Le Petit Soldat

 

Godard making his Hitchcockian cameo

Writer/director Jean-Luc Godard

Godard with cinematographer Raoul Coutard

Godard on the set

LE PETIT SOLDAT (The Little Soldier)                   B                                                                 France  (88 mi)  1963  d: Jean-Luc Godard

 The time for action is past.  I have grown older.  The time for reflection has come.                  ―opening narration from Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor)

In a 1971 essay, filmmaker Satyajit Ray summed up this early film (Tribute To Jean Luc Godard), “A cinema of the head and not of the heart, and therefore a cinema of the minority.” In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Godard made a number of politically radical films, with the mass general strike of May 68 in France figuring prominently in his development at this time, openly embracing Marxist orthodoxies, where the turning point is LA CHINOISE (1967), an absurdist, pop-art parody of Maoist/Leftist student activism coming a year earlier, followed just months later by the surreal anarchist portrayal of society’s collapse in WEEKEND (1967), with the film’s ominous final caption, Fin de Cinéma.  Coming in the midst of his most groundbreaking period of early 60’s films, Jean-Luc Godard: the Early Years, where he’s generally considered the pioneer of the French New Wave, he makes this outlier of a film, perhaps more interesting for what it foreshadows in Godard’s career than anything else, shot in the spring of 1960 in Geneva and Zürich immediately after Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), but it didn’t open in Paris until the year after My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), making this his fourth film, but it’s actually his second, as it was banned from release in France until January 1963 due to its controversial display of torture on both the French and Algerian sides during the Algerian War, revealing the dirty little secret that French soldiers tortured Algerian prisoners and sympathizers, while the implicit anti-war message was not in keeping with the nationalist fervor.  The French government also threatened to bar Godard, a Swiss citizen, from France and the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, from the movie industry if it were shown internationally.  The struggle for Algerian independence was achieved in 1962 (The Algerian Revolution Changed the World for the Better), so eloquently documented in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), and the ban was overturned soon after the war was over.  While the politics of the film are vague and confusing, not really advocating one position over another, it does take a look at the dubious methods employed during the Algerian war, while also amusingly showing a photo of an alleged co-conspirator during an extended torture scene, which turns out to be producer Georges de Beauregard.  Godard joined forces with avowed leftist journalist Jean-Pierre Gorin, making a series of radical films with the Dziga Vertov Group, moving away from dramatic films, preferring to blend Brechtian distancing techniques with Marxist ideology, vowing not to make “political films,” preferring instead to “make films politically.”  Eventually abandoning his Marxist ideology of the 70’s, he never stopped making political films, as KING LEAR (1987) is not the Shakespearean play one expects, instead it’s rooted in the Chernobyl disaster, while FOR EVER MOZART (1996) dramatizes the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.  Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, coming from an extravagantly wealthy family, as his father was a Swiss doctor while his mother was a medical assistant and daughter of one of the most prominent bankers in France, who was also well-connected in literary circles, as his closest friend was poet Paul Valéry.  Postwar Paris was a place of great philosophical and political debate, where the dominant intellectual figure was Jean-Paul Sartre, a prolific writer and advocate of existentialism, believing it was essential, after the experience of the war, that writers and artists become engaged with politics, taking sides if necessary.  The preeminent film critic was André Bazin, placing an emphasis on film technique, valuing the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of cinema more than any social message.  Godard was transformed by both, quickly becoming friends with two other film fanatics, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, often seeing three or four films every day, eventually joining forces in 1949 with editor Éric Rohmer in a short-lived film magazine La Gazette du cinema, with Godard, only nineteen years old at the time, already writing complex articles and reviews.  By the mid 50’s, these young guns turned Cahiers du cinema into the leading film publication in the country, still maintaining considerable influence today.

One of the few Godard films set in an earlier time, as the entire film is a flashback, as reflected by that opening voiceover, never having the privilege of accessing the present, so it actually takes place a few years earlier, playing out against a backdrop of a succession of radio broadcasts dating back to the spring of 1958 which explicitly refer to the Algerian uprising, yet there are also newspaper headlines with a date corresponding to when the film was actually shot, the same year, incidentally, that JFK became President.  A French colony since 1830, Algeria was in a state of revolt, with militants fighting a guerrilla war for independence since 1955.  French citizens as well as the military soldiers came under sustained attack from the Algerian resistance, with the army responding with escalating brutality, determined that Algeria would remain French.  General Charles De Gaulle rode that wave of military escalation to the French Presidency in 1959, having no intention to liberate French colonies, incorrectly assuming retention of colonial interests was their last chance to conserve French international power, rewriting the constitution while establishing the Fifth Republic, as the fourth had been weakened by a series of colonial losses from French Indochina to Morocco and Tunisia.  The insurrection in Algeria was viewed as the final straw, much like America viewed Vietnam, yet both ended up as humiliating debacles of colonial misadventure.  Delving into the behind-the-scenes espionage battles for each side, in typical Godard fashion it features a love affair with a girl, a gun, and a car, in this case a souped-up 1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, turning the terrorism that was tearing France apart into a pulp fiction B-movie, complete with incessant images of cigarettes and sunglasses.  Bruno Forestier, played by a brooding Michel Subor, appearing 40-years later in two of the best films Claire Denis ever made, Beau Travail (1999), which imagines this same character much later in life, also the otherworldly The Intruder (L’intrus) (2004), is an army deserter on the run in France, taking refuge in Geneva, Switzerland, and because of his precarious position as a deserter, he is blackmailed into doing dirty jobs for the right-wing French OAS (Organisation armée secrète), finding himself posing as a journalist and photographer, with Godard making a cameo appearance behind Bruno at a train station, anxiously looking at his watch about eight minutes into the film.  Much like Michel Poiccard in Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), Bruno is self-involved, but colder, harder, and more disdainful, evolving into his own existential dilemmas, portraying a kind of intellectual and moral confusion, reflective of man’s alienated existence, mirroring the existential inner dialogue of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), made about the same time, expressing a deeply tormented subconscious, where his voiceover narration takes us into film noir territory, one of which includes Godard’s most famous line, spoken during a photo-shoot sequence, “Photography is truth.  And cinema is truth 24 times per second.”  Before Godard, the Jump cut was a mistake, a sign of amateurism, yet in his hands, it was symbolic emphasis announcing that the rules of cinema were meant to be broken, like removing most of the ambient sound, which is especially noticeable in outdoor street scenes or driving through traffic, while emphasizing the protagonist’s fractured uncertainty with an abrupt editing style, almost entirely dubbed, as was his first film, where the voiceover takes the place of a nearly non-existent musical soundtrack, though Maurice Laroux’s deliberately oppressive atonal piano music adds to a disorienting mood.  Bruno’s immediate superior is Jacques (Henri-Jacques Huet), a veteran of the Indochina war, ordering him to carry out an assassination of Arthur Palivoda, a radio host who is pro-FLN (National Liberation Front) and adamantly in favor of Algerian independence.  But Bruno hesitates, questioning his lack of political convictions, discovering he really has no compelling interest, feeling morally empty and vacuous, revealing a side that is completely different than how he sees himself, where the character he most resembles is Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), which also exhibits a complicated flashback technique, reflecting the character’s anxiety-ridden state of mind.  As a kind of diversion, and quite unexpectedly, Bruno loses a bet that he wouldn’t fall in love with a girl, Le Petit Soldat - The Bet (CC) YouTube (4:04), but instead falls head-over-heels in love with Véronica Dreyer (Anna Karina in her first feature role, discovered as a successful young model in a soap ad for Palmolive), a friend of a friend who, unbeknownst to him, may be working for the FLN, though this is never mentioned until the end. 

The photo-shoot with Véronica is also an existential monologue, “When you photograph a face, you photograph the soul behind it,” Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1961) by Jean-Luc Godard ... YouTube (4:16).  While this suggests a certain amount of philosophical self-reflection, spoken in the midst of a budding love affair, it’s more surface than real, as Bruno pretends to political activism, while deferring from action, becoming a story about a man without ideals, perhaps hoping freedom will come from the barrel of a gun, yet this becomes a perplexing dilemma, with Véronica bluntly getting to the heart of the matter near the end, “I could see the French are wrong.  The others have an ideal, but not the French.  Against the Germans, the French had an ideal.  Not against the Algerians.  They’ll lose.”  Lacking a moral center, Bruno’s ambivalence may reflect how ordinary French citizens viewed the Algerian crisis, which was mostly happening on distant shores, and not really anyone’s immediate concern, so they had little vested interest, and by the time the film was finally released, the war was over, which may explain the viewer indifference, yet it was made without knowing the outcome, revealing the problems of war and its moral repercussions.  As he tries to seduce her with his camera, he asks infantile questions while making silly requests, “Shake your hair like this, or light a cigarette, take a shower,” hoping the camera will reveal the secrets he’s unable to uncover, exploding irrationally when he learns she wants to be an actress, exhibiting paternalistic and sexist attitudes, which may reflect Godard’s own views, as he seems equally befuddled by her own alluring feminine mystique, where he uses her initial awkwardness in front of a camera to his advantage, becoming a dominating presence in his next films.  They were a couple by the end of the picture, marrying not long afterwards, becoming one of the most celebrated pairings of the 1960’s, making seven critically acclaimed films together before suffering one of the most well-publicized break-ups.  While there is a casual reference to the car-bombing of Professor Lachenal, this is in reference to the March 26, 1960 letter bomb murder of Professor Georges Laperche at the University of Liège (Two Books of Questions, One Opera and a Composition ...), known for his opposition to the French occupation of Algiers, where incidents of this kind led to the conflict being described as a “dirty war,” as the government secretly targets the arms dealers before going after FLN sympathizers.  Bruno’s hesitation is viewed with distrust, suspecting he’s a double agent who’s been compromised, leading to his kidnapping and torture by Algerian militants attempting to identify who he is working for, which is chilling in its nonchalance of burning flesh, electrocution, and waterboarding, creating a murky atmosphere of unrelenting anxiety and tension, while later, behind the scenes, we discover the pro-colonial French do exactly the same, making reference to French-Algerian journalist and French Communist Party member Henri Alleg’s autobiographical account of enduring French torture sessions in his 1958 book La Question, an instant best-seller that was re-issued by a Swiss publisher after it was banned by the French government.  French soldiers were subject to brutal torture from the Nazi’s during the war, so the thought of them now inflicting these same atrocities against the Algerians and even some of their own citizens was unconscionable.  Bruno’s character embodies Sartre’s existential quandary about man’s fate in the modern world, and the limits of freedom of choice when it comes to political action, mirroring Godard’s own existential predicament at the time, juxtaposed against the dirty secrets and double-crosses behind the Algerian War.  As both factions, French and Algerian, close in on him, he desperately wants to flee to safety with Véronica, but he also faces a lingering sense of duty, the same profound anguish faced by the Communist characters in Andre Malraux’s The Human Condition.  At times this becomes a dry political exposé spouting didactic phrases with a stream-of-conscious sensibility in line with his later films, quoting revolutionaries, or literary figures seemingly at random, having the same tiresome effect as the William S. Burroughs Cut-up technique, as it’s never integrated into a meaningful or cohesive narrative, feeling hollow and fractured, and deeply pessimistic, where it hits the same repetitive note over and over again with little relief, Le Petit Soldat (1963) Jean-Luc Godard - promising ending scene (with subtitles) YouTube (6:43).  It’s easy to see why this darkly somber and contemplative film didn’t fit with his other more spontaneously upbeat works at the time, all shot by Raoul Coutard, and even when seen from today’s vantage point, there’s never a real sense of urgency, instead it provides an ugly backdrop for the underhanded power struggles going on behind the scenes, where the political left and right are indistinguishable, equally deplorable, reflecting the same amorality that exists in gangster films, where there’s no beauty or truth, only a detached yet heavy-handed fatalism about the future, where ideals and values are worthless, having been corrupted to the point of meaninglessness, mirroring his final act of desperation, hoping to find relief in escapism, but there is no relief, only inevitability.    

Le Petit Soldat (1963) - Jean-Luc Godard Criterion film on YouTube (1:28:24)

Watch Le Petit Soldat Full Movie Online Free With English ...  entire film available on FshareTV with multiple subtitle options (1:28:00)

Hitchcock/Truffaut

Hitchcock/Truffaut                 B               
France  USA  (80 mi)  2015  d:  Kent Jones

In America, you call this man “Hitch.”  In France, we call him “Monsieur Hitchcock.”  You respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder.  We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love! 

— François Truffaut, AFI Salute to Hitchcock, 1979

Certainly one of the more interesting “meetings of the minds” to come along in the last half century took place in the sterile offices of the Universal Studios of Hollywood for six days of discussion in August 1962 when 63-year old director Alfred Hitchcock agreed to sit down to an exhaustive interview and critical analysis of literally every film he ever made with 30-year old French film director François Truffaut, who had completed three films of his own by that time, and was otherwise known as a former critic and editor of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma magazine.  One of the rare books about film made by film directors themselves, after accumulating 50-hours of tape, the next four years were spent transcribing and editing the tapes into a book format, where extra sessions were needed to cover the subsequent films Hitchcock made, resulting in a book entitled Hitchcock/Truffaut published in France in 1966, released a year later in an English translation.  The book nearly overnight changed the perception of Hitchcock, a cinematic virtuoso who made his start during the Silent era before working in Hollywood, whose films were instantly recognizable, known as the “Master of Suspense,” but was viewed at the time more as a popular entertainer perhaps best known for his caricatured round profile and perfectly enunciated “Good Evening” greeting while hosting his own television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955 to 1965, using television as the medium for a series of blood curdling murder mysteries presented week by week, to not only a world-class filmmaker, but in the running for the greatest director of all time.   Asked if he wanted to piece together a documentary movie out of the surviving archival material from that interview, Film Comment editor, occasional Cahiers du Cinéma critic, and programmer of New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kent Jones responded, “Fuck yeah!”  Broadening the idea of a conversation on film, with directors discussing the works of other film directors, Jones brought in contemporary filmmakers who have been successful in their own right to offer their views on Hitchcock, including the exclusively male-centric comments of American directors Wes Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, David Fincher, James Gray, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, the ever reliable Martin Scorsese, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and from France, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin.  It might have been nice to hear the views of Jane Campion, for instance, as she is thoroughly rooted in the psychology of Hitchcock, as evidenced by In the Cut (2003).

One of the reasons the book is so successful is due to the incessant hours of meticulous research and careful preparatory work put in by Truffaut ahead of time, seen as a labor love where he invested as much thought and effort to these interviews as any film he ever made, perhaps taking even Hitchcock by surprise, as his knowledge of Hitchcock’s films elevated the discussion to unforeseen heights, offering a candid view the public had never seen before, opening a window into the very soul of Hitchcock.  The book also differentiates the way artists are perceived and written about in Europe, with a certain degree of reverence, and how they are viewed in America, where disdain is commonplace and the scrutiny more closely resembles “What have you done for me lately?”  Truffaut had interviewed Hitchcock earlier for Cahiers when he was in France working on TO CATCH A THIEF (1955), but was disappointed in the vague and rather unremarkable responses he gave when questioned about aspects of the French “auteur” theory, convincing Truffaut that only a prolonged, more in-depth interview was required.  It all started with a series of complimentary letters exchanged between the two men beginning in June of 1962 when Truffaut proposed the idea to Hitchcock:  “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature.  There are many directors with a love of cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself.” Hitchcock responded, “Dear Mister Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes, and I am very grateful to receive such a tribute from you.”  With American-born Helen Scott, the daughter of an American journalist stationed in Paris acting as translator, the two men blazed a trail through the Hitchcock lexicon, picking apart traces of the Hitchcock film vocabulary that the public has become fascinated by, discovering the secrets behind famous shots, like a particularly sinister moment in Suspicion (1941) when Cary Grant carries a glass of milk that may or may not be poisoned up a flight of stairs, where Hitchcock had the audacity to place a small lightbulb in the glass, adding a special glow of distinction, or unraveling elusive meanings, like the influence of Hitchcock’s own Catholicism on films like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) or The Wrong Man (1956), where Truffaut suggests the framing of the wrongfully accused Henry Fonda, viewed only in silhouette, bowed silently in prayer in front of an iconic portrait of Jesus, that dissolves into a facial close-up of the actual guilty man, could only have been filmed by a Catholic. 

To Truffaut’s credit, he did not rely upon production stills that often never appeared onscreen, but instead borrowed 35mm prints from studio archives, including stills from British titles not available in France, and used them to provide shot-by-shot presentations of sequences, a vital strategy in understanding the near mathematical precision used in Hitchcock’s calculated editing strategy.  The book is chalk full of these accompanying photographs, along with handwritten notes by Hitchcock or drawings conceived during the conception of the films, where Truffaut’s somewhat literary approach brings these films to life with a more intimate understanding.  It also becomes clear that in France, André Bazin, film theorist and co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, is considered the father of film criticism, while Jean Renoir represents the epitome of French filmmaking.  But in Hollywood, a world the Cahiers critics certainly revere, no one is more admired than Hitchcock.  Wes Anderson describes his copy of the book is so worn out from constant use that it is only held together by a rubber band, while various directors chime in discussing their favorite Hitchcock moments, dissecting notable scenes, where who better than Martin Scorsese could discuss the powerful effect of framing and editing in the notorious shower scene of Psycho (1960)?  In discussing Vertigo (1958), specifically the scene when Judy (icy blond Kim Novak) perfectly resembles Madeline, the beautiful dead woman Scottie (James Stewart) is still obsessed by, Hitchcock acknowledges “I indulged in a form of necrophilia.”  In a particularly graphic moment, just as Scottie is about to consummate his desires with her, he sends her back into the bathroom because a single detail is wrong, as she is wearing her hair down while Madeline wore hers up.  “While he was sitting waiting, he was getting an erection.”  At this point Hitchcock politely asks Truffaut to turn off the tape recorder so he can tell a story not for public consumption that apparently only Truffaut and interpreter Helen Scott were privy to hear.  As all the principles are now deceased, we will never know what the story was, but one can only imagine the dirty little details.  It is this element that fascinates David Fincher, as Hitchcock’s films (like Buñuel’s) are filled with his own personal fears and fetishes, as well as sexual daydreams, where he made no attempt to hide his own psychological impulses from the characters that appear onscreen, which is one of the cherished aspects of a Hitchcock film.

Somewhat disappointing was discovering the interview was never filmed, only taped, so there are really no new revelations in the film.  Most of the photographs taken at the time have already been seen, but certainly one was initially hopeful to see personality traits developing during the course of the interview, where Truffaut tends to be eagerly enthusiastic, filled with an abundant supply of energy, while Hitchcock is the picture of aristocratic taste and refinement, never moving a muscle unnecessarily, where he is almost always portrayed in an economy of motion.  His mordant sense of humor comes through as he describes various scenes from some of his films, where he obviously relishes how the audience is impacted from the exact precision utilized to set up scenes.  Scorsese was forever affected by the aerial shots of Hitchcock, which he equates with the power of God on high, as if He’s looking down upon us, including a terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds (1963), where the camera literally descends from the clouds above, as if casting ultimate judgement over all of us, where one of the most famous is a spectacular camera shot from NOTORIOUS (1946) that begins with a high overview of a party, as seen from the top of a banister of winding stairs, following the sweep of the action with a crane shot descending into the crowded atmosphere on the floor below, where the camera goes in search of the most important item in the room, where the crux of the film depends on the discovery of this single detail, zeroing in on a couple where after a number of shifting focuses we can identify an immaculately dressed Ingrid Bergman fidgeting nervously, as the camera zooms in on an object she’s holding in the palm of her hand, which is revealed to be a key in a stunning, perfectly timed close-up.  All the drama is compacted into the tiniest space imaginable.  While the film is heavy on Hitchcock, and does at least consider the possibility of what might have happened if he had loosened the authoritative grip over his style, but it has little to say about Truffaut, failing to explore the director’s profound influence on him, where it’s impossible to think of THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1967) without the droll, gallows humor so representative of a tongue-in-cheek Hitchcock. While it might have been nice to get Hitchcock’s take on that film, instead he finds it incomprehensible to discover the unscripted, improvisatory style Truffaut used with his actors in JULES AND JIM (1962), as that’s simply something he would never allow.  Also missing is the considerable influence of Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s longtime wife who literally had her hand in every Hitchcock film ever made, was his closest collaborator and most trusted ally, but is hardly ever mentioned, which in this modern era seems like a criminal oversight.  So while the book remains a classic for film lovers, something that will be revered forever, the same can’t be said for this film, as the director’s comments aren’t particularly memorable, though as a trip down memory lane it’s good fun and amusingly interesting, following the example of Two in the Wave (2011), but never rises to a level of scholarship or essential viewing.