Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina. 1965

Pierrot le fou (1965)

"After the release of Pierrot le fou, Godard gave the public a skeleton key to it: 'The only scenario that I had, the only subject...was to convey the sense of what Balthazar Claës was doing in The Unknown Masterpiece.' The Unknown Masterpiece is a novella by Balzac about a painter in seventeenth-century France who has been working alone for a decade on a portrait of a woman that he considers to be not only his masterpiece but an epochal advance in the history of art; he shows it to two artist friends, who find it to be an incomprehensible mess, a blunder and a disaster, and he kills himself. But Balthazar Claës is not a character in that novella (the painter is named Frenhofer); rather, he is the protagonist of another work by Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute. In that novel, an alchemist in single-minded pursuit of the secret of nature brings about his wife’s premature death, his financial ruin, and his public humiliation. The two fictions by Balzac that Godard’s memory had run together unite in Pierrot le fou, a self-portrait of the artist on the verge of pushing a philosophical inquiry into form, or rather formlessness, to an extreme that destroyed not only himself but also his wife."

462 to go

Louisiana Story (1948, dir. Robert Flaherty): The setting is lovely and beautifully shot but man did this one bore me.

The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (1966, dir. André Delvaux): The protagonist is such a wet tissue of a human being but that just makes this story of devastating, all-encompassing obsession work all the better.

Pierrot le Fou (1965, dir. Jean-Luc Godard): This project has fully Stockholm Syndromed me into enjoying Godard.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978, dir. Lau Kar-leung): Not really my cup of tea but it's very well made and surprisingly funny.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960, dir. François Truffaut): Truffaut has always been a bit too esoteric for me but that wasn't the case here - I actually loved this movie! What can I say, I can't resist a pathetic male lead or witty, foul-mouthed waitresses, not to mention how beautiful the film looks - Paris in the 1960s is ever charming.

Bigger Than Life (1956, dir. Nicholas Ray): A beautifully crafted, nightmarish melodrama. Obviously the science is 100% bullshit but the anxiety and fear are very real. It also kind of shocked me how openly critical it is of at those at the time sacred concepts of the American Dream, the noble patriarch and the nuclear family.

Body Heat (1981, dir. Lawrence Kasdan): A very fun little piece of 80s sleaze. Kathleen Turner is mesmerizing, a modern day (at the time) Lauren Bacall. And people really aren't sweaty enough in modern day cinema.

The Five Venoms (1978, dir. Chang Cheh): Actually, I think I'm starting to get this genre. The structure felt strange to me but the plot was gripping and the characters fun, if not particularly complex (Toad was my favorite). The amount of awful wigs - and fake beards! - delighted me to no end.

"He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things--she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so--it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? Nothing she could do for him? (...) And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)--"

(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)

Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Anna Karina in “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard.

Dropping some of my favorite lines from the movie, Pierrot le fou directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1965. A movie about how love, despite its spontaneity, can drive one to madness 👏

Anna Karina, Pierrot Le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965