Around the same time that Alain Resnais portrayed the innovative use of flashbacks in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard discovered jump cuts with Breathless. I haven’t watched Breathless, but his Crazy Pete serves as a good enough example for understanding jump cuts. Other than that nugget there is not much I can write about the movie.
In an attempt to placate my inability to articulate much, I quote Roger Ebert from a review in 1966:
Godard never sticks closely enough to this plot to make it important. He does a curious thing. He will have a scene that is perfectly conventional, like a scene in a Hollywood gangster movie. But it doesn’t come out of anything or lead into anything; it is important because of its tone, its texture and not because it advances the plot. Thus a Godard movie becomes a montage of pure technique; the parts don’t fit together — but they add up to an attitude. Does this make sense? More than any other director, Godard resists being written about.
Crazy Pete opens with Ferdinand sitting in a bathtub reading some heroic account of a Spanish conquistador to his daughter who may not even be ten. Thrown out of his job in television, he abandons this young daughter and her beautiful Italian mother, his affluent father-in-law and his connections with prospective employers, and runs away with his daughter’s new baby-sitter with whom he had an affair several years ago. “Gay abandon” is the phrase that strikes me.
We soon learn that the baby-sitter Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot, is a free-spirited woman who murders men and midgets as easily as she breaks into song and dance. And she does the latter as easily as Julie Andrews does, though not as often.
Ferdinand (aka Pierrot) and Marianne become public enemies like Bonnie and Clyde, and anarchists like Thelma and Louise, and to their credit remain unique. Incidentally, “Crazy Pete” is the namesake of France’s first “public enemy number one”. The two lead a vividly whimsical life, with major events like abandonment of family and murders and threats to life seeming inconsequential. They alternatingly keep an upperhand on each other, identifying themselves as personifications of ideas and feelings. They are more like personifications of atomic units of ideas and feelings respectively, for every two successive states seem separated by the jump cuts.
The two for a while live in a cabin on the seaside eating fish and fruit. Ferdinand is scribbling fragmented sentences in a notebook, eagerly obsessing with his free verse poetry, which he believes is a game of loser-take-all. Marianne, on the other hand, is mostly bored. The two are digital characters, with their only states being boredom and adrenaline-pumping frenzy. They lived where they did because they reached the place and suddenly got bored of running away from the police and gangs of weapon smugglers. I can’t help thinking what Thoreau would have made of them, who “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Pierrot and Marianne are the antithesis of all and any purpose in life. Their nihilism is strangely liberating.
Godard’s success can be attributed in his ability to make his actors believe that he knows what he is asking them to do, and in making his audience believe that there is a method to this madness. More recently, Ebert wrote of the same movie again:
I once wrote of it as “Godard’s most virtuoso display of his mastery of Hollywood genres,” I now see it more as the story of silly characters who have seen too many Hollywood movies.
There are too many references to cinema, art, literature, even to political events. That was how Godard made his movies. But I wouldn’t call those characters silly. I wouldn’t call them anything as they are too volatile to be called that.
Image Source: Crazy Pete on IMDB
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I haven’t seen the film but I can imagine from the comparisons you made using some ideas and films I know. I see that Podcasts of Thoreau have enriched the thought process. Thoreau is one of the this long queue of philosophers but imagine viewing this from a variety of angles: Through Dostoevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche (I think you have touched this in the phrase about “Nihilism”), Sartre, Camus, Hemingway. A range of philosophies. Somehow the question “Why they did that?” whether put in this film’s context or in case of Thelma and Louis, is a very rhetorical and a deep one. It might touch upon all the abstract philosophies developed to inquire about ourselves in the 20th century. At the same time it appears that we are reading too much between the lines. Now I understand what you mean by the volatility of the scene/characters.
Those audio books haven’t really enriched anything. Wait until I write about Thoreau. I am partly disillusioned. But yes, I am also what I read.
You may have read too much between my lines, but it is possible that one can never read too much into Godard’s intentions, especially when one hasn’t watched his movies.