Chris Flackett
What’s your favourite Jean-Luc Godard film? It’s a simple question, and one which will, of course, have a subjective answer. However, if I were to ask you what films you think might receive a consensus of opinion on being Godard’s best, I’m confident you would name the usual suspects, a handful of pictures that, quite understandably, have entered the arthouse canon as all-time greats. A quick scout across the internet at ranking articles proves it to be so: À Bout De Souffle, Le Mepris, Pierrot le Fou are the names that appear again and again at or near the top of ranking articles. All great films, no argument from me, and all obvious picks for Godard’s best. Fine. But let me ask you: what about Bande à Part?
Known as Band of Outsiders in America, Bande à Part was made and released in 1964 during a tumultuous period in Godard’s life, with his famously tempestuous marriage to Anna Karina having being rocked by her suicide attempt (later, Karina claimed Bande à Part “probably saved [her] life”). There was also the matter of Godard having formed his own production company, Anouchka Films, and having to rely on a $100,000 investment from Columbia Pictures to make the film. Godard needed the film to be a success and returned to the earlier B-movie crime and Parisian working-class explorations of earlier films, such as À Bout De Souffle and Vivre Sa Vie.
However, in his book
Thankfully, time has been much kinder to
I beg to differ. Ever since I first saw it as a twenty-one-year-old film student, on murky VHS borrowed from the University film library, I have had a complete love affair with this movie. Far from a step backwards, I see
Here’s why
The Playfulness
Partly out of a desire to explode the conventions of cinema to reignite its creativity, partly out of a sardonic need to irritate conventional, conservative people, and partly out of a genuine mischievous streak, Jean-Luc Godard was known for a playful quality in his films, using a self-conscious, self-reflexive approach to disrupt viewer’s expectations, and probably, in all honesty, to make him and cineaste friends laugh. Bande à Part is no exception, but benefits from perhaps some of Godard’s most well-known, most entertaining touches.
The fun starts right away with the opening credits. Utilising a system where the name of the role e.g. producer, is in the middle of the screen, with the name or names of the person/s fulfilling that role both above and below, all is normal until we reach Mr Godard. His name, as shown in the image above, is displayed as “JEANLUC CINEMA GODARD.” In French, this just means that Godard is the director, but taken literally, in English, the phrase reads as if Godard is declaring himself to be the very art of cinema itself. It’s an iconic moment that’s also rather funny, playing on the idea of Godard having a highly inflated opinion of himself and his art, whilst also being quite a combative declaration to his fellow directors, who Godard certainly saw as competition, even if he didn’t always respect them.
Outside of the dance sequence, which I will address on its own later, there is another moment that has come to be seen as iconic, which occurs when Odiile queries what they will do while waiting for nightfall to commence the robbery. What follows is an attempt to break an American’s record for doing the Louvre in nine minutes, forty-five seconds. It’s a quick sequence—less than a minute—of the three main characters running through the Louvre, whilst a security guard tries to stop them and fails. The looks on the three characters’ faces—nervous, surprised, exhilarated —suggest that this was a quick take done for real: that the Louvre was unaware the scene would take place. This gives the moment a naturalness, a frisson, that adds to the authenticity of their attempt. Godard’s narrator tells us that the three broke the record in two seconds, which always makes me laugh—how would we know otherwise? Yes, Godard could have cut straight to the robbery—the Louvre moment adds nothing to the narrative. And yet, it adds fun, surprise and mischief to the film overall.
Talking of Godard’s narrator, he uses the role to disrupt the idea of a classical narrator in a modern film, but also to eradicate the need for a prolonged backstory so that the film can exist in the moment. Within the first five minutes, Godard tells the viewer: “My story begins here. Two weeks after meeting Odile, Franz took Arthur to see the house.” With two swift sentences, not only does Godard introduce the three main characters and their initial situation, removing the need for time-consuming exposition, but he also announces a sense of self-awareness. By saying this is his story, Godard is being up front and in your face from the start about the fact that a film is not reality but an artificial construct. Godard is asking the audience to acknowledge this so as to free the viewer of their expectations. Godard never said, “True cinema begins with an open mind,” but I’m confident he’d agree.
Furthermore, Godard’s narrator gives one of my favourite examples of using a narration to mock the act of narration: “The story until now, for people who’ve come in late: Three weeks ago…a hoard of money…an English class…a house by the river…a starry-eyed girl…” It’s not even exposition by this point, but basically a sly dig at the idea that he has to present a back story at all. Why can’t film be about the instant? The narration at the end adds weight to this: “There my story ends, like in a pulp novel. At that proud moment of life where nothing degrades or disappoints. My next film will relate, in CinemaScope and Technicolor, fresh adventures of Odile and Franz in the tropics.” Godard pushes the idea that a film is only an instant in an ongoing story, with no beginning or end, whilst speaking with tongue firmly in cheek to Hollywood elements of colourisation and lenses that he would not, and financially could not, use. The Cahiers crew must have appreciated that one, as they must have enjoyed the man in the English class who asks the throw-away question, “What’s ‘un gros film d’un million de dollars?’ A big one-million-dollar film.”
What really appeals about Bande à Part, though, is how the film has fun with its own B-movie conventions. Godard understands the value and the fun of a myth, and he recognised that the low-life movie hood was as much a romantic myth as the stories of outlaws of old. With that in mind, it always makes me happy to see Arthur and Franz play-act the shooting of Billy the Kid by Sheriff Pat Garrett, with Franz pretending to shoot Arthur, who draws out his ‘death’ throes out to hilarious, over-exagerrated lengths. It’s a literal playfulness representing the playfulness of the entire film, and I absolutely love it.
The Melancholy
But for all of his playfulness and the glee he obviously took in disrupting conventions, Godard, certainly in the films of this era, clearly had a sense of humanity, melancholy and even empathy, even if it was tempered with a sense of superiority. That melancholy can be seen expressed in the likes of Vivre Sa Vie, his tale of a woman chasing her dreams, only to become desperate and poverty-stricken, and ultimately ending up as a prostitute. Godard never judges, and he clearly expresses his empathy with Nana (played by Karina) in a scene where she is watching Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and cries at Joan’s confirmation that she is to die. By crying, Nana is confirming her own acceptance, however tempered by sadness, of her societal fall and death. It is astonishingly moving. Likewise, Le Mepris uses the power plays of the film industry to examine a married couple at the end of the tether, the futility of trying to fix something that is beyond repair, balanced against the need to try.
Perhaps the biggest source of melancholy in the film comes from the character of Odile, who Anna Karina imbues with an enormous amount of sadness. Odile is presented as a fundamentally innocent character; not only does she obey her Aunt, Madame Victoria, in coming straight home after school and not going with boys or out to cafes (at least, until she hooks up with Franz and Arthur), but she also follows her instruction to “learn something useful.” Hence the English lessons.
However, this is the moment that Godard reveals something more about Odile. She tells Arthur, “She wanted me to take up nursing. I didn’t want to. I was in hospital once. It was disgusting. I haven’t the patience or goodness for that.” It’s a quietly sad, critical piece of self-analysis and, with Odile revealing it unprompted, suggests a desire behind the innocence to communicate to others the more complex feelings beneath that innocent veneer. Throughout, Anna Karina physically portrays this inner conflict between innocence and sadness very successfully, her very expressive face moving from anxious uncertainty to a pleading despair to a childlike joy with the rapidity of the switches in Odile’s unstable moods. Karina tends to be celebrated more as a beauty, the face of the French New Wave, than for her acting skills, but her ability to express complex, conflicting emotions with a simple look or change of facial expression should be celebrated and studied—starting with
Godard also uses Odile to take a look at the Parisian working-class society around him, with a scene on the Metro that has perhaps never been surpassed in Godard’s oeuvre for its melancholic and bittersweet look at the working classes, and it is perhaps my favourite scene in the entire film.
Riding the Metro with Arthur, a gloomy yet tender Odile observes how people on the Metro always look sad and lonely and that it reminds her of a song. Starting to recite, Odile uncertainly, movingly, begins to start up the melody, gaining in confidence and quiet emotion as she sings the Jean Ferrat adaptation of Louis Aragon’s poem ‘J’Etends J’Etends’.
With Odile surveying the people on the Metro, Godard widens the scope of that view, cutting to a man gloomily reading a newspaper on his commute home, a woman at a café table outside drinking wine alone, a homeless person sleeping on the street with a bag as a pillow, and people walking at night amongst bright neon shop signs and street lamps. Godard cleverly cuts out the diegetic sounds of the Metro train, the sudden silence being eerie and allowing the words of the poem to cut deep: “What’s done to you, men and women? You’re like gentle, worn-out stones. Like carcasses of hunted animals. My heart breaks to see you.”
And as Karina falls on that line of heart break, Godard suddenly cuts back to the train, with Karina turning to the camera and looking deep into the lens into our souls, the digetic sounds of the Metro catching us off guard again as we cut to the camera looking through the carriage door at the station name on the wall: Liberté. It’s a moment that’s bitterly ironic, desperately sad, and absolutely brilliant filmmaking.
The Romance It Inspires
Now, this point is a bit more personal to me and perhaps to people interested in a particular style and era. I can appreciate someone reading this and laughing this point off, but it explains a lot of Bande a Part’s appeal to me.
The French New Wave, in particular films of Godard’s such as À Bout De Souffle, were influential on an English sub-culture that has had resonances throughout English rock/pop since the 60s, and still has meaning today, although perhaps more to the margins: the Mod movement.
Mods, at their most popularly fashionable, around 1964-1965, were a group of young people who were into smart dressing, r’n’b and soul music, all-night dancing and amphetamines. The Who have come to be seen as the definitive mod band, although The Small Faces were arguably the more legitimate mod group in the 60s. But before its populist heyday, Mod was more secretive, more elitist and arguably cooler. Then it was called Modernism, a name taken from the Modern Jazz these young people loved.
Dazzled by the cool, neat, new-feeling styles of the Brooks Brothers/Ivy League look worn by the Modern Jazz players, the young Modernists adopted these fashions for their own, but also looked to the continent, taking the beautiful, exotic, colourful fabrics from Italy into their hearts and literally onto their backs. And this is where Bande a Part comes in: they looked to the Gallic cool of then-contemporary French Fashion and film and literature.
In Jonathon Green’s extremely evocative history of 60s alternative culture, Days In The Life, David May gives as succinct an explanation of the Modernist fascination with France as any: “Mod was always intellectual…one did read Camus. ‘The Outsider’, there it is, it explained an awful lot. A sort of Jean Genet criminal lowlife was also important. These were the outlaw figures.” It was the mixture of this street-level existentialism with their sharp, continental and American-inspired clothes that captured the Modernists. One was not attractive without the other, at least not initially. There are even stories of Mods in cinemas, in the dark, sketching the outlines of a particularly sharp jacket or pair of trousers so they could take them to their tailor to make a pair of their own—now that is dedication!
As a teenage Mod who was also fascinated by the history, I was very aware of the French connection. But it wasn’t until I saw Bande a Part for the first time that I understood why it had been so important. To put it bluntly, I was completely caught up in a romanticising of the symbols that the film was providing. I already loved old film noirs and crime B-movies, so I was completely into the idea of these two chancers driving around Paris, daydreaming, fooling around and plotting the perfect heist. I tended to wander around at the time imagining I was like a character in a film, so I could relate to the sense of playacting around Franz and Arthur. I wanted to be from a different time, attracted as I was to the 60s; they wanted to be successful criminals. It’s nice to have a dream, however unrealistic.
I thought Anna Karina was beautiful and could understand why Franz was in love with her. I wanted to be right in that world with her, and with them all, dancing to jazz in a smart Parisian cafe, driving along the Seine, running around the Louvre, dressing as sharp as Sami Frey, who looked immaculate in that pinstriped jacket, cream rain mac and widebrimmed hat (though Anna Karina wore the hat better). Even Claude Brasseur’s Argyle jumper is something to covet.
So, it’s a highly personal reason, and it all might be a little too past tense, but a big reason Bande a Part is still a film I celebrate is because it reminds me a time I was young, romantic and looking to art to build my view of the world. People should daydream, it’s healthy, and Bande a Part absolutely made me dream.
THAT Dance Sequence
Perhaps the most famous sequence in , it would be amiss not to celebrate this wonderfully cool moment, where Arthur, Franz and Odile break up a moody meeting in a cafe, where they are plotting their robbery, by giving up and breaking into dance, sharing a momentary happiness in each other’s company.
The dance itself is excellent fun to watch. Dancing to a cool, jazzy rhythm and blues (composed by Michael LeGrand, who scored the film), the three actors dance a smooth routine they called the Madison Dance, based on the then-fashionable dance of the time. What makes the dance so attractive is that it’s simple but with strong, contrasting movements: hand claps, sliding forward on their feet, swinging the arms and body out smoothly, clicking the fingers, and little kicks out of the feet. It’s a lightly sensual dance with a sense of coolness to it—no wasted movements—that suits the music to a tee.
And yet, although according to Richard Brody the dance was rehearsed daily for a month as none of the actors were natural dancers, it’s not over-choreographed, not pristine. There’s a slight awkwardness to it at times, slightly rough edges, more reflective of a dance you might actually see in a cafe. That naturalness is actually a part of the scene’s charm
The aesthetic of the composition is attractive, with the three actors in a line at a slight diagonal from the camera creating a sharp line within the frame, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur standing shoulder to shoulder with Anna Karina, who is the middle. Frey is nearer the camera, which works because he has sharper features than Brasseur, while Karina captures the eye from the centre of the eye, more so as Frey drops out of the dance, then Brasseur, leaving Karina alone to dance.
That would be great enough in itself, but Godard chooses this moment of the dance to even further disrupt the viewer’s experience of the film, dropping the sound out at intervals for Godard to narrate over, the dancers appearing to move to his words rather than music. By doing this, Godard actually layers more character development into what might have been a great scene but one otherwise irrelevant to the plot. He relates to the viewer the differing thoughts of the character at the moment, revealing that their interior world differs to the picture they present on the surface; Arthur, with his lustful thoughts of Odile betraying he is a slave to his physical impulses; Franz being unsure whether dream is becoming a reality or reality a dream (as great a description as any of the state of the viewer lost in a film in a darkened cinema).
It’s Odile, though, who slyly compels here. Godard’s treatment here of Odile is quite subtle, and perhaps it really is me reading too much into this, but it’s an intriguing thought to pursue. Godard related Odile’s thoughts as wondering “If the boys notice her breasts moving as she dances.” It suggests not only is Odile an object for the male gaze, and Odile being placed centre of frame in this sequence seems to bear this out, but it suggests she wants to be an object—that she wants the boys to view her in sexual terms.
There’s two things, though; one, that the fact of Odile wondering about this suggests a level of self-consciousness which in turn suggests she is far from a brainless sex object; two, a woman can want to be sexually desired by men she is in turn desires. That doesn’t mean that she wants to be or sees herself as an object. This becomes clearer at the end of the sequence, where Odile is left dancing alone. At first she smiles, but then realises she is all alone. A sense of self-consciousness overcomes her, and she looks more and more uncomfortable, stopping to address Franz and Arthur. It’s clear Odile won’t allow herself to be objectified, not if she can help it.
The fact that so much can be pulled out of what could be viewed as a simple scene of fun and dancing is a testament to the talent of Jean-Luc Godard as a writer and filmmaker, and why
