robbery, in which people look and nod and wave at each other but because Godard has not given us an establishing shot, we have no idea who is who and what is going on. Later, Godard will break the 180˚ rule, making a chase sequence look instead like an impending head-on collision. Michel, presumably making an escape having just stolen a car, will complain about cars overtaking him, wax lyrical about scenery and assess every women that he drives past. The music will be exciting when nothing exciting is onscreen and slow when it should be fast-paced. The confrontation with the policeman is so disjointed that the ensuing scene makes little sense (Michel is half inside his car, the policeman is walking down a lane, then Michel is standing on the lane, and the policeman, having been shot, is falling into some trees). We then have one of the many jump-cuts in the film, where we suddenly see Michel running through some fields, late at night, presumably being chased. Godard fades out here, deciding not to show the chase and the result. And all of this, and much more, occurs in the first five minutes.

When À bout de souffle first appeared in cinemas, these innovations were often taken as mere incompetence, but they are much more important than that. They make us, as an audience, realize how much there is in cinema that has been codified, how many rules there are for filming and editing and how reliant we are on these rules. Most of these rules came from Hollywood, where the traditional style was for invisible direction, lighting and editing. If the audience notices any of these things, then they have been distracted from the story, the characters or their popcorn. But Godard delights in his medium, as does is cinematographer Raoul Coutard and his editor Cécile Decugis, and here he shows how these rules are, effectively, a restraint on the possibilities of filmmaking. It needs hardly be said how influential this film is and how it made Godard the key filmmaker for a whole generation. À bout de souffle, then, is a great young film, every frame revealing a youthful energy and enthusiasm and, very possibly, a contempt for the older way of doing things.

This is true – and there are plenty of further examples that would be unnecessary to write down (just go watch it again if you’ve forgotten) – but it is not entirely what À bout de souffle is about. The term ‘À bout de souffle’ is frequently translated as ‘Breathless’, emphasising again that energy and youthfulness, but a more accurate translation is ‘End of Breath’ which is much more reminiscent of the terminal breath. Both Michel and Patricia are very tired of the world that they are in. Patricia has ambitions to write for a literary magazine and is an avid reader, but after an interview with the deeply obnoxious Parvulesco (played by Jean-Pierre Melville) she is thrown into a funk. Michel’s lifestyle seems exotic and exciting, modelled like the film itself on Hollywood gangster films (if you are wondering why Michel wipes his lips with his thumb so often, take another look at Bogie in The Big Sleep). However, we realize that Michel is even more tired than Patricia. In the end, Patricia glumly decides to return to her career (gained, it is suggested, by sleeping with or promising to sleep with her editor), choosing the path that everyone else has trod before her, while Michel is so fed up, he can’t even be bothered to get away from the police that he knows are coming. Look at the scene where Michel stops at a cinema and stands in silent tribute at a poster of Bogart (a poster for The Harder They Fall, mind, the last film Bogart made before he died), before wandering back into the world, a rare quiet moment in the film that feels leaden and sad. Or the moment during the usually upbeat extended bedroom scene where Michel sitting at the end of the bed and looks out of window and thinks about death, the camera observing him from behind and lingering on the moment. Putting the eye of a realist in the youth film genre, Godard reveals their empty heart, celebrating non-conformity at the same time that it encourages those who follow the rules. Like all Godard, there is a serious if not angry heart underneath all of the fun and games.

Godard had yet to find his style or his politics at the time he made À bout de souffle but the film remains rewarding nonetheless as an expression of a maverick young filmmaker who got the chance to make a film and was not going to waste it. Much darker than it would initially appear, À bout de souffle is not the epitome of cool as many praise it (one wonders how they deal with later Godard, if at all), but it is exuberant and thoroughly enjoyable. Much imitated but never truly repeated, it is a magnificent debut.

Next came Le Petit Soldat.

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REVIEW: La Dolce Vita (1960)

  La Dolce Vita is arguably Federico Fellini’s best remembered work and his best hit. The film was the first arthouse film to appear in the US Box Office Top 10 during its release. Americans were awed by its taboo-breaking spectacle and by decadent Europe in general. A wave of lesser imitations followed and Fellini gained his reputation as one of the prominent voices of art cinema.

  When it came to plot, Fellini was a modernist, preferring a more abstract approach. Instead of a conventional narrative with a beginning, then a middle and then an ending, Fellini constructed an episodic structure which recalls poetry and the cubist paintings of Picasso. In other words, there is a story but not one that can be simply written down. Keeping it short, the film follows Marcello, a celebrity columnist, as he wanders around Rome, alternately attracted and repelled by the people he meets all living “la dolce vita”, or the “sweet life”.

  From its opening image of a statue of Jesus being flown into Rome by a helicopter, the themes are flying. Throughout the film’s long yet rewarding 167 minutes, we are introduced to a variety of lost people. Celebrities tired of the attention, bachelors always on the prowl and the paparazzi that follow them. We meet people confronted with Rome’s rich history who have no idea how to emulate the glories of the past and people clinging to a religion that is rapidly losing its power.

  La Dolce Vita is the very definition of the word zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. Its well-paced episodes uncover the attitudes and beliefs of Rome at the start of the Sixties. The myths and superstitions of the past are mere decoration to a Rome that is becoming increasingly secular. In the film, a miracle is just another excuse for another media circus and a priest hears a confession during a late-night party in which boredom leads to stripteases and orgies.

  Marcello Mastroianni is great as the columnist who strives to escape his cynical and decadent lifestyle, but who sees no alternative. The film is almost effortlessly stylish and plays best on a big screen. While portraying all the inadequacies of this lifestyle, the film also retains its vibrancy and energy

  However, while the film does have a lot to show and tell, it can’t help but feel over-stretched. Unfortunately, a zeitgeist film such as this can’t help but be almost hopelessly dated. Many of the scenes, so shocking when they first played, are now not much worse than the stories one sees after a cursory glance at any tabloid. The final image, as evocative an image of innocence lost as it may be, rings of preaching. It is that oddest of films, the entertaining, horrible and attractive work of a man who is repulsed by the world he has found himself in as well as being intrigued by its vigour and its joie de vivre. A deep film about a shallow world.