Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here.  First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman. Today, with Ben still tripping through Godard's old stomping grounds in Paris, I take on a film that just about defies you to like it. Are you locked and loaded for...


The Riflemen/Les Carabiniers (France, 1963, Godard)

The Riflemen, Jean Luc-Godard's fifth narrative feature film, is a darkly comic parable, a peculiar pastiche that blends theatre of the absurd with elements of silent film, while juxtaposing both with unsettling moments of grim realism. The film is as off-putting as it is thought-provoking, but this was almost certainly Godard's plan from the get-go. 

Two peasants, improbably named Michelangelo and Ulysses, are promised paradise on earth by a couple of the king's representatives ("In war, anything goes") if they join the armed forces and march off on behalf of their monarch. Their sweethearts, the equally improbably named Cleopatra and Venus, are smitten less with their beaus than with the notion that they will have all this and heaven too should their young men do so, so they shoo their own little Vladimirs and Estragons out the door and onto the stage of war. But first, in a blunt metaphor and goofy piece of slapstick, the newly minted King's men try to catch a lamb to slaughter for a celebratory meal. It is a moment that we will return to at the end of the film, when our heroes assume the position of scapegoats. Godard also exercises his sense of humour by contrasting the character's classical names with their live's overall squalor, a familiar juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic that will recur throughout the film, to varying degrees of success. A vivid example of such being the execution scene of a long blonde-haired rebel who gets the soldiers to delay her death by spouting Marxist slogans, while cutting to semi-comic takes of the soldiers who are momentarily given pause by her rhetoric. The key word is momentarily, as they eventually gun her down, not simply (one suspects) out of a lack of comprehension, but out of simple exhaustion. 


On the other hand, Godard underscores the desolation of the protagonists' situation with the use of grainy and overexposed black and white film stock, as well as the dull grey wash of Raoul Coutard's cinematography. 

And while Godard makes a clear statement about the tedium of war through the film's determinedly ugly appearance, where Godard really puts his imprint on the film is in the way he refuses to play the war genre game, which often contends that when war isn't a thrilling and/or terrifying adventure, it is full of camaraderie and good cheer. The Riflemen takes pains to point out the opposite. With one notable exception, to be discussed later, the film's humour is occasionally absurd, but mostly juvenile. More importantly, Godard purposefully elides action sequences in order to avoid presenting war as anything but a deadly dull affair. Indeed, the film doesn't even present the war as particularly horrifying (inserts of actual war footage notwithstanding). Instead, we witness much aimless wandering, punctuated by moments of near-action and not-quite-adventure that don't really seem to go anywhere. To be sure, The Riflemen is one war film that will not be used by troops going into battle looking for a quick adrenaline kick.  This is a rather unique sort of anti-war film, in that its main concern to  to show war at its most uninteresting, to depict what Godard called its "ordinary everyday-ness." This is an Arendtian study of the banality of warfare, not from the remove of the officers and their bureaucratic administration, but from the perspective of the soldier, looking from bottom up. Also, instead of depicting scenes of savagery, Godard has the soldiers write postcards home to their sweethearts, as if they were on a long vacation, describing the action through inter-titles, in one of many homages to silent film, while occasionally contrasting the terrible with the ridiculous ("Even so, it is a nice summer".) Again, it looks like we are back in Brecht's playing field of alienation and detachment, for Godard's approach is certainly potentially off-putting, as he risks losing the audience in order to drill home his central thesis: War is not Hell. War is Humdrum. Unfortunately for the director, it appears that his film did alienate an awful lot of people, as both critics and audiences loathed it upon its initial release in 1963. 

In the tradition of the silent films that Godard clearly adores, most of the film's humour is not only black, but also deadpan, in the vein of Buster Keaton. This is highlighted in the film's most accomplished set piece, where Michelangelo attends a movie for the first time in his life. When the country bumpkin mistakes the projected image for reality, much to the chagrin of his seatmates and our great entertainment, and eventually attempts (a la Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.) to get a little too close to the bathing beauty on the screen, the rube destroys the illusion, while also underlining one of Godard's recurrent tropes. Expropriating from Jorge Luis Borges, Godard, always examining the conventional while on the lookout for a new cinematic language, begins the film with the proclamation "I use worn metaphors," and in this passage, he transplants Keaton's premise to a war setting, giving it a twist of gallows humour to go with Keaton's post-modern self-awareness. Further, the humour that runs through the film is of the level of satirical bleakness that anticipates the works of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, with a little bit of Bela Tarr tossed in via the rustic ruins of the central quartet's cabin. And some of Godard's other bugaboos make their (re)appearance as well, including his proclivity for examining the effects of violence being played for comic effect, as well as his fascination with the commodification of people through the deleterious effects of advertising, which shows up in an amusing shtick involving superimposition of alluring underwear advertisements over the bodies of the actors holding them.

More interestingly, the question of fantasy and reality, particularly with regards to the photographic image, is pointedly examined in the film's above-mentioned funniest scene as well as its climactic scene, wherein the soldier's return home to share the spoils of war, which turn out to be a trunk full of postcards from all the places they have seen and supposedly conquered. Godard stretches the gag to the breaking point, as if  purposefully challenging the audience's patience at every turn, daring them to find anything about this cinematic representation of war ultimately entertaining. 

The Riflemen is an easy film to dislike, and a difficult film to embrace, because Godard does not allow us an easy way into the characters or their situation. He refuses to make it easy on the audience, avoiding genre conventions at all costs, and daring us to consider that the real horror of war is the idea that anyone could find it rewarding, never mind exciting or adventurous.  Finally, Godard also continues to pursue several tropes that will become even more important to him as the 1960s unfold, which makes The Riflemen an interesting transitional work in his filmography.


Then Ben:

Outstandingly good review!  You touched on (just about) every point that dawned on me while watching the film and many more besides.  I am especially gratified that you mentioned Bela Tarr because Satantango certainly came to my mind during The Rifleman. In fact, I even flashed on Even Dwarves Started Small, which you didn't mention and I can understand why; yet, something about the absurd tone and perverse humour of The Riflemen reminded me of the misfitted world in Herzog's film.  I also thought of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, by the way.  Clearly, this anti-war/non-movie war movie worked it's way into the filing cabinet of my head and started opening drawers. 

 

I am especially appreciative of your discussion of the two scenes about "the question of fantasy and reality, particularly with regard to the photographic image," although I believe your approach to this requires theoretical revision.  While it is correct that more than once a character mistakenly takes photographic images to be reality, the character does not in so doing confuse reality and fantasy.  No doubt, the flat-out stupid character has all sorts of fantastic misconceptions about reality in the first place, but the photographic images are not the source of his misconception, at least not the photographic images we see him encounter during the course of the film.  So, the issue is not about the subjective mental blurring of fantasy and reality but rather the objective epistemological status of the photographic image as the representation of reality.

 

I happen to be very tuned to this topic since watching The Little Soldier with it's famous dialogue: "Photography is truth.  Cinema is truth 24 frames per second."  The second sentence is, of course, the famous line, often presented without the first line.  But the second line truly is second; i.e., conceptually derivative.  Every since seeing Tarkovsky and then even more after seeing Marker's La Jette, I have been thinking about the relationship between motion pictures, movies, and still photography with respect to the post-painting visual image as representative of reality.  Hence, I draw attention to The Little Soldier statement as a whole.  And now The Riflemen stirs the pot for me even more because in it, not just the movie but also still photographs fool the fool.  I won't attempt to pursue this further here.  Suffice to highlight what is probably already obvious, the epistemological status of the photographic image in The Riflemen is negative, false, illusory (not to be confused with fantastic), contra the positive status verbally ascribed to it in The Little Soldier.

 

You are darn tootin' that The Riflemen is "an easy film to dislike" but personally I cannot agree that it is "a difficult film to embrace."  It bugged the hell outa me a number of times but just when I figured I was getting fed up with it, I found it funny or profound or both.  I mean, your name-dropping of Becket's two great clowns is apt.  Let's call The Riflemen "Waiting for Godard."  Call me an artsy nerd but I embrace this film wholeheartedly.  I really like it.  And I think it is quite unique in the film-maker's New Wave catalogue.  The film is probably his slowest moving.  I mean this literally in terms of the real time that passes in certain scenes.  But I mean it even more in terms of the overall heel-dragging pace of the thing, the lazy rhythm of the dialog and the attitude of almost ennui.  My observation is of comedy not only black but also decidedly dry and droll, giving the critique in the film the edge it needs.

Here is the funniest scene in this movie:

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