Out of Focus: Godard’s ‘Pierrot le Fou’ experiments with New Wave

During his brief cameo in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 ultra-cool masterpiece “Pierrot le Fou,” Hollywood renegade Samuel Fuller famously said, “Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word, emotion.” His quip occurs during a party, but it perfectly comments on the meaning of cinema, and foreshadows the events that will follow in the film itself.

Before slipping further down a path of pedantically Marxist cinema, Godard made “Pierrot le Fou,” one of his last great films: a quixotic, lovers on the lam movie, a kind of pop-art “Bonnie and Clyde.” As part of a retrospective of Godard’s films, “Pierrot le Fou” will be playing at the Aero Theatre this Thursday.

Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as Ferdinand, an out-of-work man fed up with the stuffy intellectualism all around him. Overly impulsive, his response is to run off with Marianne (Anna Karina, Godard’s wife at the time), a young woman he had already had a relationship with once before in the distant past. With violent gangsters hot on the trail of Marianne for some largely unarticulated reason, the two lovebirds flee to the French Riviera while engaging in a slew of criminal activities, including sticking up a gas station in Three Stooges slapstick-fashion and stealing cars.

The resulting film is an ultra-stylized crime picture rendered in a stark comic book color scheme. Injected with occasional musical sequences that appear out of the blue and end just as quickly, the film is, thus, a strange experience, one that is both literary and political. It’s typical Godard.

Some weeks ago, I profiled another film by Godard – 1963’s “Contempt,” a denunciation of commercial, profit-driven cinema. By 1965, fueled by burgeoning youth and anti-war movements, Godard had switched his path to a more politically radical cinema. Increasingly more experimental, he slowly began to distance his audiences further. By the end of the decade, he would alienate almost all of his initial supporters.

“Pierrot le Fou” is an interesting film in that it seems to oscillate between the youthful and spontaneous style of the early French New Wave and the stuffy, pedantic films that Godard would soon make (like “La Chinoise”). It is one of the final breaths of the movement, a cinematic rebellion that was just about to fall over the precipice.

Borrowing a throwaway plot from a forgettable piece of pulp fiction, Lionel White’s dime-store paperback “Obsession,” the overtly political “Pierrot le Fou” comes off as a collage of different and even conflicting ideas from an artist in the midst of great change. Godard is a director trying to reconcile and merge his lofty, political ideologies with the French cinema he had significantly redirected. Never is this more evident than in the sheer variety of cultural references throughout the film: everything from Nicholas Ray’s brilliant American Western “Johnny Guitar” to comic strips to Chairman Mao.

“Pierrot le Fou” stands as one of Godard’s last great films. Inventive and experimental, yet still rooted in standard narrative cinema, it is a brilliant story of doomed love and double-crosses, set against a pop culture landscape.

What locally screened films do you think deserve their time in the spotlight?