Of the 1968 revolt in France, Margaret Atack writes, “[s]pontaneity and immediacy are the two most important notions connoted by May.” Three years earlier, Jean-Luc Godard described the filming of Pierrot le fou as, “a kind of happening.” This notion of spontaneity and immediacy is helpful when drawing parallels between Pierrot le fou and the vision held by the Situationist Internationale in the years leading up to the events of May 1968. In February 1968, when asked about the spontaneous, improvised nature of his films Godard remarked that “[c]inema is not a dream or a fantasy…[I]t is life.” This idea holds much in common with the situationist ideal that after the revolution alienation will cease and “life would become art.” While this revolutionary goal of May failed in the end to materialize, the films of Godard and Pierrot le fou in particular are evocative of the writings and sensibilities of the situationists. Making a case for Pierrot le fou as a transitional work by Godard toward an increasingly politically aware cinema, this paper will discuss both Godard and the Situationists as similar and exemplary models of the utopian political attitudes and ideas that led to the May events in France.
It is a popular practice in film criticism to “periodize” Godard’s work into distinct phases: cinephile films ranging roughly from 1959 to 1968, the political films from 1968 to 1974, the video collaborations from 1974 to 1979, and then a return to more conventional art cinema practice in 1979 on. While these categories are helpful in discussing Godard it is worthwhile to note, as David Bordwell points out, that there is a political dimension to the pre-1968 films that many critics ignore. Consider first that Godard is a filmmaker who became increasingly aware of politics through filmmaking, and not outside of it. Pierrot le fou, in this context, can be seen then as occupying the middle of the spectrum of cinephile films at a point where Godard was becoming increasingly political. In terms of political themes Pierrot le fou contains evocations of the Vietnam War on radio, newsreel, and in a minimalist play put on by Marianne and Ferdinand, who says of American spectators, “that’s okay, we’ll change our politics. Something they will like.” There is an abrupt documentary sequence in which a student testifies to fleeing his country after an American invasion; a scene in which Ferdinand tells a story of a man on the moon who flees while the Americans and Russians “shoot it out”; and in another scene, Ferdinand undergoes Algerian War torture.
While Godard’s more didactic, Post-May 68 films such as One Plus One (1968), Le Gai Savoir (1968) and Tout va bien (1972) are often cited in relation to the politics of May, there is a spontaneous quality in the earlier cinephile films that evoke the same revolutionary energies. Consider Paul Thibaud’s comments in Esprit, “As for Godard, we have been living for a month in his shadow…cars are burning as in Pierrot [le fou]…This whole world of Godard’s, a world of parody, violence, eruptions of joy and freedom, dead ends, detours, glimpses of peace, sudden brutalities, is our world.” It could be argued that there was something in Pierrot le fou’s fragmented film style, both violent and romantic, that struck some to be as May 68-related than the later films that were more explicitly so.
Godard is a filmmaker who gained the attention of the situationists, albeit negative attention, as they felt he stole their ideas and diluted them. Yet this, more than anything points to the similarities in their thinking. One major strand of pre-May 68 sentiment that serves to bridge the gap between the Situationist Internationale and Godard’s Pierrot le fou is the theme of alienation within consumer capitalism. Guy Debord, editor of the Internationale Situationiste wrote extensively on the alienation of consumption and capitalism in his book Society of the Spectacle. This “spectacle” Debord discusses refers to all the ways, outside of brute force, that the dominant ideology makes individuals passive and complacent while simultaneously relegating critical and creative individuals to the margins of society. Spectacle, for Debord, is “a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Alienation is the result in a society where the, “modern conditions of production prevail…and everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.” Later he writes, “the more [the alienated spectator] accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires.” This type of alienation is evident in the set-up of events in Pierrot le fou. Trapped in bourgeois existence, Ferdinand as the lead character, represents alienation in a society based increasingly on mindless consumerism. In preparation for a bourgeois party thrown by his wealthy wife’s father, Ferdinand reads aloud an advertisement for a woman’s slip. The advertisement takes up the full screen and the camera slowly pans from top to bottom back to top as Ferdinand remarks, “after Athens, after the Renaissance we are now entering the civilization of the rump.” Later Marianne and Ferdinand overhear a radio broadcast in which a newscaster reports that 115 guerrillas have been killed in the Vietnam conflict. Marianne remarks, “they say 115 guerrillas and it doesn’t mean a thing to us. Yet each one is a man, and we don’t even now who he is.” In this way the spectacle, in this case advertising and broadcasting, invites complacency through its unquestioned omniscience. In the latter case it alienates to the point of pacifying. It alienates by rendering the spectator as a consumer or a number but not an individual. Debord writes that the spectacle demands an attitude of “passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.” This fact is powerfully illustrated in Pierrot le fou during the famous party scene.
Ferdinand’s wife, Mme. Espresso, advises him to attend this party in order to make a good impression and get a job since he’s already been fired from the television job he had held before. Already Godard shows Ferdinand as a character both antagonistic toward the media and subject of the nepotism of the upper classes. The guests at the party literally speak in advertisements as if it is consumer products that define them. This has the simultaneous effect of illustrating the sexism of consumer culture in which the men are defined as powerful through masculinist car advertisements while the women recite ads for beauty products that appeal to a vain, waif-like, and almost submissive tone. To further emphasize the objectification of women in consumerist society the women present are shown topless. The party sequence illustrates one of the key situationist positions: that consumption has replaced production as the driving force behind modern capitalism. The apathetic bliss of consumption stifles any revolutionary potential in humanity. The repressed desires felt by those alienated by capitalism can only be expressed in a limited and complacent capacity through consumer goods and spectacle. Ferdinand’s alienation is expressed in a way that suggests that he is overwhelmed by media and images:
I’ve got a machine to see with called eyes, to hear with, I’ve got ears, to talk with, a mouth. But they feel like separate machines. There is no unity. A person ought to feel unified. Hearing this, Mrs. Espresso, too passive to contemplate matters of existence complains, “You talk too much, it makes me tired just listening.” This scene is illustrative of the ways in which the dominant ideology is maintained through culture. Most notably the party sequence creates a subjective awareness in the viewer akin to the situationist technique of detournement. Touted as a form of cultural hijacking, detournement is a situationist attempt, “to counter the hypnotic power of a spectacular society, by using its very words, symbols, and totems against it.” This is usually done through the imagery of advertising and comic strips where the situationists write new texts for them. Alan Williams points out that the party sequence is a form of reverse detournement for it is Godard who takes the text and places it in the context of new images but it is done to a similar effect. Godard does something similar in Les Carabiniers (1963) by using the text from the postcards of actual soldiers and placing them in a context that does anything but valorize war and combat.
Uniquely Pierrot le fou is political in a way that is lacking in Godard’s later films. While it contains an increased political consciousness found in the later films it still maintains the playfulness and the love of cinema apparent in the earlier films which in itself is characteristic of May. In Pierrot le fou political consciencness is matched by references to the cinema. There is a cameo by Samuel Fuller as well as film references like Laurel and Hardy and Pepe Le Moko. Later films of Godard’s cinephile period such as La Chinoise (1967) and Week-end (1967) would incorporate political themes more explicitly.
What makes this mix of playful cinephilia and politics significant is the way in which it resembles the spontaneous spirit of May 68, specifically the situationist emphasis on the celebration of desire and joy. The Situationist Internationale, through its involvement with the Committee to Maintain the Occupations articulated this attitude through urban graffiti in an attempt to detourn the urban environment. Slogans such as “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires” point to the poetic disposition of Pierrot le fou. Arguably it was in this same spirit that Godard wrote that Pierrot le fou, “is an attempt at cinema. And the cinema, by forcing reality to unfold itself, reminds us that we must attempt to live.” Godard’s emphasis on the blurred boundary between the cinema and real life is reminiscent of the situationists working through lived art. While they may not have had a direct impact, both Godard and the Situationist Internationale made their presence felt during the May events: Godard by arguing for a closure of the Cannes film festival and through various agit-prop film projects, and the situationists through their journal and graffiti sloganeering. In the years leading up to the May events, Pierrot le fou is situationist in its message of alienation under consumer capitalism but also in its playfulness and love of the cinema.
Works Cited
Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.
David Wills, ed, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, ed. David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3.
David Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 13.
Phillip Smith, The Situationists and Their Legacy (Chicago: Collective Chaos, 1993), 5.
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), 332.
ibid, 334.
ibid, 332.
Colin MaCabe et al., Godard: Image, Sounds, Politics (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980), 19
Paul Thibaud, “Imaginons,” Esprit, 36/372 (1968), 1032; quoted in Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44.
Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52.
Alan Williams, “Pierrot in Context(s),” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, ed. David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57.
Phillip Smith, The Situationists and Their Legacy (Chicago: Collective Chaos, 1993), 6.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 4.
ibid., 1.
ibid., 30.
Phillip Smith, The Situationists and Their Legacy (Chicago: Collective Chaos, 1993), 6.
ibid.
ibid., 8.
Alan Williams, “Pierrot in Context(s),” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, ed. David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56.
ibid., 55.
Phillip Smith, The Situationists and Their Legacy (Chicago: Collective Chaos, 1993), 13.
ibid., 10.
ibid.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Pierrot Mon Ami” in Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology, ed. Toby Mussman (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1968), 244.
