'Pierrot le Fou': An Annotated Bibliography, Pt. 1

With its pop-art Technicolor and widescreen, anything-goes attitude and technique, and the energetic presences of Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Pierrot Le Fou initially seems an antic work in the mode of the 1961 Belmondo/Karina/Godard teamup Une Femme est Une Femme. But while Femme's antic tone evolves into one of insouciant/resigned poignancy, the road picture Pierrot travels to despair. It is no coincidence that the film was made as Godard and Karina's marriage was collapsing (they were to make one more film together, the poison valentine Made In U.S.A., a sort of proto-Kill Bill with politics).

Pierrot is, like most Godards, a persistently allusive film, one which its narrators, Belmondo and Karina in the guises of their characters (or are they?) divide up into chapters, so I thought it would be fun, in anticipation of the release of an excellent Criterion Collection DVD of the movie next week, to put together a post citing all the books shown and/or quoted from in the picture. It turned out to be a bigger list/task than I had anticipated, so I'm dividing it up into portions.

It would be best to first mention two books that aren't mentioned in the film, but hang over it nonetheless.

The first is Lionel White's Obsession, the hard-boiled novel from which Godard is said to have lifted whatever plot the picture itself has. The other is Raymond Queneau's Pierrot Mon Ami, a comic novel from the early '40s which in its turn leads to "Mon Ami Pierrot," the Eurovision song contest entry of 1959, which Karina's Marianne frequently sings to Belmondo's Ferdinand (whom she calls Pierrot, which invariably moves Ferdinand to respond, "that's not my name."). White's novel is out of print and can be gotten used on Amazon for about 140 bucks, which is a little over my research budget. Queneau's delightful book is readily available. Now onto what's actually in the film.

1) A "Pieds Nickeles" anthology

When we first see Belmondo's Ferdinand character, he's shopping for books in "the best of all worlds." (Note the shop awning. Also note the old-school listing of the phone number, with the letters and the mnemonic word. These will come into play again shortly.) The most prominent of those he's holding is a big volume of the adventures of "Les Pied Nickeles" (the Nickel-Foots), a trio of scoundrels (initially at least; they were reformed after World War I into rascally paragons of Frenc ingenuity) whose escapades were chronicled in bandes desinees beginning in 1908. Ferdinand and Marianne will carry this volume with them for the balance of their ill-starred affair.

Belmondo is holding on to one volume, but what he's reading from, in voice-over, is something wholly other, a passage of art criticism talking about the latter works of the painter Velasquez (1599-1660). Soon there's a cut to Belmondo in the bathtub and we see he's ecstatically reading from...

2) A History of Art: Modern Art, by Elie Faure

The French art historian published his remarkable four-volume history in the early 1920s. Why does he discuss Velasquez in the volume on Modern Art? Because his conception of Velasquez's late works is so radical, recasting him as a sort of abstract painter avant le lettre; Faure avers that after the age of 50, Velasquez no longer depicted people, but the spaces and objects between them. Belmondo's Ferdinand is so excited by this passage he calls his young daughter in to read it to her. "C'est beaux ca, eh, petite fille?" he asks before the girl's mom pulls her out of there, noting, "You're crazy to read her such things!"

Godard insists the Faure passage is essential to his conception of the film: "This is the theme. Its definition. Velasquez at the end of his life no longer painted precise forms, he painted what was between the forms, and this is restated by Belmondo when he imitates Michel Simon: one should not describe people, but what lies between them. " Later in the film, impersonating the legendary actor Michel Simon, Ferdinand speaks to the camera about his "idea for a novel," which is as Godard describes above. "Joyce tried it," Ferdinand says, not mentioning a book but clearly referring to Ulysses, "but one should be able to do better."

3) Cesar Birotteau, or The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, by Honore de Balzac

About to head out to another dull party (thrown by Ferdinand's in-laws, "Mr. and Mrs. Espresso") with his wife and couple Frank and Paola, and in the midst of leaving instructions for Marianne (Karina), the "niece" of Frank who's going to be tonight's ad hoc babysitter, Ferdinand waxes enthusiastic for the fast-vanishing three-letter prefixes of phone numbers, the one for the phone at the party being BAL for BALZAC. Which leads him to wax enthusiastic to Frank about the maestro's 1837 novel about the financial ruin and subsequent madness of a perfumer.

4) Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), Charles Baudelaire

The only bright spot for Ferdinand at the party, where just about all the guests only spout ad copy, is his encounter with one who doesn't: rough-hewn auteur Samuel Fuller, here playing himself, "an American film director." Fuller doesn't speak French, so Ferdinand has to speak to him via an attractive female translator. What's Fuller up to? "I'm here to make a picture in Paris called Flowers of Evil." The woman translates this as "Il est la pour faire Les Fleurs du Mal." To which Ferdinand responds "Ah, Baudelaire. C'est bon."

It's the "Les" that made all the difference. The fact of the matter was, as Fuller recounts in his very entertaining autobiography A Third Face, the movie he was working on in Paris was indeed called Flowers of Evil. But Fuller took only his title from Baudelaire; the film itself was to be Fuller's science-fictionized take on The Lysistrata. A project which, alas, like so many Fuller projects, unravelled and was never realized.

But in any case, Fuller doesn't correct Ferdinand, who the asks the director for an exact definition of cinema, to which Fuller famously replies: "A film is like a battleground." ("C'est comme une bataille," the female translator says.) "There's love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word, emotions."

"I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every film magazine and festival program around the world who printed that goddamned line!" Fuller says in Face.

Belmondo invokes Baudelaire with far less reverence in Alain Resnais' great 1974 Stavisky (scripted by Jorge Semprun), in a scene early on where Belmondo's Stavisky is mockingly recounting a bourgeois woman's attempt to seduce him in the manner recounted in Baudelaire's poem "The Jewels" ("My darling was naked, or nearly...she had left on her jewels...whose jingling music gave her the conquering air of a Moorish slave on days her master is pleased.").

5) A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust

Mentioned here in a voiceover by Ferdinand, who actually flubs the title, saying "disparue" (disappeared) instead of "perdu" (lost). The translation in the subtitle is from C. Scott Moncrieff's still-controversial Englishing of Proust's magnum opus. In any case, the black screen here is an interim between fireworks explosions, and the pertinence of the title will soon be made clear: Frank's "niece" Marianne is in fact Marianne Renoir, a former lover of Ferdinand's, and the two are about to run away together.

6) Al Capone, by John Roeburt

Marianne is trouble, we find, as she and Ferdinand wake up in her flat—in a building still under construction, it seems—the next morning. The place is filled with guns, there's a corpse with a scissor in the back of his next in the other room, stuff like that. This quick shot of a nightstand in the flat is testimony to a life dangerously lived. Minor screenwriter Roeburt's 1959 novelization of Capone's life, a tie-in with the Rod-Steiger-starring biopic of that year, rated a Serie Noire edition back in the day, but the book's all but forgotten now.

More to come...

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In the scene where Pierrot mentions Balzac, he also refers to "Olypio's Melancholy," a Victor Hugo (and Faure Song) by the name ‘‘Tristesse d’Olympio.’’ In the poem, Hugo (as Olympio), recalling a past love affair while revisiting the forest where their trysts were consummated mourns the fact that things do not retain a memory of the emotions and actions that took place in the past.

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hiya do you have any references please? like, where did you learn that godard said that about velazquez? thanks. emma xx

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