What is Pierrot exactly? a video essay on Pierrot le fou.
Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965) is in my opinion his greatest film and possibly the greatest movie of the 1960s. In it Godard attempts to do EVERYTHING - capture both life and art in a movie. I don't think there's been a movie like it before or since. Seeing it is an experience like no other - it truly involves the viewer's mind and senses in a breathtakingly imaginative, creative, new way.
Audience Reviews for Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot Goes Wild) (Crazy Pete) Oct 06, 2015 Pierrot Le Fou is a stylish film with a great romantic, hip, blase vibe and sardonic sense of humor.
Echoing Yves Klein’s anthropometric canvases and Belmondo’s last act before blowing himself up in Pierrot le fou, Godard literally paints himself with red, blue, and white: wearing a white lab coat, he is seen in his office with its blue wall and red lamp, even his magic markers (red and blue) announce these colours! (p. 66). In his last episode, 4B.
Pierrot Le Fou was made when Godard was in his best form, before he turned to radical politics and his films became less and less coherent. Show this movie to anyone raised on mainstream studio fare and they won't know what to think of it except that it's boring. The mainstream viewer would be absolutely right in that opinion since at this point of his career Godard cared less and less about.
In the films Le Petit Soldat (1960), My Life to Live (1961), Les Carabiniers (1962), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), and others, the director sought to prove the impotence of individuals pitted against capitalist society and the futility of their efforts to oppose it. Godard’s heroes (or, by definition of the new-wave theorists, his antiheroes) are alienated from the bourgeois.
To take a case in point, one is grateful for the seven pieces by Godard in the book, which throw considerable light on his work and are fun to read besides; included are the scenarios of A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and VIVRE SA VIE, a fascinating monologue on PIERROT LE FOU, and a reply to critics of LES CARABINIERS. But the English translations of most of these pieces are grotesque. Unless the reader.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), made at the height of the French New Wave, remains a milestone in French cinema. More accessible than his later films, it represents the diverse facets of Godard’s concerns and themes: a bittersweet analysis of male-female relations; an interrogation of the image; personal and international politics; the existential dilemmas of consumer society.