Band of Outsiders

Imagine that you were an adult in the 1960s. Maybe you actually were an adult at this time (I reckon this would make you at least 73), so in this case you would just need to call upon your memories. America dominates the world film industry, pumping out hundreds and thousands of films from the Hollywood film factory. From the earliest beginnings of mainstream American film - Thomas Edison, D. W. Griffiths, Buster Keaton - there has been an ongoing process of development that has seen the medium of film grow from a visual curiosity to an incredibly structured form of storytelling. By the 1950s and 1960s, mainstream cinema was highly codified. People knew what kind of stories to expect, and if they were presented with a story that was unfamiliar it would use the hallmarks and tropes that they already understood to make itself known to them. Films were structured with beginnings, middles and ends, and certain actors embodied certain kinds of characters that audiences were familiar with. Even the way things were shot and edited was a visual language that had grown out of a process of storytelling that was evolving at an incredibly slow rate.

Pre-1960s non-American cinema was often built on it's own merits or was slave to the hype of the Hollywood film machine. From an atmosphere of homage and reaction, a new movement of French directors (often referred to as the French New Wave) broke with established traditions of filmmaking so radically that the films they created seemed so truly foreign as to be outright alien. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to see Band of Outsiders back when it first came out... it isn't the first French New Wave film (nor is it the first I've seen), but it still breaks so many cinematic 'rules' that parts of it feel decidely uncinematic. The wildly experimental nature of some of these films helped break down barriers in film-storytelling, and whilst the pacing can occasionally test one's patience, there are more than a few magical moments in Band of Outsiders that more than justify it's existence.

The 'band' of 'outsiders' of the title are Franz (Sami Frey), Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Odile (Anna Karina) - three students in an English class who are slowly incubating a plan to rob a tenant in Odile's house. Wikipedia touts this film as Godard's most accessible work, owing to it's subject matter and influence, but it's still very much an odd duck in comparison to mainstream filmmaking of any era. Godard focused on petty crime as a new subject matter for cinema to exploit. In a way, this is clearly part of his mandate to break the rules... it's the smallest possible version of the heist narrative, instead of hardened gangsters we get apathetic students living in a fantasy world, and instead of a priceless artefact or bank vault the loot is just some money in a shoebox kept inside a cupboard. The 'inside man' is Odile, a naive schoolgirl. At it's heart, even this plot flies in the face of film convention - most filmmakers operate on a belief that bigger is better, but Godard goes in the opposite direction to operate in microcosm.


There's something very real about the way the film focuses on small details... the exchange looks, notes passed, contained reactions, the way Franz and Arthur idly find things to do while they talk (such as the scene where Arthur rides Odile's bike in a circle while Franz swings a blanket around). They're small things that normally escape our notice or don't even feature in films, but here they become a part of the picture because it's naturalistic. At first I thought that Franz and Arthur were just playing at being gangsters in an effort to impress Odile, and I think in Franz's case this is probably true, but after the film spends a lot of time observing these characters it suddenly shifts and in the blink of an eye we meet Arthur's family and everything is different. An earlier scene in the film sees Arthur talking about how a man's expression will seem different if the viewer is told certain information (true or false) about his past, and this exchange becomes metafictionally prophetic when we unexpectedly meet his horribly parasitic and bullying family, and we suddenly have a context to place his callous demeanour in.

Godard throws more than a few curveballs in the way that he subverts film language by messing with established editing techniques and previously-accepted visual grammar. There's a scene where the sound drops out to convey a minute's silence and occasional fourth wall-breaking narration that allows for unimportant bits of the narrative to be skipped. There are also two youth-celebrating sequences that can still be felt echoing through film history, the cool scene where the three main characters dance the Madison in a cafe while the narrator describes what each is thinking and feeling, and the sudden, exciting snippets of footage where they run through the Louvre in an attempt to see all of it in a record amount of time.

Of course, everything goes awfully wrong in the end as is often the way with heist films, but Godard stages the film's final sequences in such an uncliched fashion that it all still comes as a shock. Sometimes I find it hard to get past the pretentiousness of the French New Wave (these guys practically invented the concept of pretension) but I can't fault the devastating effect they had on modern cinema. Without Band of Outsiders there'd be no Tarantino (especially Pulp Fiction), and it's a wonderfully lulling tale of fatalistic youth shot through the lens of someone who could clearly identify with his main characters.

DIRECTOR: Jean-Luc Godard
WRITER/SOURCE: Jean-Luc Godard, loosely based on a novel by Dolores Hitchens.
KEY ACTORS: Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Louisa Colpeyn

RELATED TEXTS:
- Breathless, Godard's first film and one of the first major touchstones of the French New Wave.
- Band of Outsiders was adapted from Fool's Gold, an American pulp crime novel by Dolores Hitchens from the 1950s.
- Francois Truffant (the other big name of the French New Wave) made his own tribute to the gangster film, Shoot the Piano Player.
- The continuing influence of Band of Outsiders can be felt in English-language films such as Point Blank, If..., Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and The Dreamers.