I’ve been trying to write out my thoughts about Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) for days, but even after watching the film twice and enjoying all the wonderful extras included with the fantastic new Criterion DVD, I’m finding words inadequate to describe how much I’ve fallen in love with this wonderful movie in so short a time. My love for Pierrot le fou is so fresh, so passionate, so alive and so completely unabashed that I feel a little like a silly schoolgirl with a terrible crush on the cute new boy in class.
I’ve been curious about seeing Pierrot le fou for about 15 years after I came across still shots from the film featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo with his face painted bright blue. I also saw brief clips of the party scene from Pierrot le fou a few years ago in the fascinating Samuel Fuller documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (Adam Simon; 1996) and became even more intrigued, but for one reason or another I never got around to watching it. I had hoped to attend the theatrical revival of the film last year, but sadly I wasn’t able to. As far as I know Pierrot le fou was never shown in the San Francisco Bay Area last year and the official Janus site seems to confirm this.
Thanks to Criterion’s recent DVD release of Pierrot le fou I was finally able to experience this amazing film for the first time and now I deeply regret not seeing it sooner. Pierrot le fou manages to combine everything I love about my two favorite Godard films (Contempt, 1963 and Weekend, 1967) into one brilliant piece of work, while referencing every film the director had made before and predicting many of the more radical films he would make afterward. The basic plot of Pierrot le fou involves an unhappily married man named Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who meets up with an old flame named Marianne (Anna Karina) and the two abandon their old lives and begin a life of violent crime together. Unfortunately their combustible relationship begins to unravel under the stress of life on the run, but between their verbal sparing and love-making the audience is treated to a smart political and social satire with slapstick style comedy and an occasional musical number.
Pierrot le fou borrows elements from classic crime films such as Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), but the film also takes a lot of inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard’s own Breathless (1960). It’s also worth noting that Pierrot le fou pre-dates Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty’s less interesting and more conventional Bonnie and Clyde (1967) by two years. For my money, none of the previously mentioned films come close to matching the offbeat magic conjured up in Pierrot Le fou by Godard and his two incredibly charming stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.
Pierrot le fou combines some of Jean-Luc Godard’s best writing and directing with stunning color photography by Godard’s longtime collaborator Raoul Coutard. The film manages to effortlessly mix comic-book style aesthetics with a painterly eye and the outcome is so wonderfully modern that Pierrot le fou still feels fresh and alive some 45 years after it was made.
Criterion’s magnificent two-disc restored widescreen DVD presentation of Pierrot le fou looks absolutely stunning and it’s loaded with fantastic extras, including a new video interview with actress Anna Karina who’s now 68 years old, and she offers some wonderful insights into the making of the film. The DVD also includes a new video program with audio commentary by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin called A Pierrot Primer, a fascinating fifty-minute French documentary about director Jean-Luc Godard and his personal & working relationship with Anna Karina called Godard, L’Amour, La Poesie, a wonderful archival interview with the young and extremely adorable Jean-Paul Belmondo conducted while he was shooting Pierrot le fou and a brief archival piece about the Venice Film festival in 1965 that features interviews with Godard and Anna Karina. The DVD also contains the original theatrical trailer and a nice booklet with a new essay by critic Richard Brody, a 1969 review by Andrew Sarris and a 1965 interview with Godard. Pierrot le fou retails for $39.95 and it’s currently available from Amazon for $29.95. Criterion has really kicked-started 2008 by releasing some truly wonderful films on NTSC Region 1 DVD in recent weeks and I applaud them for it.
If you would like to see more screen shots from the film please see my Pierrot le fou Flickr gallery. I’ve also uploaded the wonderful song Ma ligne de chance that was sung by Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le fou for anyone who would like to hear it.
Pictured Above: High and Low (1963), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Cleo From 5 to 7 (1961)
I was invited to participate in putting together a list of Favorite Foreign Language Films at Edward Copeland’s blog recently which is now open to online voting and I hope my blog readers will cast their vote for their 25 favorites from the films that are now eligible.
The criteria was: 1) No film more recent than 2002 was eligible; 2) They had to be feature length; 3) They had to have been made either mostly or entirely in a language other than English and 4) Documentaries and silent films were ineligible.
I also made a rule for myself. I only allowed myself to pick one film per director.
Out of the 25 films I suggested only 13 managed to make it onto the final list of nominations linked above. I was mostly disappointed that out of the six Japanese directors I included in my own list of 25 favorite films, only one (Akira Kurosawa) made the final cut. I refuse to believe that I’m the only person who likes Teshigahara, Suzuki and Imamura’s films*. I’m also dissappointed that the work of some of my favorite directors such as Mario Bava, Jess Franco and Alejandro Jodorowsky was not found eligible. Many of my other favorite directors such as Fellini, Godard and Wong Kar-Wai have multiple films on the list, but some of my favorite work from them such as Satyricon (1969), Weekend (1967) and Happy Together (1997) are nowhere to be found.
But enough complaining! On the bright side, here are the 13 films I submitted that managed to make it onto the final list (in alphabetical order):
- Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
- Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau)
- Cleo From 5 to 7 (1961, Agnès Varda)
- Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
- Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)
- High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa)
- Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais)
- Jules et Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)
- La Dolce Vita (1960, Frederico Fellini)
- L’Eclisse (1962, Michelangelo Antonioni)
- Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)
- M (1931, Fritz Lang)
- Rocco and His Brothers (1960, Luchino Visconti)
I was especially happy to see that my three favorite Alain Delon films made the final list of nominations. You can never get enough Delon!
So what were the 12 films I voted for that did not make the final list? You can read my thoughts on them here.
If you haven’t seen any of the 13 movies I listed above I highly recommend giving them a look. They are all deeply loved films that I enjoy without reservation and they are easily available on DVD (most from Criterion). If you plan on voting I hope you will consider my nominations. I will try and do some more serious campaigning for them before the Sept. 16th voting deadline arrives.
* It looks like one of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s films made the final cut after all which is great news!
I love soundtracks. I listen to film scores almost daily and as my last.fm charts show, I never get tired of my favorites. My blog’s name “Cinebeats” is directly tied to my love for films and film soundtracks.
When I heard about the Film Music Blog-a-thon I thought long and hard about the composers that I love and the scores that have left a deep impression on me. I couldn’t decide on one composer or soundtrack to write about, but one particular piece of music kept haunting me and reminding me of the incredible power that a great musical score can have over a film and its audience, and that was composer Georges Delerue’s theme music for Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt (a.k.a. Le Mépris, 1963).
Contempt is one of my favorite movies and I can’t think of another film that so perfectly captures that painful moment when two people fall out of love. There are countless romantic movies about couples falling in love, but very few films manage to capture the human anguish and profound sorrow of what it’s like to deeply love another human being and to have that love completely destroyed by one stupid gesture or careless action.
Some might say that Godard uses Georges Delerue’s theme for Contempt excessively within the film and he does. Delerue’s theme music is heard again and again throughout Contempt, but instead of becoming irritating or distracting, Delerue’s beautiful score only adds more layers and depth to Godard’s film as it pushes it onward towards its explosive conclusion.
Is there another piece of film music as perfect and as powerful? I’m not sure that there is and that’s why I couldn’t resist writing about it for the Film Music Blog-a-thon. Delerue’s theme for Contempt completely captivates me every time I hear it and I’m instantly brought back to the film’s complex emotional core and carefully constricted themes.
When I first watched Godard’s Contempt the film completely shattered me. I was a wreck for days after I saw it, but the movie’s incredible beauty also managed to take me to new heights that I’ve never really come down from and I truly believe that’s what a good film score is capable of. Great soundtracks can elevate a film as well as the audience to new unimaginable heights and bring meaning to the mundane.
The theme music for Contempt is part of my Radio Playlist and you can listen to it by scrolling down to Cinebeats Radio and clicking on the song Georges Delerue - Le Mépris featured in the right hand column of my blog. You can also hear it in the film’s trailer which I came across on Youtube.
The Cannes Film Festival turns 60 this week and that’s reason enough to celebrate all things fabulous and French, so I plan on doing just that throughout the next week until the festival wraps up.
I haven’t come across many books written about the early days of Cannes but I can recommend Cannes - Fifty Years of Sun, Sex & Celluloid: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Most Famous Film Festival compiled by the editors of Variety. This thin cheap large-format paperback book only has 96 pages and it’s put together like some scrapbook that you might come across in a film critics old file cabinet. It contains lots of great black and white photos of directors and actors, plus news clippings and articles about the festival written by various journalists and critics between 1946 and 1996. This is not an in-depth look at the history of Cannes, but if you’re looking for some quick and interesting reading about the film festival with lots if pretty pics, the book is definitely worth picking up.
Here’s a few examples of the writing you can find in Cannes - Fifty Years of Sun, Sex & Celluloid: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Most Famous Film Festival:
Employees of the French film industry take to the streets in protest (1968)
Barricade ‘68: The Day They Seized the Celluloid
by Penelope Houston (Sight & Sound)
“May 18, 1968 - The day the brakes were slammed on the 21st Cannes Film Festival. In Paris, the students had carried their grievances from their suburban campuses onto the city streets. The barricades went up and riot police moved in. A rather frail alliance between students and workers brought waves of strikes. For a few days, it seemed that France really might be balancing on the edge of revolution. And in Cannes, predictably, they launched their revolution with a press conference.
François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard presided over the conference on the morning of May 18. These were filmmakers who had been most active three months earlier in the battle of the Cinematheque Francaise, when Arts Minister Andre Malraux sacked Henri Langlois, the powerfully charismatic founder and head of the Cinematheque. Langlois was reinstated, though with reduced powers, after a protest that involved the French film community, filmmakers from around the world, the major American companies and an interesting sprinkling of left-wingers. Journalists expected Truffaut and Godard to use the publicity spotlight of Cannes and the impetus of the Cinematheque triumph to press their grievances against the Gaullist film establishment. They were in for a shock.
Truffaut and Godard called an immediate halt to the festival, to show solidarity with students and workers and as a response to the national crisis. The occasion was well-timed. Jurors Louis Malle, Roman Polanski and Monica Vitti were on hand to announce their own resignations. French filmmakers promised to withdraw their films; others, including Milos Forman and Carlos Saura, joined them. Still others jumped up to say they would have withdrawn their films if they had been in competition, which unfortunately they were not. I bumped into Richard Lester, hurrying to record his protest. This being the year of flower power and gurus, the British director was wearing what at first looked like a white frock, but what in fact was an Indian-style tunic. Somehow, this rig seemed to fit the surrealism of the day.”
Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford at Cannes promoting Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
May 12, 1972 - Sunshine, Darkness, Nixon, Schizophrenia.
by Charles Champlin (L. A. Times)
“There is something bizarre and conceivably lunatic about coming to the sun-bleached shores of the Mediterranean with a total commitment to darkness
Along the Criosette, the local ladies are airing the local poodles and the international wanderers, vagabonds in jeans, already have spread displays of brass and silver jewelry, leather work and watercolors on the sidewalks. At the outdoor cafe alongside the Palais, the day’s debut has already begun over cups of coffee the color and texture of the Mississippi in flood tide.
The cinema is packed but even the early arrivals sit down front. Godard and the New Wave critics made it an article of faith that film should be a total, enveloping and developing experience, seen from as close up as vertebrae and eyeballs will allow.
Into the sunshine again briefly for lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes. A salade Nicoise and some eau minerale, in a desperate move to prevent the festival from becoming a total caloric disaster.
Back into the darkness again. The stage of the Palais theater has been set with artificial grass and flowers arranged to spell out XXV, this being the 25th festival, though it is the 26th year (1968 was a no-show). The plastic plants have an eerie glow in the dim light, hinting that nothing real any longer exists anywhere. There is a kind of urgent rustling of newspapers; half the waiting audience is reading accounts of the Nixon speech. The feelings of unreality are deepened.
The movie is Robert Altman’s Images, the Irish entry in festival mostly because it was filmed there. Susannah York plays a children’s author in advanced stages of paranoid schizophrenia, hearing voices, seeing dead lovers and being bedeviled by glimpses of her own accusing self. It is a dazzling piece of moviemaking and mood-spinning.”
Alain Delon, Sophia Loren & Romy Schneider brave the crowds at Cannes (1962)
There’s some great old clips from Cannes floating around Youtube that I highly recommend giving a look:
I’ve been trying to write out my thoughts about Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) for days, but even after watching the film twice and enjoying all the wonderful extras included with the fantastic new Criterion DVD, I’m finding words inadequate to describe how much I’ve fallen in love with this wonderful movie in so short a time. My love for Pierrot le fou is so fresh, so passionate, so alive and so completely unabashed that I feel a little like a silly schoolgirl with a terrible crush on the cute new boy in class.
(a.k.a. Le Mépris, 1963).
.
compiled by the editors of 
, the Irish entry in festival mostly because it was filmed there. Susannah York plays a children’s author in advanced stages of paranoid schizophrenia, hearing voices, seeing dead lovers and being bedeviled by glimpses of her own accusing self. It is a dazzling piece of moviemaking and mood-spinning.”