Pierrot le fou

29/04/2025

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Convoluting the Absurd

       Speaking of Godard’s work while in conversation in Paris at a conference in 2018 about his own, Philippe Garrel proposed Jean-Luc Godard’s films have stories — the viewer has to find them within a form that has all but obliterated the narrative throughline. How true this is of all Godard’s work may be moot. But it is a good way of looking at Pierrot le fou. It is the story of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who meets a woman from the past, Marianne (Anna Karina), taking off with her after a party, and leaves behind a wife with a very rich father — and a child who may be only about four or five but whom he reads art historian Eli Faure to when he lies in the tub as she comes into the bathroom. His parenting skills are hardly optimal, and he fails to improve on them by leaving his wife and kid altogether as he and Marianne shack up but very quickly take off to the south of France as their lives are endangered. They have become involved in arms dealing, apparently accidentally, but we will discover that Marianne isn’t quite as innocent as she seems. People are found dead, others are in pursuit, and a man Marianne claims to be her brother is her boyfriend. The lover and Marianne escape to a small island; Ferdinand kills them and then blows himself up with explosives. 

            The plot is a mixture of the convoluted and the absurd, but it's chiefly a chance for Godard to offer his typical blend of the cinephilic with the sociological, the referential with the formally playful. Nobody more than Godard in the sixties seemed to take to heart Pasolini’s claim, made the same year as Pierrot le fou’s release, 1965, that “the reality of the possible ‘institutional film language”…does not exist, or is infinite, and the author must cut out his vocabulary from this infinity every time.” (‘The Cinema of Poetry’) Pasolini’s is an intricate essay drawing on film semiotics and proposes filmmakers use literary techniques (free indirect discourse) while resisting the notion that film can resemble a language. However, what can be taken from Pasolini's piece is the idea of infinite possibilities in film, which has the world as its source over the words that represent it, and where the author cuts out their own vocabulary from this world. As Pasolini insists: “the filmmaker does not have a dictionary, he has infinite possibilities.” (‘The Cinema of Poetry') Godard could have made a film that minimised this intrusion by playing fair to the genre codes that might just about have been extracted from the film. Yet it’s as if the abundance of possibilities that comes from other generic codes. and from the manifold world itself, were too irresistible to ignore. Whether it is suddenly invoking the musical, or absorbed by the locational specifics, Godard proposes that most filmmakers work within the narrow focus of narrative demand and hewishes to put what is usually in the background to exist no less in the foreground, and create an odd democratising of the image so that the usual hierarchies don’t apply. As Pasolini reckons: “he puts everything on the same level head on.” Angela Dalla Vache sees the film’s various elements in the context of collage, and says “according [to Donald B. Kuspit, as soon as they enter the collage, fragments from the debris of daily life overcome their banality and numbness, while their gain in expressive intensity is due to their participation in a brand new artistic effort.” (‘“Pierrot le Fou": Cinema as Collage against Painting’) 

     Whether it is a murder or dance, an argument or a suicide, Godard doesn’t offer dramatic distinctions, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying he is indifferent to ethical values. It is more that he wants to show everything is both real and made up simultaneously, a combination of codes and the world from which they are extracted. The point isn’t to take anything seriously but to see with seriousness the possibilities available to film. It is partly what distinguishes Godard from the postmodernism of the hyperreal, where image and reality become indistinguishable. As Andy McLaverty-Robinson says, “Hyperreality differs from other realities in that the division between reality and imaginary disappears.” (Ceasefire) In Godard’s work, the distinction is still there even if he no longer accepts that some images are more important than others. Many post-modern filmmakers, including Tarantino and the Coens are well aware of what matters when it comes to pushing their stories along; they have less interest in the reality out of which such stories come. The image is the thing. In Godard’s work, things are the thing, and his purpose is to film them without believing they have to be promptly locked into plot demand. They have a truth that can be extracted from them as readily as a story that can be formed around them. “For three­ quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth”, Godard says, “which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. This was how Sartre began writing his novels. La Nausee.” (Godard on Godard)

               If Garrel is right to say that Godard’s films have stories, but you have to find them in the thicket of preoccupations, fascinations and peregrinations, then we shouldn't take this to mean he has no interest or grasp of narrative, nor that he wants to make the viewer work very hard to comprehend the story. (Godard and Christopher Nolan have nothing in common.) It is that film is the medium better than any other art form which captures life. We needn’t offer this as a naive defence of realism semiotics and post-modernism helped undermine: semiotics by proposing that film could be understood as a language and post-modernism by manipulating these codes that proposed reality had very little to do with anything. Godard wished to hold on to the presence of reality in his work (filming on location, using natural rather than artificial light, actors often paying close to their apparent personalities rather than creating fully developed characterisation etc,) but also the presence of how that reality is manipulated into film form and by the history of the medium. As Godard says: “I thought in terms of cinematographic attitudes. For some shots I referred to scenes I remembered from Preminger, Cukor etc. And the character played by Jean Seberg (in Breathless) was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse.” (Godard on Godard) Yet that would merely have made him a post-modernist before his time when what matters more is the various tension points his works generate. When Ferdinand and Marianne decide to torch the car they’ve escaped from Paris in, hoping to evade those who will be seeking them out, we also see a concrete piece of flyover and a car rammed into a tree with a couple lying dead. By implication, we may assume that the couple were driving along this stray bit of motorway and obliviously careened over it to their death. But how did they get onto it, considering it is a random piece of concrete in the middle of a field? It is a surreal image that may lead us to wonder where Godard found it, and if it was there ,how did it find itself in such a place? Its presence is the best explanation for the couple’s accident, but makes no sense within the sense that we try to establish. We have a found-location but confusing images which refuse to let us take them straight. 

        It is perhaps this notion of refusing to allow the viewer to take the image straight that is central to the director’s work and why both semiotic assumptions or post-modern claims for Godard don’t fit. He is too interested in the vagaries of reality for the former, and resistant to the facility of the latter, to fall into either, which would allow the viewer to ‘read’ the film. When, for example, a horror film or noir announces its code in the use of a point-of-view shot following a character, or in the presence of a femme fatale holding a cigarette and wearing an ankle bracelet, we know where we are. And we know too that a horror film like Scream or a noir such as Body Heat knows that we know the conventions and makes us aware of their use as a meta-dimension of the generic, that we get the codes and comprehend the self-reflexive use of them. Godard insists that we won’t know where we are because the codifications and the knowingness keep sinking back into a reality out of which they come. Godard may have taken his life by assisted suicide, but he did so at the age of 91, as if cinema kept him alive for so long if we take into account a remark he made while being interviewed about Pierrot le fou. The interviewer provocatively proposes if an artist whose work we see absorbed into the film’s look, Nicolas de Stael, had been a filmmaker, he might not have taken his life at 41. Godard replies: “I agree. The cinema is optimistic because everything is always possible, nothing is ever prohibited; all you need is to be in touch with life.” (Godard on Godard) To enclose himself within the codified and the reflexive would be to limit what he wishes to remain without boundaries. Cinema is a world of things a filmmaker can extract in many ways and that needn’t be pressed into the limits of ready understanding, but can open up to both the very concrete and the equally perplexing. 

     To understand this, we can think of the scene which combines a musical with a murder mystery and a documentary on the actors playing the roles. After the party in Paris, they go back to Marianne’s apartment,t and it is the next morning. Marianne makes breakfast and we see in various areas of the apartment numerous rifles and machine guns. When she goes to wake Ferdinand up she finds someone murdered on the bed. 

The film proposes the most pressing problem the night before wasn’t the body but the space it was occupying, as they would have had to settle for the narrow bed in the room next door. Instead of speaking about the murder, she bursts into song as the film announces itself briefly as a musical, in keeping with Godard’s earlier A Woman is a Woman. Marianne singing about the nature of her love for Ferdinand might not be the most pressing question on our minds (the guns and the body are surely the priority). But it isn’t the filmmaker’s as he watches his own beautiful wife singing at what turned out to be the end of their marriage. (They divorced in 1965) Some might see this as insufferably indulgent but Godard would see other filmmaker’s willingness to cast in films their various muses without acknowledging the fact as the height of hypocrisy — a point he noted years later in a famous letter exchange between himself and Francois Truffaut, calling Truffaut a liar, “because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other evening at Chez Francis is not in your film, and one can’t help wondering why the director is the only one who doesn’t screw in La Nuit americaine.” (Moving Image Insights) 

        Godard’s purpose was to remove the diegetic assumptions most other films would hold to and assume everything could be up for becoming part of the film, whether it would be breaking the fourth wall as actors look into the camera, allowing the non-diegetic music to cut out halfway through a scene, allowing actors to offer political tracts without any attempt at containing them within dramatic necessity, or to offer aesthetic musings without feeling obliged to containthem within the story. When Ferdinand reads a passage from Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Gugnal’s Band, this has as much to do with the character sharing a first name as with any pertinence to the story. It isn’t a detail that deepens the tale (as the references to Frankenstein become vital to The Spirit of the Beehive or A Streetcar Named Desire to All About My Mother). They may not be random but neither are they integral — ‘disintegral’, perhaps, as Godard may expect them to evoke meaning but not quite demand it. The same happens to be so with the paintings that intersperse the film; not the de Staels which work as a visual template for the sort of colours and tones the film works with, nor even the Picasso and Matisse reproductions we see on the walls of Marianne’s flat, but those by Van Gogh and Renoir that function as non-diegetic inserts, to use Christian Metz’s term. We know that the impressionists and post-impressionists were enamoured by the south of France. But that wouldn’t usually be reason enough for a film to edit into the work instances of their paintings. When Vincente Minelli uses various Van Gogh works in Lust for Life as he tries to integrate his visual design with the Dutch artist’s work, this makes immediate sense: he is making a biopic of the artist. Pierrot le fou lacks that immediate sense, but Godard replaces it with immediate non-sense, where we search for its sense rather than assume it. 

      Almost all films contain images of the world in one form or another, even the most studio-oriented movie will use actors who go off and have a life when they leave the set, will use cars that may have an existence before and after the shoot, and smoke cigarettes that were grown in plantations and produced in factories. There may be exceptions to this: animated features or those showing us no images at all (like Derek Jarman’s Blue and Joao Cesar Monteiro’s Branca de Neve), but almost all films to varying degrees are made out of the things of the world and no filmmaker more than Godard has proposed these must be acknowledged without necessarily being incorporated. Indeed, the more they are shown, without being integrated into the work, the more they exist as things unto themselves. Godard proposed, “to me there is no difference between documentaries and fiction films. I have always tried to shoot the fiction films in a more documentary way so that bring what they are, the way they look to the picture.” (Film Forum) He may also add that “it is an impossibility to avoid reality in film”, even if we have proposed animated film and the use of blank screen can all but eradicate it. But he has more than a point in the context of his work, and it gives his films, especially during the 1960s, a proliferating purposefulness, a dispersive density, yet all the while containing the images within what can only be called the Godardian.

       It is there in his use of colour, in the apparent arbitrariness of his camera, evident when the film cuts away after Ferdinand drives the car into the sea and tilts up at the sky, in the car crashes and killings presented as distractions and irritations. It is as if Godard proposes that telling a story is the easiest way a filmmaker can hold together the material object that is a work of film. Instead, he suggests that you can contain the story within a much bigger material object that will hold numerous objects that needn’t further the story but hide it - all the better to bring out what is usually hidden intothe bright light of the Godardian — to remember the truths that are hidden for three-quarters of the day and most of a film’s running time. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Pierrot le fou

Convoluting the Absurd

       Speaking of Godard’s work while in conversation in Paris at a conference in 2018 about his own, Philippe Garrel proposed Jean-Luc Godard’s films have stories — the viewer has to find them within a form that has all but obliterated the narrative throughline. How true this is of all Godard’s work may be moot. But it is a good way of looking at Pierrot le fou. It is the story of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who meets a woman from the past, Marianne (Anna Karina), taking off with her after a party, and leaves behind a wife with a very rich father — and a child who may be only about four or five but whom he reads art historian Eli Faure to when he lies in the tub as she comes into the bathroom. His parenting skills are hardly optimal, and he fails to improve on them by leaving his wife and kid altogether as he and Marianne shack up but very quickly take off to the south of France as their lives are endangered. They have become involved in arms dealing, apparently accidentally, but we will discover that Marianne isn’t quite as innocent as she seems. People are found dead, others are in pursuit, and a man Marianne claims to be her brother is her boyfriend. The lover and Marianne escape to a small island; Ferdinand kills them and then blows himself up with explosives. 

            The plot is a mixture of the convoluted and the absurd, but it's chiefly a chance for Godard to offer his typical blend of the cinephilic with the sociological, the referential with the formally playful. Nobody more than Godard in the sixties seemed to take to heart Pasolini’s claim, made the same year as Pierrot le fou’s release, 1965, that “the reality of the possible ‘institutional film language”…does not exist, or is infinite, and the author must cut out his vocabulary from this infinity every time.” (‘The Cinema of Poetry’) Pasolini’s is an intricate essay drawing on film semiotics and proposes filmmakers use literary techniques (free indirect discourse) while resisting the notion that film can resemble a language. However, what can be taken from Pasolini's piece is the idea of infinite possibilities in film, which has the world as its source over the words that represent it, and where the author cuts out their own vocabulary from this world. As Pasolini insists: “the filmmaker does not have a dictionary, he has infinite possibilities.” (‘The Cinema of Poetry') Godard could have made a film that minimised this intrusion by playing fair to the genre codes that might just about have been extracted from the film. Yet it’s as if the abundance of possibilities that comes from other generic codes. and from the manifold world itself, were too irresistible to ignore. Whether it is suddenly invoking the musical, or absorbed by the locational specifics, Godard proposes that most filmmakers work within the narrow focus of narrative demand and hewishes to put what is usually in the background to exist no less in the foreground, and create an odd democratising of the image so that the usual hierarchies don’t apply. As Pasolini reckons: “he puts everything on the same level head on.” Angela Dalla Vache sees the film’s various elements in the context of collage, and says “according [to Donald B. Kuspit, as soon as they enter the collage, fragments from the debris of daily life overcome their banality and numbness, while their gain in expressive intensity is due to their participation in a brand new artistic effort.” (‘“Pierrot le Fou": Cinema as Collage against Painting’) 

     Whether it is a murder or dance, an argument or a suicide, Godard doesn’t offer dramatic distinctions, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying he is indifferent to ethical values. It is more that he wants to show everything is both real and made up simultaneously, a combination of codes and the world from which they are extracted. The point isn’t to take anything seriously but to see with seriousness the possibilities available to film. It is partly what distinguishes Godard from the postmodernism of the hyperreal, where image and reality become indistinguishable. As Andy McLaverty-Robinson says, “Hyperreality differs from other realities in that the division between reality and imaginary disappears.” (Ceasefire) In Godard’s work, the distinction is still there even if he no longer accepts that some images are more important than others. Many post-modern filmmakers, including Tarantino and the Coens are well aware of what matters when it comes to pushing their stories along; they have less interest in the reality out of which such stories come. The image is the thing. In Godard’s work, things are the thing, and his purpose is to film them without believing they have to be promptly locked into plot demand. They have a truth that can be extracted from them as readily as a story that can be formed around them. “For three­ quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth”, Godard says, “which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. This was how Sartre began writing his novels. La Nausee.” (Godard on Godard)

               If Garrel is right to say that Godard’s films have stories, but you have to find them in the thicket of preoccupations, fascinations and peregrinations, then we shouldn't take this to mean he has no interest or grasp of narrative, nor that he wants to make the viewer work very hard to comprehend the story. (Godard and Christopher Nolan have nothing in common.) It is that film is the medium better than any other art form which captures life. We needn’t offer this as a naive defence of realism semiotics and post-modernism helped undermine: semiotics by proposing that film could be understood as a language and post-modernism by manipulating these codes that proposed reality had very little to do with anything. Godard wished to hold on to the presence of reality in his work (filming on location, using natural rather than artificial light, actors often paying close to their apparent personalities rather than creating fully developed characterisation etc,) but also the presence of how that reality is manipulated into film form and by the history of the medium. As Godard says: “I thought in terms of cinematographic attitudes. For some shots I referred to scenes I remembered from Preminger, Cukor etc. And the character played by Jean Seberg (in Breathless) was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse.” (Godard on Godard) Yet that would merely have made him a post-modernist before his time when what matters more is the various tension points his works generate. When Ferdinand and Marianne decide to torch the car they’ve escaped from Paris in, hoping to evade those who will be seeking them out, we also see a concrete piece of flyover and a car rammed into a tree with a couple lying dead. By implication, we may assume that the couple were driving along this stray bit of motorway and obliviously careened over it to their death. But how did they get onto it, considering it is a random piece of concrete in the middle of a field? It is a surreal image that may lead us to wonder where Godard found it, and if it was there ,how did it find itself in such a place? Its presence is the best explanation for the couple’s accident, but makes no sense within the sense that we try to establish. We have a found-location but confusing images which refuse to let us take them straight. 

        It is perhaps this notion of refusing to allow the viewer to take the image straight that is central to the director’s work and why both semiotic assumptions or post-modern claims for Godard don’t fit. He is too interested in the vagaries of reality for the former, and resistant to the facility of the latter, to fall into either, which would allow the viewer to ‘read’ the film. When, for example, a horror film or noir announces its code in the use of a point-of-view shot following a character, or in the presence of a femme fatale holding a cigarette and wearing an ankle bracelet, we know where we are. And we know too that a horror film like Scream or a noir such as Body Heat knows that we know the conventions and makes us aware of their use as a meta-dimension of the generic, that we get the codes and comprehend the self-reflexive use of them. Godard insists that we won’t know where we are because the codifications and the knowingness keep sinking back into a reality out of which they come. Godard may have taken his life by assisted suicide, but he did so at the age of 91, as if cinema kept him alive for so long if we take into account a remark he made while being interviewed about Pierrot le fou. The interviewer provocatively proposes if an artist whose work we see absorbed into the film’s look, Nicolas de Stael, had been a filmmaker, he might not have taken his life at 41. Godard replies: “I agree. The cinema is optimistic because everything is always possible, nothing is ever prohibited; all you need is to be in touch with life.” (Godard on Godard) To enclose himself within the codified and the reflexive would be to limit what he wishes to remain without boundaries. Cinema is a world of things a filmmaker can extract in many ways and that needn’t be pressed into the limits of ready understanding, but can open up to both the very concrete and the equally perplexing. 

     To understand this, we can think of the scene which combines a musical with a murder mystery and a documentary on the actors playing the roles. After the party in Paris, they go back to Marianne’s apartment,t and it is the next morning. Marianne makes breakfast and we see in various areas of the apartment numerous rifles and machine guns. When she goes to wake Ferdinand up she finds someone murdered on the bed. 

The film proposes the most pressing problem the night before wasn’t the body but the space it was occupying, as they would have had to settle for the narrow bed in the room next door. Instead of speaking about the murder, she bursts into song as the film announces itself briefly as a musical, in keeping with Godard’s earlier A Woman is a Woman. Marianne singing about the nature of her love for Ferdinand might not be the most pressing question on our minds (the guns and the body are surely the priority). But it isn’t the filmmaker’s as he watches his own beautiful wife singing at what turned out to be the end of their marriage. (They divorced in 1965) Some might see this as insufferably indulgent but Godard would see other filmmaker’s willingness to cast in films their various muses without acknowledging the fact as the height of hypocrisy — a point he noted years later in a famous letter exchange between himself and Francois Truffaut, calling Truffaut a liar, “because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other evening at Chez Francis is not in your film, and one can’t help wondering why the director is the only one who doesn’t screw in La Nuit americaine.” (Moving Image Insights) 

        Godard’s purpose was to remove the diegetic assumptions most other films would hold to and assume everything could be up for becoming part of the film, whether it would be breaking the fourth wall as actors look into the camera, allowing the non-diegetic music to cut out halfway through a scene, allowing actors to offer political tracts without any attempt at containing them within dramatic necessity, or to offer aesthetic musings without feeling obliged to containthem within the story. When Ferdinand reads a passage from Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Gugnal’s Band, this has as much to do with the character sharing a first name as with any pertinence to the story. It isn’t a detail that deepens the tale (as the references to Frankenstein become vital to The Spirit of the Beehive or A Streetcar Named Desire to All About My Mother). They may not be random but neither are they integral — ‘disintegral’, perhaps, as Godard may expect them to evoke meaning but not quite demand it. The same happens to be so with the paintings that intersperse the film; not the de Staels which work as a visual template for the sort of colours and tones the film works with, nor even the Picasso and Matisse reproductions we see on the walls of Marianne’s flat, but those by Van Gogh and Renoir that function as non-diegetic inserts, to use Christian Metz’s term. We know that the impressionists and post-impressionists were enamoured by the south of France. But that wouldn’t usually be reason enough for a film to edit into the work instances of their paintings. When Vincente Minelli uses various Van Gogh works in Lust for Life as he tries to integrate his visual design with the Dutch artist’s work, this makes immediate sense: he is making a biopic of the artist. Pierrot le fou lacks that immediate sense, but Godard replaces it with immediate non-sense, where we search for its sense rather than assume it. 

      Almost all films contain images of the world in one form or another, even the most studio-oriented movie will use actors who go off and have a life when they leave the set, will use cars that may have an existence before and after the shoot, and smoke cigarettes that were grown in plantations and produced in factories. There may be exceptions to this: animated features or those showing us no images at all (like Derek Jarman’s Blue and Joao Cesar Monteiro’s Branca de Neve), but almost all films to varying degrees are made out of the things of the world and no filmmaker more than Godard has proposed these must be acknowledged without necessarily being incorporated. Indeed, the more they are shown, without being integrated into the work, the more they exist as things unto themselves. Godard proposed, “to me there is no difference between documentaries and fiction films. I have always tried to shoot the fiction films in a more documentary way so that bring what they are, the way they look to the picture.” (Film Forum) He may also add that “it is an impossibility to avoid reality in film”, even if we have proposed animated film and the use of blank screen can all but eradicate it. But he has more than a point in the context of his work, and it gives his films, especially during the 1960s, a proliferating purposefulness, a dispersive density, yet all the while containing the images within what can only be called the Godardian.

       It is there in his use of colour, in the apparent arbitrariness of his camera, evident when the film cuts away after Ferdinand drives the car into the sea and tilts up at the sky, in the car crashes and killings presented as distractions and irritations. It is as if Godard proposes that telling a story is the easiest way a filmmaker can hold together the material object that is a work of film. Instead, he suggests that you can contain the story within a much bigger material object that will hold numerous objects that needn’t further the story but hide it - all the better to bring out what is usually hidden intothe bright light of the Godardian — to remember the truths that are hidden for three-quarters of the day and most of a film’s running time. 


© Tony McKibbin