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| Godard making his Hitchcockian cameo |
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| Writer/director Jean-Luc Godard |
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| Godard with cinematographer Raoul Coutard |
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| 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)
