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Summary: Godard bids a fond farewell to the New Wave.
Review: 'Band of outsiders' is Jean-Luc Cinema Godard's most endearing film - a teen movie played by adults, a love story, a heist movie, a serial, a slapstick comedy, an anthology of New Wave magic. As with previous films, Hollywood genre is made a complete nonsense, continually deflated by extended bits of business, my favourite being the attempt to beat the record for racing down the Louvre's corridors just before the heist.As with all early Godard, the joy of 'Band' is in the bouyant playfulness of his style - the high, long shots looking down on bustling activity; the long car-journeys through Paris streets; the intense close-ups on Anna Karina (Godard's wife), eluding all meaning, or the sheer rapture in watching her running along pavements, or crossing a river; the messing around disused yards; the lengthy quotes and allusions that stall the action and give resonance to the silly goings-on and the turmoil of the characters in them; the unwavering long takes with exciting real sound; the playful homages to old Hollywood; the narrator's bumptious intrusions, equating events with 'bad B-movies'. More than Louis Malle's 'Zazie dans le metro', 'Band' is the ultimate Raymond Queneau film - Karina's character is named after the heroine of Queneau's roman a clef 'Odile', a book about the writer's break with the Surrealists, just as 'Band' signals Godard's outpacing the New Wave - with its deadpan marginal heroes, its elusive heroine who doesn't want to be elusive; its romanticising Paris, especially its margins and its pull to the embankments; the attractions like circuses and funfairs intruding on the everyday. Godard finds a cinematic equivalent for Queneau's narrative voice - its flip melancholy; its casual intellectualism; its move from messing about to the philosophical to slapstick to dreams to the tragic and back again; in the self-consciousness of the characters; in the narrative mix of whim, genre and destiny.
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Summary: Godard' s best movie. This movie has attitude to spare.
Review: A nifty little black and white flick Godard made in 1964. Zero production value. Yet the attitude of the movie seems very modern, even today. It's very romantic and has a plot line (believe it or not) with lots of great rainy shots of Paris. The dance number that falls together in the cafe has got to be one of the most beautiful moments ever captured on film. A great rainy day movie to see with a jug of wine and someone you love.
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Summary: B Movie Poetry
Review: An ultra-low-budget, cliche-slaying tribute to the expressive possibilities of cinema by the gonzo New-Wave master who influenced a thousand and one directors now all much richer than him. Godard practically invented the 'intellectual B-movie' with "My Life to Live," and made "Band of Outsiders" after his nauseating experiences with big-time producers Ponti and Levine on "Contempt," just to prove, once again, that a man bursting with ideas doesn't need too much to express himself magnificently (he later continued in this direction with "Alphaville," another cheaper than cheap masterpiece, this time in "Science Fiction," without any special effects or 'futuristic sets' to speak of). Don't be fooled by the cheesy production values (that in itself is a calculated joke mocking big-time Hollywood films with million dollar budgets and nothing to say). You have to give this film a little time to reveal its poetry. It's subtle and relaxed yet crazy, and that's good. People usually take a while longer to warm to this one than "Alphaville," or "My Life to Live," but it's just as brilliant. It took me 3 viewings back when I first saw it some 6 years ago, but now I know very well why it's considered a great poetic film: every time I watch it I get a unique, almost ecstatic emotion from it no other film provides, like reading a great humorous romantic poem full of Bukowski-like eccentricities.
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Summary: DVD Review
Review: Band of Outsiders is easily Godard's most accessible and most enjoyable film. This is early 60's New Wave spirited, movie convention bashing Godard, not the abstract inpenatratably political Godard of the late 60's and on. Spontaneous and joyful the picture has that wondeful feel of Paris in the early 60's. Godard punctuates the film with brilliant witty asides that are among his finest. The Louvre tour and Madison dance are some of the coolest moments on film. In fact the entire movie conveys a great sense of cool, a quirky cool. For me the film is especially notable because it introduced me to Anna Karina. This is one of the seven films she made with Godard and with this film I became captivated by her prescence as icon of the New Wave. Video: Thank you Criterion for providing a gorgeous transfer of the film. Extremely clean, perfectly sharp, nice contrast and this film is nearly 40 years old! Extras: Way to good, this is cheap for a Criterion disc and has more extras then most. A fun bonus identfies several in jokes and literary references, although the narrator is annoying. A short documentary actually has footage of Godard directing on set and is great for historic purposes. A recent interview with Coutard is interesting, but the highlight for me was an recent interview with Anna Karina. My college term paper on Karina took a lot of material from this. Another great bonus is a short silent film starring Karina and Godard. This short is in the film Cleo 5-7 and is lots of fun is you know a thing or two about Karina and Godard's relationship. Godard's own trailer for the film is wonderful and as I write this I notice their is a lengthy booklet which I didn't get around to reading. Awesome job Criterion one of your best DVDs.
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Summary: Typical Godard, which is in evey way untypical
Review: Band of Outsiders is one of those films that you are either going to love or hate. When i first saw the film I could not understand what all the fuss was about. I found the film rather boring and very slow paced with no conclusion in sight and so I had to watch it in three viewings.
Im glad for taking my time watching the film because during my break inbetween viewings i had time to think about what i had watched. The film for some reason kept playing back in my head time and time again. I could not understand the phenomenon of why i kept thinking about a film that i hardly liked!
I realized that Godard is a genius, he somehow has a way of capturing the viewers attention without really do so. The cafe scene where the trio does a dance ensemble kept playing back and back in my mind it was some sort of rythmitic hypnosis. I still play it in my head.
The film is pure noir with a different view of Paris than we typically see in other more romantizied films. It takes part in some of the more grittier parts of town at the time, which goes well with the characters personalities which are neither flashy, glitzy or normal you could almost say surreal.
I higly recommend this film to anyone who wants to experience something a bit different something a bit disagreable with a typical format for a movie.
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Summary: Band on the Run
Review: Godard's best movie for Karina, one best recognizing her limitations and strengths. The story is half-baked fluff, but this is life as half-baked fluff, lived as one joke told after another, one cigarette smoked after another, one pop song cranking out of the jukebox after another. The three leads are often infantile and idiotic yet as the story progresses, Godard slowly develops another layer apart from the episodic buffoonery. Something like real devotion grows between one of the guys and the initially reluctant Karina. It ends with the tiresome cliche of the hood running away with his girl, something Belmondo fails to do in Breathless(whereas Lemmy Caution succeeds in Alphaville), but what really matters is the poetry--literary, visual, aural--that Godard whispers into our ears throughout the movie as if to suggest despite(perhaps, because of)all the distractions and delusions in life, there's an underground wellspring of serenity coursing through us that is real.
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Summary: Bande A Part
Review: Godard's `Band Of Outsiders' is a philosophical masterpiece in the form of a pseudo-film-noir. It's a film told in little, self-contained, unwritten vignettes of observation, fueled by Godard's deliberately simple narration: A romantic girl. A cigarette. A gun. A kiss. Some words about a robbery. A minute of silence. A quick run through the Louvre. A tragic ending that no one will ever know about. Godard's early films, in particular `Pierrot Le Fou', `Band Of Outsiders' and `Alphaville' used the cheap, bricolage style of paperback thrillers to make something self-ironic, anarchic and completely anti-establishments of any kind. These films were statements about anti-classical cinema being linked to classical cinema and they radiated art and apocalyptic screams in the form of melancholic observations. `Band Of Outsiders' is profound and beautiful, unsettling and tragic, with the spontaneous feel of graffiti blessed with a holy kind of beauty that Godard finds in insanity. The characters are illuminated by their shadows, creating voids of grunge-poetry, desperate and radical with sadness and the unpretentious, minor, petty destructiveness of youth and their movements seem profound and yet meaningless at the same time.The film is stained with the scream of youth, hushed by the melancholic tone, especially the evocative shots of Paris becoming less artisan and more industrial. The faces of the protagonists convey such emotion, such art, such poetry, illuminated by the beautiful, tragic, un-melodramatic, obligatory black and white. These characters are innocent in a world of unimaginativeness, tragedy and obligations, living outside of society, living for the moment, their youth killing them and yet making them live at the same time. Sacrificed and compromised like in a film by Pasolini, trying so desperately to continue living in their quotidian film-noir vignettes of guns, girls and Bogart, insane with the primal feeling of reality, like misplaced saints in a decaying universe.
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Summary: like watching a stream of consciousness french poem...
Review: i saw this last night over bread and tulips and i was smiling by the time i left the theater...goddard is the undisputed master of the french new wave...he based this film on a a roman noir crime nove. odile becomes a companion of arthur and franz and she helps them to pull off a heist, along the way she gets involved with both of them romantically. goddard pays a touching tribute to crime flims in this one. a lot of the dialogue appears to be stream of consciousness, like you wouldn't expect people to say things like this in real life, but its so cool. goddard's narration, which is at times inflated, comes off charming...the photography is goregous,a creamy black and white. as a movie it works better this way as opposed to color. two of my favorite scenes is when arthur and odile are riding in the metro people watching and the scene in the bar which odile, franz and arthur, do " the madison " dance sequence, that quentin tarantino copied in pulp fiction, using uma thurman..... this film a is a wonderful escapist treat.....
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Summary: Dancing the Madison in glorious black and white!
Review: If there are any films that offer a wonderful sense of love for the cinema, they are the films of Jean-Luc Godard. But, as he explains in a brief interview from 1964 that is included with this fine DVD, he was also against film; that is, against the conventions and rules that predominated French cinema. So he introduced unconventional methods of telling stories and making movies and decided to include elements that films typically left out. "Band of Outsiders" is a playful, unconventional, mesmerizing tale of small-time gangsters and young love set in 1960s Paris. Its source material runs the gamut from the pulp crime novel on which it is based to the American B-movies and film noir that inspired its look. It's Godard's best love letter to Paris since "Breathless," and also one of the last of his true New Wave films. The story might be simple enough: Arthur and Franz enlist the help of the young, beautiful Odile to stage a robbery. But if the story is simple, everything else around it is not. Here we find allusions and homages to Arthur Rimbaud (the poet whom one of the characters is named after), Franz Kafka, film composer Michel Legrand, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, American cartoons, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Andre Breton, Andre Malraux, and numerous others. That's Godard doing his thing, and even if we miss those allusions, there's so much more to be cherished: the famous minute of silence, the running visit through the Louvre, the dance scene, the glorious closeups of Anna Karina, riding on the underground metro, the trio driving through the streets of Paris. "Band of Outsiders" is playful, wondrous, hilarious, breezy, but at the same time melancholic, dark in its undertones. Raoul Coutard's photography gives it a stark look, but its playfulness is its most alluring aspect, along with Godard's wonderfully appealing, inventive visual language. It might not be the finest example of the French New Wave, nor is it as perfect as a work of art as "Breathless" and "My Life to Live," but in its flaunting of cinematic invention, its richness, and its embodiment of pure cinema, it's in a class by itself and certainly a film that should be seen, if not owned, by lovers of cinema. Its most memorable moments will remain in your mind forever. Many Godard fans, myself included, have been waiting eagerly for this Criterion edition of "Band of Outsiders." It's a remarkable digital transfer; the images and contrasts are crisp; the mono soundtrack is as clear as possible. The additional features are worth the price of the DVD alone, including a visual glossary that explains many of the film's allusions and a brief interview in which Godard explains the philosophy behind the New Wave. Criterion has really outdone itself with this disc, and that's saying something. I recommend that, even if you do not know French, you should watch this film at least once with the subtitles off since they sometimes obscure the closeups that make this film so memorable. When the camera is on Anna Karina's face, believe me when I say you don't want anything to stand in its way.
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Summary: QUENTIN TERANTINO'S INSPIRATION?
Review: It's easy to see why Quentin Terantino took the name of his film company (A Band Apart) from the French title of Jean Luc Godard's BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Criterion). A naive girl enamored of two would be gangsters joins them in a robbery of her aunt's home. There's lots of idiosyncratic small talk, film and literary references, an extended dance scene, some unexpected violence and a fatalistic romantic ending. Sound familiar?
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