Pierrot Le Fou
Samuel Fuller makes a cameo appearance in the French film Pierrot Le Fou by Jean Luc Godard and is asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo's character Ferdinand what cinema is while standing at a party. Fuller replies "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death....in one word, emotion." The battleground that is cinema unfolds in this French New Wave masterpiece about two characters, Ferdinand and Marianne, who take a Bonnie and Clyde romp through the French countryside finding love and hate in each other. Marianne, played by Anna Karina, wants to dance, sing and find her brother who is actually her real lover. Belmondo's character, Ferdinand, wants to write, smoke cigarettes and live by the sea. Not able to compromise with each other or with love, Ferdinand blows himself up with dynamite at the end of the film right after shooting Marianne, leaving everything unresolved. There's much in between though that makes Pierrot Le Fou a key film in the French New Wave movement as well as a mockery of American cinema.
Pierrot Le Fou, made in 1965, was based on the novel Obsession by Lionel White. Godard had originally cast Sylvie Vartan in the Marianne role and Richart Burton in the Ferdinand role. According to Godard, "Burton, alas, had become too Hollywood. In the end the whole thing was changed by the casting of Anna and Belmondo." (Whitehead 5) The film starts with Ferdinand running off with the baby sitter, Marianne, who we soon find out was once Ferdinand's girlfriend. As Ferdinand and Marianne drive off into the night Godard doesn't use the typical Hollywood matte shot, but instead incorporates running colored lights over the car window in a fast pace. Godard says of the technique, "When you drive in Paris at night, what do you see? Red, green, yellow lights. I wanted to show these elements but without necessarily placing them as they are in reality. Rather as they remain in memory. I wanted to recreate a sensation through the elements which constitute them." (Whitehead 13)
"I'm putting my hand on your knee and kissing you all over," Marianne says as she sits motionless. Ferdinand replies "Me too, Marianne." This thought process of speaking out loud and voice-over narration of the two characters runs its course through the rest of the film to set a motif. Often times Godard will use art pieces, mostly Renoir and Picasso, throughout the film to represent Marianne and Ferdinand's characters speaking to each other. A jump cut occurs as we find Ferdinand laying in Marianne's apartment which contains a corpse with a pair of scissors hanging out its neck and a large amount of contraband laying about. Marianne sings "This love of ours will be short and sweet" as Ferdinand stares blankly, smoking. Godard incorporates an excellent use of a long take and then a massive amount of discontinuity editing as Ferdinand and Marianne escape Marianne's husband and leave "Paris by a one way street as the Statue of Liberty waved goodbye." Robbing a countryside gas station shortly after this, Ferdinand tells Marianne, "I remember this trick from Laurel and Hardy" as he boxes the gas station attendant.
After several more car-jackings Godard places the two characters at a sea side cottage. Marianne hates the sea and wants to go dance in the town. Ferdinand wants to write and smoke by the sea. Godard presents conflicts between the two, and finally Marianne insists on finding her brother. After a bloody encounter with a pair of scissors and a midget, Marianne disappears. When a Cashiers du Cinema interviewer observed, "There is a good deal of blood in Pierrot," Godard answered, "Not blood, red." (Milne 217) One day while Ferdinand is working on a boat for the Queen of Lebanon who is in exile, Marianne shows up and wants to make up with Ferdinand. Eventually after several disputes and a boat chase, the two of them end up on an island. Ferdinand shoots Marianne, calls his children only to hang up on them, and then wraps dynamite around his blue-painted face for an explosive ending.
It is interesting to note that Godard didn't even write a script for the film. "The whole last part was invented on the spot. It is a completely spontaneous film. I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began. I had nothing, nothing at all." (Whitehead 23). The film was shot over a period of a month in Paris and South of France, and was shown at the Venice Film Festival only a month after being shot. "One is left acknowledging that Godard has fully carried out his intentions and directed a film where there has been no writing, no editing and no sound mixing." (Armes 69)
Throughout the film Ferdinand keeps a journal of his thoughts, inspirations and feelings about Marianne. The journal is read in a voice over narration by Ferdinand and the film is divided into chapters of the journal. "His journal does not chart, it merely reflects the collage of fragments that surround him and enter the helter-skelter in his mind." (Hopkins 219) Marianne gets tired of Ferdinand always writing in his journal, and Ferdinand sends her into town to buy books when he tires of her at the sea. Godard says of this, "Anna represents the active life and Belmondo the contemplative. This is by way of contrasting them. As they are never analyzed, there are no analytical scenes or dialouge. I wanted, indirectly through the journal, to give a feeling of reflection. They are inside both their adventures and themselves." (Whitehead 21) Pierrot Le Fou is one big adventure that we find the two on in a non-classical form. They seem to follow a path, but the viewer has no idea where the two are going. We have a small underlying plot about Marianne trying to find her brother, but we are given no motivation unlike many American films. Like many films from the French New Wave, Pierrot Le Fou sticks to a style all its own and has the frame of mind that is the essence of the directors of that era. The camera just follows them, and that seems good enough. Godard says of American filmmaking, "The Americans are good at story-telling, the French are not. Any great modern film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding. Audiences like Psycho because they think Hitchcock is telling them a story. Pierrot Le Fou is not a film, but an attempt at film." (Whitehead 23) I happen to find it a masterpiece of cinema, and a landmark foreign film of the 1960s.
There are a few statements made in the film that are worth noting. For money, Ferdinand and Marianne put on a play for some American tourists about the Vietnam war. Marianne plays a Vietnamese villager and Ferdinand plays the macho American soldier. Burning matches thrown into water symbolize planes being shot down. Belmondo's character speaks in English to imitate the American soldier as he points a gun at the camera on the sound of bombs dropping. "Sure..yeah, yeah..New York..Oh yeah..Hollywood..Communist." A close up of Ferdinand's journal shows the phrase 'Uncle Sam's nephew versus Uncle Ho's niece.' As Marianne and Ferdinand run off with the tourist's money they yell "Down with Johnson, long live Kennedy!" as the Americans shout "Communists!.."
Godard mocks American style and the Vietnam war all throughout the film. Several times during the film there are radios playing commentary about the conflict in Vietnam, most of which contains negative style reporting on American soldiers. Ferdinand and Marianne tell some tourists more stories and one of the tourists is young man who says he is a political refugee, but the caption below reads "Lazlo Kovacs." Belmondo's character is obviously a playoff of Bogart. In his cameo appearance, Samuel Fuller says he is in France to make a film called "Flowers of Evil." When they leave Paris with the line "the stature of liberty waved goodbye to us," we see a miniature Statue of Liberty on the bridge. When Ferdinand burns all of their money, Marianne get mad cause she wanted to use that money to go to "Chicago, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo stupid bastard!" Ferdinand says he would only like to go to "Florence, Venice, Athens." The musical numbers are very Americanized, especially the musical scene on the beach.
The battleground that is Pierrot Le Fou is a rough one. A very sense of the odd timing in the film leaves a viewer confused at time. The film is very personal and yet at the same time filled with possibilities. "Godard may have shown us battlegrounds of love, hate, violence and death in Pierrot Le Fou, but this film is singularly devoid of emotion, for there is no longer any real subject to emote or sympathize with." (Hopkins 221)
I personally like the film for its sense of mis-guided adventure and it's two central characters. The romantic story in Pierrot Le Fou I feel is a classic because it doesn't follow the Hollywood pattern directly. It wanders and goes in all sorts of directions, and I feel the spontaneous technique Godard used in making the film gave more of a real life feeling to it. Karina and Belmondo play the parts well, and this is one of my favorite works by the French New Wave directors.
The film of tomorrow seems to me even more personal that a novel, individual and autobiographical, like a confession or a private diary."
- Francois Truffaut, 1957
Works Cited
Kline, Jefferson T. Screening the Text. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1992.
Whitehead, Peter. Pierrot Le Fou. London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1969.
Milne, Tom. Godard on Godard. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968.
Armes, Roy. French Cinema, Volume Two. London: A. Zwemmer Limited, 1966.
Pierrot Le Fou.. Director: Jean Luc Godard. Rome-Paris Films, 1965.