Analysis of Godard's Pierrot Le

Exploring Life, Exploding Life - Analysis of Godard’s Pierrot le fou Kai Tölle I6002205 UCM Film Art Final Paper Coordinator: Jack Post Tutor: Marteen Michielse In the following I will analysis Pierrot Le Fou (1965) by Jean Luc Godard from various perspectives. It is about Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who flees from his social life, to escape with his new (and former) lover Marianne (Anna Karina) to the Mediterranean Sea. Far away from his family, he lets the days pass, reads books and works on a diary. Marianne however is wanted for murder, which is why police and Algerian killers seem to follow tehm. Marianne manages to escape them but also leaves Ferdinand behind. When they meet again, she is with Fred, which she presented as her brother, but who in fact is her lover. Ferdinand kills them both for her betrayal and in the end commits suicide. By pointing on the formalistic and stylistic elements, I will use Peter Wollen (2002) concept of Counter Cinema, of which he claims Godard to be the creator, as a guide to place the characteristics of this film into a context. Wollen defines Counter Cinema as the conscious application of the 7 deadly sins of classical cinema, which are summarised briefly in the following overview: Narrative Transitivity vs Narrative Intransitivity: Instead of a clear narrative causality Godard builds an episodic construction and prevents a clear sequence of action. Identification vs Estrangement: Instead of an emotional involvement with characters, the figures in Godard‟s film appear incoherent, fragmented and contradictory. Transparency vs Foregrounding: Instead of being immersed by a fictional product Godard makes apparent the fictional construction. Single Diegesis vs Multiple Diegesis: Instead of a homogeneous film world, Godard introduces sometimes several storylines. Closure vs Aperture: Instead of one self-contained and harmonised film world, Godard‟s films are inter-textual and self-reflective. Pleasure vs Un-pleasure: Instead of entertainment, Godard wants to provoke and create reactions. Fiction vs Reality: Instead of acting a fictional story, characters might play themselves. (Wollen 2002, 74) However, as Wollens framework looks mainly on Godard‟s way to deconstruct classical cinema, whose principles have been in film theory defined as the established rules of Hollywood since the 1920s, the aim of this analyse will be to show a way to construct meaning in this overly ambiguous film. It has been pointed out that the “fragmentary nature of stories, the mixture of genres and complexity of the inter-textual references all render Pierrot le fou a postmodern film before postmodernism was invented.” In the following analysis I shall related to these characteristics and how they express postmodernism, but my main goal will be to point on what I perceive as the purpose of this film is: To show “life as a thing in itself” in all its facets and that “what lies between people”. The Party – The Shallowness of Society “I'm tired. I've got a mechanisms to see with, called eyes. To hear with, I've got ears. To talk with, a mouth. But they feel disconnected, They don‟t work together. A person should feel like he‟s one individual. I feel like I'm many different people.” The first remarkable scene of the movie in terms of visual distinctiveness is at the party of Monsieur and Madame Espresso, the parents of her wife. Ferdinand first does not want go there and when the film introduces the first scene of the event we learn why. In most of the shots the guests just repeat advertisement slogans. It is exactly the world “of sadness” that he was reading about during the first four shots of the film. Here we find the “handful of clownish freaks dressed up as princes, whose function it was to laugh at themselves”, “in the meshes of etiquette plots and lies”. There are several remarkable elements in this scene, the most obvious stylistic one is the use of coloured filters and light. The party is displayed with 7 shots, while each shot uses a different flashy filter or light. The first scene has a firm red filter, for the next a green, then yellow and a blue. He continues using a white harsh light from the left for one rather short shot and then builds in the next shot that starts with a blue filter a jump cut, after which a green filter is applied. In the next shot again a blue filter is used and in the final scene a red light from the left and a blue from the right are again applied. The extreme use of these colours in this scene is representative for the overall film and even Godard as filmmaker. In the following shall elaborate on some functions they fulfil bearing in mind that they are a perfect example of Foregrounding, thus making us aware of the fact that this is a film and not a story in the first place. First of all, are they in this particular fragment reinforcing the depicted people and their topics. Strong and flashy colours stand then for a society that is through and through spoiled by commercialism. Their words actually lost all their meaning and the only thing they actually stand for is the fanciness of the products they are promoting. While the colours express the shallowness of society, they are also an important stylistic element that runs through Godard‟s oeuvre. Since his first colour film Une Femmes Est Une Femme red, blue and white have been dominating in his works of the 1960s, creating with yellow and green an overarching theme. On the one hand stands the tricolour use of blue, red and white for him as a French filmmaker, who has in his time as movie critic always criticised the way French cinema is heading at. The colours then symbolise the transformation of French cinema by him and his filmmaking colleagues of the Nouvelle Vague. On the other hand is this reflecting him as a true film-„auteur‟, who emphasised already as a critique at the Cahier du Cinema the importance of the director‟s creative and personal vision that should, like a handwriting of a writer, be consistent through all the filmmakers works. The colours as a reference to his filmmaking are only one of many references to his prior or even upcoming films. Just in this fragment we can detect further hints to films of his. The first one is the conversation with the real American director Samuel Fuller, who playing himself in this party-scene a reference to Godard‟s two years earlier film Le Mepris. In this film not only the director Fritz Lang plays himself, but also an American film director (this time fictional) is constantly using a female translator to communicate to the male protagonist, like in the party-scene in Pierrot Le Fou with Samuel Fuller. His presents is introducing a second diegesis, the story of a real director, who is spending time in Paris. Secondly, is the jump-cut, which was mentioned above, a reference to himself, as he is regarded as the inventor of this film-technique, and to his first feature film À Bout de Souffle, where he plays with this cutting technique as a conscious style element, which was before that regarded as a sign for bad filmmaking. Also, several other reference to this movie appear several times in Pierrot Le Fou, which shall also pop-up at later point of this analysis. Now, how can we understand these references, in a scene where the colours that characterise his filmmaking are overemphasised and taken to an extreme, in respect to the commercialism, shallowness and corruption of the people presented at the party? One approach lets us read it as an affiliation with the pop-art movement that itself promoted consumerism but often with a sarcastic undertone and worked mostly with strong, recurring colour themes. But in this respect we can carry that thought a bit further. Having presented already two of countless examples in Pierrot Le Fou in which Goddard refers to his and also others filmmaking we can take the presence of Samuell Fuller and expand the idea of Godard as a self-conscious and hence postmodern filmmaker. Ferdinand asks for instance Fuller “I‟ve always wanted to know exactly what cinema is”. The idea of a movie about movies is the fundamental concept behind postmodern cinema, and by placing such a question at the beginning of the film, shows that Godard‟s film incorporated this concept (Cook, 2007, p. 547). We shall see later some of many more examples of inter-textual quotations, the concept that Wollen refers to as aperture (Wollen 2002, 74). But it is not that these references stand there without any meaning, it is just left to viewer to construct it for him or herself. For instance, Godard‟s cinema has been since its beginning said to be a reference to classical Hollywood and American B-Movies. The knowledgeable viewer thus will read the choice of Fuller again as an example of his self- consciousness film-making. As the plot is as well based on a novel by the American writer Lionel White, who became known for his hard-boiled crime fiction it is not surprising that it again, like in many Godard films imitates 1940s film-noir films, with “ordinary people tempted into crime” , gangsters, “a seductive femme-fatale that lures the protagonist into a dangerous scheme for hidden purposes of her own” and an “outlaw movie involving young criminals on the run” (Bodrdwell & Thompson, p. 409).

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