KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

By: Alix Lambert
August 2, 2017

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite neo-noir movies from the Sixties (1964–1973).

BANDE À PART (BAND OF OUTSIDERS) | d. JEAN-LUC GODARD | 1964

Near the beginning of Band of Outsiders, two aspiring robbers play-act Billy the Kid, the American outlaw who served as both myth and reality for Michael Ondaatje in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid — in which we read that “…every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome — the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.”

These descriptors could apply equally to Godard’s band of outsiders: Franz (Sami Frey), Arthur (Claude Brasseur), and Odile (Anna Karina). At times playful, at times mournful, always poetic, the movie shows us where crime and art, love and life are inextricably woven together: where our imaginations allow us to justify our moral transgressions. Via Band of Outsiders, life, art, and crime seep into our pores; it’s a dreamlike experience. In fact, during the brilliant and delightful café dance sequence, Godard notes that Franz “doesn’t know whether the world is becoming a dream or the dream, a world.”

The film’s use of silence, the mad dash through the Louvre, the score and tone captivate me. But it is the interplay between the performative aspects of crime and the criminal aspects of performance that makes Band of Outsiders a touchstone film for me. Where does one end and the other begin? “Arthur, when he goes off to rob the house, looks quite disguised, artificial and theatrical. With his black mask he looks like he is playing a gangster,” Godard once said in an interview. “That’s why, immediately afterward, the theft scene is treated with a great deal of violence and brutality. It had to be realistic; you had to see the scene as somewhat true to real life.”

The film is also about the complex relationships that can develop within a group of misfits: the yearnings of the heart, the desire to feel alive that lead us sometimes from the pleasures of the imagination to the despair of reality. An exchange between two of our lead characters: “Isn’t it strange how people never form a whole?” “In what way?” “They never come together. They remain separate. Each goes their own way, distrustful and tragic.” By the end of the film Odile, our once wide-eyed and trusting heroine, laments, “I’m worn out from sorrow and fatigue.”

Godard adds: “After all catastrophes, the world keeps on following its course….”

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MORE ALIX LAMBERT at HILOBROW: SÉRIE NOIRE series | GROK MY ENTHUSIASM: The Skies Belong To Us | HERMENAUTIC TAROT: The Eye Floater | MORE: including HILO HERO items on Patty Wagstaff, Nelson George, William Kentridge, Angela Davis, and Vito Acconci.

MORE MOVIES at HILOBROW: KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: 25 neo-noirs of the Sixties (1964–1973) | James Parker’s BOURNE VARIATIONS series | Alix Lambert’s SÉRIE NOIRE series | Jacob Mikanowski’s SCREEN TIME series | Josh Glenn’s SHOCKING BLOCKING series | Joanne McNeil’s ALL MY STARS series | MORE: including dozens of HILO HERO items on movie directors and actors.

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

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