Godard
has always been a filmmaker who pays as much attention to the politics behind
his work as the images in his work. Les
carabiniers (The Riflemen), his fifth film, displays this dualism at work,
criticizing the act of war and the politics of nationalism and imperialism
while at the same time interrogating the aesthetics of the war and anti-war
film.
The
story of Les carabiniers is
fable-like in its simplicity. Ulysses and Michelangelo are two peasants living
on a wasteland with a mother and daughter, Cleopatra and Venus. Two riflemen come to
their shack and convince Ulysses and Michelangelo to join the army and fight
for the King, seducing them with all the riches in the world. They go to war,
sending letters home to Cleopatra and Venus. However, when they finally get
home, they find that their rewards are not quite how they imagined them.
Les carabiniers did
not do well on release, and it isn’t hard to imagine why. It is gritty, nasty,
plotless, ugly, the characters are vulgar stereotypes, the events are shocking,
the soundtrack is a constant barrage of explosions and gunfire. It is an angry,
abrasive little film, but it chooses its targets with intelligence and its
critique and the way this critique is made are fascinating.
Ulysses
and Michelangelo are promised everything, from money to the monuments of the
world to any sadistic little wish they may want to carry out. The criticism is
obvious – any horror is permissible in war – but it also alludes to colonialism
in its acknowledgement of the gleeful seizure of lands and property regardless
of the human toll it may take and to nationalism in the blindness with which
Ulysses and Michelangelo gets suckered into signing up for the war. Given these
characters’ grotty and aimless existences at the beginning of the film, it is
clear that king and country have not done anything for them so far, and is
unlikely to do anything in the future. Indeed, the extended punchline of all of
this is that the two soldiers return home only with photos of their promised
rewards – pointing towards the illusionary nature of all nationalism and, by
extension, colonial gains. By the end of the film, the country has erupted into
what seems like several distinct civil wars between the republicans, the democrats,
the communists, the anarchists, the state and the army. The film ends on a
disused, ugly bus shelter in which Ulysses and Michelangelo are shepherded and
gunned down.
The
film’s critique of war suggests that the men and women who fight are not those
who receive the rewards and the acclaim and that it is not in their interests
to fight their king’s wars. But the film also holds a critique of the
aesthetics of the war film. The film is fractured, loud, uncomfortable viewing
and the war scenes are intentionally choppy and confused. Godard opts for short
scenes of sadistic war crimes rather than some grand narrative of war. Godard’s
point is that war films, like action films, entertain an audience when they
should be horrifying them. Compare the battle scenes in Les carabiniers to the same in Saving
Private Ryan, in which the violence is certainly horrible but the film does
allow the war to have a heroic and redemptive quality. War films tend to
validate war even as they criticize it. Les
carabiniers then, because it denies the audience a fluid narrative line
with which to understand and digest the war on screen (even down to the simple
cutting between weapon fired and damaged caused), can be said to be a truly
anti-war film.
It
even goes so far as to suggest, in the scene inside the cinema in which
Michelangelo is fooled by the projection while everyone around him silently
imbibes whatever the screen throws at them, the brainwashing nature of cinema
and the need to engage intellectually with what is being shown. As such, Les carabiniers is a distancing and
confrontational film, a bombardment of ugliness and noise, but all to an
extremely moral purpose. There is nothing enjoyable or aesthetically pleasing
about this war, nothing cathartic, nothing whatsoever to validate the horrors
onscreen – because this film is truly a pacifist one.
With
Les carabiniers, Godard unites form
and message to create one sustained and powerful critique, which will make one
rethink one’s opinions about wars past, present and future as well as rewatch
war films looking for the signs that they are as much pro- as anti-war. It is
one of Godard’s most difficult sixties films and one of the hardest to like,
but it is one of real intellectual rigour - with this film, Godard could not be
dismissed as just a stylist. Despite being one of Godard’s least financially
successful films, it is one of his most important early films.
Up next was Le Mepris
See other Godard reviews