The Favorites - Band of Outsiders (#34)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Band of Outsiders (1964/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard) appeared at #34 on my original list.

What it is • Two wannabe hoodlums, Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) enlist an odd, naive young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), into an attempt to rob the bourgeois family she lives with. Romantic, deadpan, perpetually bemused, the trio spends most of the film lounging (and dancing) in cafes, bantering about movies and current events, and deciding who Odile is going to sleep with. As Pauline Kael noted, it comes as a shock when they actually endeavor to commit the crime, as if one type of movie has been dropped down in the middle of another. Godard based the film on the pulp novel Fool's Gold by the Californian crime/western writer Dolores Hitchens. Thus we have another quintessential example of the French New Wave's interest in fusing taut American genre fare with a more leisurely French sensibility; Godard's early work in particular was an exemplar of this tendency from Breathless onward. The influence boomeranged back to America again, impacting the auteurs of New Hollywood down to Quentin Tarantino, who named his production company "Band Apart" - a play on the French title - and many others (while reading into the subject for this review, I even stumbled across an article comparing the dance sequence to Audrey in the diner on Twin Peaks). For such an influential film, Band of Outsiders has a mixed legacy - some consider it very minor Godard (including biographer Richard Brody and perhaps even the director himself), while others mark it among their favorites. Obviously, I'm with the latter group.

Why I like it •

The Passion of Anna K. (video essay on Jean-Luc Godard & Anna Karina)

Although I prefer to stick to the 3-a-week schedule, it looks like this week I'll be posting on Tuesday and Thursday as well, so stay tuned.

This is a video that has been on my mind for at least four years. Now I'm finally able to realize it for Fandor Keyframe.

Here is my written introduction for the non-narrated video:

Introduction

For six breathless years, actress Anna Karina and her filmmaker husband Jean-Luc Godard forged a cinematic partnership that remains legendary. Their collaboration is charted over the course of seven feature films: Le Petit Soldat (1960), A Woman is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville(1965), Pierrot le fou (1966) and Made in USA (1966). Split into seven montages (one for each film), "The Passion of Anna K." traces the evolution of Karina's craft as well as her purpose within Godard's work. Each montage is bookended by Karina's first and last appearances in the particular film, a guideline that yields surprising revelations. We witness her transformation from playful ingenue to hardboiled pro. Trajectories emerge with tidal rhythm rather than the logic of a straight line: from love to disillusionment, affection to respect, spontaneity to rigor, passivity to power. (To reference a straightforward explication of the couple's relationship and collaboration, see Tyler Knudsen's complementary approach in "Godard and Karina: A Marriage on Film", which I discovered after making this).

Each montage features a simple title to guide us through the ebb and flow of this onscreen relationship.

"Muse" depicts Veronica from Le Petit Soldat as a cherished object of affection, observed externally. Concerned with capturing her vivacious aura but unable to enter her mind, the film itself eventually seems to close in on this butterfly.

"Performance" presents an actress simultaneously more enigmatic and more exposed (especially when Godard includes Karina's weepy line flub), reflecting the fact that in A Woman is a Woman Angela is the central subject rather than just a love interest.

"Discovery" echoes Vivre sa vie's structure with 12 shots (one from each chapter of the film) weaving together Godard's reverential but cold photography of Nana, the actress' growing command of gesture and expression, and the director's own narration of an Edgar Allan Poe story detailing an artist's lethal desire to capture his wife's presence in his art.

"Conversation" reflects Band of Outsiders' raw, uncertain dynamic of director and star, pushing forward from the previous film's breakthrough/dead end. Godard veers between vocalizing Odile's thoughts himself, and allowing Karina to express the character's own ideas and feelings.

"Awakening" chronicles the longing emotional distance between Alphaville's stoic hero and the brainwashed Natasha. Linking Karina's acting prowess with Godard's growing alienation from his muse, this genuinely poignant scenario climaxes with a declaration of love whose formality echoes the couple's first collaboration, suggesting lovers as strangers.

"Rupture" represents Pierrot le Fou as the collaborators' passionate, doomed final fling. Marianne's story is a brilliant microcosm of the entire Karina-Godard dynamic (from meet-cute through intense romance to disenchantment, distance, and destruction), conducted with a despairing self-awareness climaxing (for the third and final time) with the death of Karina's character.

"Freedom" serves as a surprise epilogue, using Made in USA to move beyond the previous films' framework. Karina plays Paula, a strong if also cartoonish heroine (the comic-book stylization of the film has been heightened by the montage's own design). Following a bittersweet reversal of the earlier films' climaxes, we conclude on a cautiously optimistic note, with the character, the actress, and the director all moving into an uncertain, open-ended future.

Update 2017: H. Perry Horton wrote a great little piece to accompany this video for Film School Rejects called "The Muse Matters" - check it out!

uploaded to YouTube 2017 (update 2020: but the link is currently private due to a copyright back-and-forth that I don't want to deal with again until my Twin Peaks videos are finished... as of 2022, it is public again)

The initial impetus for this idea came from Richard Brody's thorough Godard biography Everything is Cinema (2008) which connects the dots between Godard's tumultuous relationship with Karina and the stories he tells, events he depicts, and ways that he scripts and especially photographs Karina's characters. While that context isn't mandatory to appreciate the video (let alone the actual films) it certainly does add another interesting dimension to their dynamic, especially given the personal, confessional nature of Godard's filmmaking. Personally, I think Godard's and Karina's collaboration gets to the heart of movies - the interaction of an author's point of view with the larger world, a world that (especially when embodied by the human form of a performer) may push back with another identity, creating new complications and yielding unforeseen treasures.

Additional pictures follow the jump...

That Total Film 1964 - 1966 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 16

The sixteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 16: That Total Film"

That Total Film

The films in today's chapter form an entity thrilling, melancholy, beautiful, and tragic - the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. When asked to write about Fists in the Pocket forty years later, Jean-Pierre Gorin noted ruefully, "every scene ... with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in." Oh, you can see that all over the place today, in a chapter that - not accidentally - finds itself exactly halfway through the series, to the point where the closing clip is even divided in two, to be concluded tomorrow.