Bande a part (The Outsiders).

It was the title of revolutionary French Director Jean-Luc Godards reimagined gangster movie that Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender used for their production company in 1991. A further Tarantino connection with Bande a part (1964) is the dance routine known as the ‘Madison scene’, which included the three main characters and took place in a coffee bar, which he is said to have been the influence for the dance scene in Pulp Fiction (1994) between Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega in Rabbit Jack Slims Restaurant.

Jean-Luc Godard was a critic at the hugely influential magazine Cahiers Du Cinéma in the early 1950s. He found that the traditions of French cinema at the time (which he believed favoured an established set of directors and actors and were not reflective of the political concerns of the young) were outmoded and irrelevant. He felt the films appealed only to the bourgeoisie, so he and other critics including Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer made their own films. This movement became the French New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague which contained then unconventional filmic elements such as handheld camerawork, non-professional actors, shooting on location, live sound and a disregard for the rules and formula’s of mainstream Hollywood cinema.

The Madison.

Four years after Breathless (1960), Godard’s best-known film, he made this tribute to the Hollywood pulp crime movies of the forties. Bande a part involves two restless and streetwise young men Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) who enlist the help of a young lady they both fancy, Odile (Danish actress Anna Karina who was married to Godard at the time) to rob the house where she lives with her aunt.

Franz and Arthur play their games.

An entertaining gem with cool set pieces which not only included the afore mentioned dance scene but also a headlong race through the Louvre. Godard’s trademarks of this period are ever present including a cool jazz soundtrack, jump cuts, smooth traveling shots and a relaxed moral tone.  A good place to start if your not familiar with the Frenchman’s body of work and then move on to A bout de soufflé (1960) and then enjoy Brigitte Bardot at the very pinnacle of her beauty in 1963’s Le mepris. 

Made in USA.

I was familiar with some of the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard vast output which included his 1960 debut feature film A bout de souffle basically a very cool gangster movie with a great jazz soundtrack starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alphaville (1965) which was shown as part of BBC 2’s World Cinema strand which went out on a Friday night in the late sixties best described as a science fiction film noir and starred Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina who was Godard’s wife at the time and Le Mepris (1963) the French directors most commercially successful film and his cinematic attack on Hollywood. It starred France’s biggest female box office attraction Ms Brigitte Bardot and was a film about filming the impossible, Homers Odyssey. All of them were prior to his mid sixties departure from plot-driven stories.

An example following this change is Made in USA (1966). The star of the film Anna Karina says at one point during what seems a rather long 85 minute running time ‘Every thing is double Dutch to me’ well I can sympathise!  I believe Godard is attempting a political statement or is he being simple elitist, is the film meant to be understood? It involves Paula Nelson (Karina) who is supposed to be a female version of Humphrey Bogart, complete with trench coat and droopy cigarette; she travels to Atlantic City to meet her lover Richard Politzer. On arrival she learns that he is dead and decides to investigate his death.  

Art work from Made in USA.

Made in USA is neither entertaining nor informative, other than perhaps its political statement, it’s not an attack on your emotions plus there’s no real narrative cohesion. Godard’s genius, it’s claimed, is making his films seen natural and improvised but they are far from it, we know that the dialog and the camera work were both calculated and worked out precisely. While Godard was shooting this film he was also working on the movie Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) a film that allegedly does not have a narrative structure either instead ‘presenting an essay-like study of the directors view of contemporary life’ I think I’ll stick to the films he made prior to 1965!