The film opens with Ferdinand, the protagonist, reading from an art history book by Élie Faure, “Velazquez, past the age of 50, no longer painted specific objects.” Upon the film's release in France in 1965, Godard explained the quotation on Velazquez in an interview: “This is the theme. It is definition. Velazquez at the end of his life no longer painted precise forms. He painted what lay between the precise forms, and this is restated by Belmondo when he imitates Michel Simon: one should not describe people but what lies between them.” (Comolli, Delahaye, Fieschi, & Guegan, 1965)
According to Ferdinand, what lies between people refers to “space, sound and color”. In Pierrot le fou, Godard touches on these elements by exploring the nature of existence, relationships between people, various art forms, and he uses Brechtian alienation devices to separate the audience from involvement.
The plot of the film, as Godard described it in an interview, is simple: “a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is. She is in cahoots with slightly shady people and it leads to a series of adventures .” However, Pierrot le fou is a completely spontaneous film. Godard recalled: “I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began. I had nothing, nothing at all. Oh well, I had the book, and a certain number of locations. I knew it would take place by the sea. ” (Cahiers Du Cinéma, October 1965) He was aware that the film would reflect the conditions under which it was made and that his methods were inseparable from his aesthetic. In In response to his lack of script, Godard replied: "But that's cinema. Life arranges itself. One is never quite sure what one is going to do tomorrow." (Brody, 2008: 63)
A conversation between Ferdinand and Marianne shows Godard's point. “M: Where are we going? F: To mystery island, like Captain Grant's children. M: To do what? F: Nothing. Just exist. M: Doesn't sound much fun . F: That's life." Godard exposes us to the question of existentialism by letting Ferdinand run away from his dispassionate life, living isolated by the sea, and in the end, painting himself blue, the color of freedom, before killing himself.
In Godard's film, the relationship between people is distant and unstable. Godard frames his actor in an empty space to achieve this goal. The cocktail party scene, for example, was shot in an unrealistic, artificial light, and the frequent changes in use of primary bright colors create a disjunctive feeling. All the figures in the frame are arranged horizontally, and they lean flatly against the wall, apart from each other. The use of widescreen magnifies the gap and distance between them. Godard believes that when confronted with the instability and distance intrinsic to human relationships, love too will eventually fade and extinguish. In a later scene when Marianne prepares breakfast for Ferdinand, she sings, “Don't ever promise to adore me all your life. Let's not make promises like that.We never thought we could live together and not grow tired of each other. Let's keep the feeling that this love of ours is a love with no tomorrow." The pessimistic but truthful lyrics seem to foreshadow the transient and doomed fate of their love.
Indeed, the portrayal of love between Ferdinand and Marianne was elegiac and reaffirms Godard's belief in the alienation between people. Their escape was adventurous and free-spirited, and their brief time together on the beach was supposed to be romantic and memorable. But as it turns out, their isolation from the rest of society heightens their differences and incompatibility. Accompanied by the beauty of nature with his beloved Marianne, Ferdinand finds his ambition in writing and spends all his money on books; he reads and writes all the time. Marianne confesses to us, "I don't give a damn about books. I just want to live." "We never understand one another," she tells Ferdinand; "You talk to me with words, and I look at you with feelings. " In the final shot,their voices echo in an intimate way accompanied by the image of the sea. It suggests Godard's belief in eternal true love, which, however, could not exist in reality.
Like Godard's first feature length film A bout de souffle, Pierrot le fou has an obsessive and explicit assembly of allusions and references to paintings (Velázquez, Picasso, Modigliani, Yves Klein, Chagall and Liechtenstein), films (Laurel and Hardy, Michel Simon) , literature (Balzac, Browning, Verne, Conrad, Rimbaud, Allan Poe), music (Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and his Piano Sonata op. 14, no. 1.) and elements of pop art, like comic books and neon signs. The name of protagonist Marianne Renoir is borrowed from Auguste Renoir and Ferdinand from a French author, Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Godard is determined to root the tradition of cinema within the history of art forms.
“Contemporary art cinema appears to emphasize the ways in which cinema is auditory as well as visual. The music as well as paintings in film guarantees the aesthetic value.” (Wilson, 1999: 106) According to la politique des auteurs, a concept of the auteur theory, film directors are not simply analogous to writers of novels but are literally capable of writing novels in the audiovisual language of film: “A film should be an all engrossing, mind- and sense-engaging experience and to express a gamut of external and internal states.” (Cook, 1993: 567) Godard deliberately uses a mix of high and low art in the film. He applies conversation-like voice-over and evokes emotion directly from these outside art works and sounds. One amazing thing about Pierrot le fou is that the very experience of watching the film, with its disconnected images and thoughts,makes us create some form of understanding of our own.
The elements of Pierrot le fou may look like a typical film noir with its mysterious femme fatale, murder, corpses in blood, a car crash, bullying, and suicide. But we never really engage in or become attached to their adventure, and we are constantly disrupted by the disjunctive narration and the montage digression. For example, in the cocktail party scene, Ferdinand throws a cake at a woman, and Godard spliced a scene of a firework into the narration. Sometimes the music does not connect with the plot, as if it is in independent existence. For instance, on their way to Riviera, the music from a classical piece suddenly stops, restarts, and stops abruptly again at the middle of a note. Godard constantly reminds us that we are watching a film by disrupting our connection with the experiences of the characters.
Even the characters themselves know that they are making a movie and do not seem to bother convincing us with their acting. In a car scene, Marianne asks Ferdinand who he is talking to, Ferdinand replies: “the audience.” She looks back at the camera, smiles, nods, and turns around. The characters address us with thoughts, quotations, instructions, and anything except their unique personalities.
With performers like these, Godard rejects naturalistic drama and set the audience apart from the narration and leads the audience to contemplate in depth the implications of his techniques. We are always the sober and irrelevant outsiders of his chaotic narration. He applies the Brechtian technique to achieve a double distancing effect called “Verfremdungseffekt” between the actor and the part and between the actor and the spectator. As Brecht states, “Spectator and actor ought not to approach one another but to move apart. Otherwise the element of terror necessary to all recognition is lacking.” (Brecht, 1978:26)
Godard once remarked that Pierrot le fou is “not really a film, it's an attempt at cinema. Life is the subject, with [Cinema]Scope and color as its attributes.” I applaud the film for its audacious rejection of the “tradition of quality,” its cinematic consciousness, and the Godardian philosophy which abounds in this masterpiece. It is a revolutionary and successful attempt to present life with its banalities in a seemingly random and discrete way.
Works Cited
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978
Brody, Richard. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Metropolitan, 2008
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Delahaye, Michel. Fieschi, Jean-Andre. & Guegan, Gerard. Let's talk about Pierrot: An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Cahiers du Cinéma, Oct. 1965, 171
Wilson, Emma. French Cinema Since 1950: Personal Histories. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999
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