Letter to my friends to learn how to make films together, by Jean-Luc Godard

Photo: Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in “Pierrot le Fou”, 1965, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)

“I play
You play
We play
At cinema
You think there are
Rules for the game
Because you are a child
Who does not yet know
What is a game and what is
Reserved for grownups
Which you already are
Because you have forgotten
That it is a child’s game
What does it consist of
There are many definitions
Here are two or three
Looking at oneself
In the mirror of other people
Forgetting and learning
Quickly and slowly
The world
And oneself
Thinking and speaking
Odd game
That life”

– Letter to my friends to learn how to make films together, Jean-Luc Godard (from the book Godard on Godard)

“ ‘The third time this week.’ Of course I did. They’re showing Johnny Guitar. Good for her education,” Pierrot (Jean Paul Belmondo) tells his wife after she reproaches him for allowing their daughter to go to the cinema for the third time in a week. There are many allusions to the movies in Pierrot le Fou, from Belmondo imitating Michel Simon, from mentions of Pépé le Moko, and Laurel and Hardy, to Pierrot’s describing Marianne (Anna Karina) as “a woman like a Hollywood movie star in Technicolor”, and the appearance of Samuel Fuller as himself in a scene where Pierrot says he’s always wanted to know what cinema is. Fuller replies (in English and another translates into French): “A film is like a battle ground, love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word… emotions.” Godard confessed that he had wanted to say it for a long time, but it was Fuller who found the word ‘emotion’.

A Lolita-style novel was the starting point for Pierrot le Fou, Godard having bought the rights a couple of years prior, a film that was completely spontaneous, with the whole last part invented on the spot. “I thought about You Only Live Once; and instead of Lolita or La Chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther and Hermann and Dorothea,” the director revealed in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma. An homage to all those classic movies, and yet a reinvention of filmmaking, a chance to improvise, a search for a vaster cinema, a response of sorts to the days when cinema was something new. A film in the spirit of adventure, a film of great freedom, because you really don’t know when it will end before it does, a film conceived from its author’s own world of cinema.

“Two or three years ago I felt that everything had been done,
that there was nothing left to do today.
I couldn’t see anything to do that hadn’t been done already.[…]
After Pierrot, I no longer feel this. Yes. One must film,
talk about, everything. Everything remains to be done.”

Photos: “Pierrot le Fou”, 1965. Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)