BAND OF OUTSIDERS

Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

Choosing my favorite Jean-Luc Godard movie is a fool's errand. I love so many. I'm definitely in the camp of folks who mostly are lit up like firecrackers by his incandescent 1960 BREATHLESS - 1968 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (ONE + ONE) run. Still there are late period masterworks like 2001's IN PRAISE OF LOVE that floor me.

Jean Luc Godard is to cinema what James Joyce is to literature. He blew the whole thing open and changed the form.

If you're inclined to be inspired by moviemakers doing things with sound, image, and montage you might never think of, Godard's your director.

Watching 2-3 Godards will open up cinematic worlds of possibility.

BAND A PART/BAND OF OUTSIDERS is nominally a menage a trois love-crime story. Odile (Karina) meets Franz in an English class, tells him how her Aunt has stashed a bunch of money in a villa, and Franz gets friend Arthur to cook up a plan for a heist. Things don't go as planned.

Like many Godard movies, the story is a road to be departed from constantly. It's there to get back to every time Godard goes deeper into the woods stylistically or scene wise. But sometimes it's abandoned entirely for several scenes that focus or explore something else.

Like almost all of his 1960's work, the stylistic experimentation IS the story. One of the original enfant terrible movie critics at Andre Bazin's CAHIERS DU CINEMA magazine in the 1950's, Godard came to cinema not in peace but to brandish a sword.

A Godard movie is a box of a thousand delights. Often he will cut to black or a word or quote in the middle of a scene. Or he might play just 1-2 bars of a song over and over again at random moments as the score (something he did to great effect in 1963's CONTEMPT).

Godard drops out dialogue and replaces it with animal sounds. He shoots a scene over and over again with different lenses and colors and gels (as he did in 1965's PIERRE LE FOU).

He carves out new editing and image languages (often aided by his amazing cinematographer Raoul Coutard). These often successful experiments inspired major iconoclastic late 20th century moviemakers like Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the U.S.'s Martin Scorsese, and Mexico's Alfonso Cuaron.

BAND A PART is one of the clearest distillations of Godard's approach. Godard would often write the pages for the scene the morning of the shooting day so that actors and crew had no idea what they were filming. The director would ride down the lightning flash of an idea and just do it that day. Here, there's an iconic scene where Odile and the two Men dance at a cafe/salon to a catchy tune.

But then suddenly, Godard drops out the music and the dance continues. It's a routine they've learned and they just do it over and over. Clapping, cycling through it. Every now and then voice over narration tells us what each character is thinking. It's a delight and a surprise.

Godard knows how to tell a story. He knows how to develop character. He knows how to keep a movie moving. His genius is also knowing how to do things in between the spaces that no one else would dare to do.

Godard loved movies. And so he made movies about the making of movies. He wanted you aware of the process. Of the seams. Of how the sausage gets made.

This can lead to near absurdist touches like MASCULIN-FEMININ's great sequence where the friends go to see a movie at the cinema and in the movie within a movie the characters just GRUNT and CHASE each other.

Bande A Part's story, like that of BREATHLESS and PIERRE LE FOU, is about misfits, outlaws, petty criminals who have big dreams and plans but not quite the necessary genius to pull them off.

The system comes for everyone in Godard movies. And few if any main characters survive or transcend or beat it.

Every now and then we get a joyous if sexually complicated A WOMAN IS A WOMAN, Godard's take on a musical, where things more or less work out. But more often than not we get MY LIFE TO LIVE, a Brechtian tragic study of a woman trying to live out her dreams but falling into poverty, sex work, and despair.

Godard's restlessness, like Bob Dylan's, like Prince's, like David Bowie's, is part of the engine of his talent. Ultimately it would lead him to embrace a militant intellectual Communism and pro-Maoist stance post 1968 that alienated much of his audience and would find him making movies in a collective through much of the 1970's.

When he returned to a kind of narrative driven cinema in the 1980's, he clearly cared little if the audience went with him or not. Some of these later works feel masterbatory, like 1996's FOREVER MOZART. But then his 21st century work re-discovered an acute emotional pain and tenderness.

That's how it goes when you really are chasing the muse.

Godard is always driven and going for something and experimenting and taking chances.

And what more do you want out of a movie maker than that?

Craig Hammill is the founder/programmer of Secret Movie Club.