Art/Movie & Theater

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Altin Topi
Alb-Club August 2001

Who can be the author of such wisdom, - the title of this miniature essay, - other than Jean-Luc Godard? The "Band of Outsiders", or translated in other words "Tres Bon Bonnie and her Clydes", is reissued these days with a new print and subtitles, being a masterpiece of mood, nuance and emotions. It is playing at Film Forum in Manhattan, New York City.

Once Godard said that he made the film to "sell a lot of tickets", but he didn't. All his films were unable to sell a lot of tickets. Apart of this, his films didn't disappear in the timeless oblivion, and as this gangsters' film of French smell, it rose from the ashes and dust of time and arrived at the Film Forum with a catalog's worth of movie geek ephemera. Quentin Tarantino himself adopted its name to "A Band Apart" for his production company and as per Godard himself: "Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He'd have done better to give me some money."


Godard is a "funny" guy, 70 years old now, never apologetic about his zigzags and his last thirty years of producing only a gnomic eight-hour history of cinema, a succession of tedious, deliberately incompressible pictures like that of a ridiculous King Lear, which he never read as with all Shakespeare's plays, or 'Hail Mary', very controversial, and provoking the wrath of Vatican which banned the movie, but launching at the same time the career of the biggest star of the contemporary French cinema, - Juliette Binoche. The nativity story was re-enacted as per Godard's vision in a new set of circumstances - a gas station, Mary(Juliette B.) as a petrol station attendant and Joseph her cabdriver boyfriend.

Godard likes gangsters, he was one time a thief himself, but he did the thief, just only to meet his life's means and ends. He doesn't like the details of gangster’s deeds. He draws his energy, and attention to pure emotions; he strips down the American gangster from pure action to pure emotional essence. As per the Swiss cinematographer, estranger from the mainstream directors, the film is a fusion of Alice in Wonderland who meets Franz Kafka. The soul of the movie are heroes, who are some wonderers running around Louvre, taking a stab at learning English, stumbling through some dance steps, and as per Godard's words: "are not among those who want to be cut off from the world, it is the world that is far from them." Godard likes to say that he was writing essays rather than telling stories, and this is true for his famous "Masculine-Feminine", whose subject has been famously described by its line that his heroes are "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola". But not in 'The Band", the kids now can be the children of Board and Billy the Kid, they can be only 'Tres Bon Bonnie and her Clydes'. His famous quote regarding the moviemaking "you need just a girl and a gun" freed him from genre's limitations. His film, like all his films (and all his themes) is filled with quotations from books and slogans, philosophical concepts, and in a way, leftist agitprop.

On this path, the love also is a kind of combination of beautiful scrubbed epigrams with sloppily inserted wanderings and musings. Let's remind the other star discovered by him, Jean-Paul Belmondo as the small French hood and the American girl (Jean Seberg) at the intersecting and clashing sensibilities of two cultures that had formed him, the juncture of American and French universe: "Do you know William Faulkner? Seberg asks at one point, and Belmondo replies bluntly. "No. Who's that? Some guy you slept with?

And what about him and Truffaut, who particularly help him to get off the level of the B-Movie Studio, and generously drew him into feature-filmmaking with 'A Bout de Souffle'(Breathless, 1960), and which was based on the idea by Truffaut and credits Chabrol as the artistic supervisor? He deliberately provoked an irreparable rift with Truffaut. In 1973 he wrote an insulting letter about La Nuit Americaine, attacking the film, accusing Truffaut of dishonesty, then asking Truffaut to co-produce and invest 10 million francs in his next film. He received a six-page reply that began: "So you won't be obliged to read this unpleasant letter right to the end. I'm starting with the essential point; I will not co-produce your film. Truffaut went on to list a succession of public and private offences, stating that 'you're nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal'. I think this is enough to represent the French way of insulting each other.

At the end, here some quotes from Godard's wisdom:
There is no point in having sharp images when you have fuzzy ideas.
I don't think you should 'feel' about a movie. You should feel about a woman.
You can't kiss a movie.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.