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February 27, 2008

[DVD] Pierrot le fou (1965, ****)

In Jean-Luc Godard’s peppy, pop-art i>Pierrot le fou, made between Masculin-Feminin and Alphaville, is a boldly colored lark of an outlaw couple-on-the-run movie, starring an impish Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. It’s remarkable how modern some of his 1960s tossed-off feuilletons remain into this century. Oh, and there’s the party scene with Sam Fuller, behind big sunglasses (the kind fashionable even this week and available at Urban Outfitters) and a fat stogy, who Belmondo says to, “I always wondered what movies were,” and Fuller replies, “Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word… emotion." And, Godard, from a 1965 Cahiers du Cinema interview, about one of the movie’s loveliest, most hypnotic effects: “When you drive in Paris at night, what do you see? Red, green, yellow lights. I wanted to show these elements without necessarily placing them as they are in reality. [This effect was created by flashlights being rotated across the windshield of a car sitting still in a dark room.] Rather as they remain in the memory—splashes of red and green, flashes of yellow passing by. I wanted to recreate a sensation through the elements which constitute it.”The Criterion DVD: out two days after seeing La chinoise in 35mm: pictures, moving. First clip: Samuel Fuller.



Buried in the trailer below: Anna Karina, bowling.


Posted by Ray Pride at February 27, 2008 10:46 AM

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