Les carabiniers

As countrymen fight amongst themselves, two farmers join the fight for riches and fame, writing home to their wives with their view of the battle. Godard used actual letters from soldiers in various wars as a backdrop.

The film was originally panned as the worst film ever made. So much so that Godard pulled the film from all distribution. Amusingly thought provoking.

The best scenes in the film come during their fighting for "the king". Unknown enemy, speaking the same language and wearing the same uniforms, Godard successfully blurs the lines of war and reason.

If you have an inclination to inflict, pain and misery and chaos in conflict, then the army is for you, you can do what you want to, although the outcomes are quite tricky to predict. In victory, however, you can take, as many women you can catch and beat and break, looting other peoples treasure, such reward and so much pleasure, overwhelmed just by the difference you can make. Don't forget all of the sites you'll get to see, as citizens attempt to run and flee, infrastructure now in rubble, as you march through at the double, razing places, to their bases, with such glee.

Will we ever learn!!!

What can you say? It's Godard. If you appreciate Godard, his early stuff, particularly, Les Carabiniers fits in perfectly with films such as Breathless, My Life to Live, Une femme est une femme, Band of Outsiders, and Pierrot le fou. It is utterly complicated, and seems to be saying dozens of things at once, none of them becoming clear enough to formulate a satisfactory thesis.

The film starts off with two brothers and their wives living in a shack in the middle of nowhere. Two carabiniers (riflemen) arrive, basically assaulting the four of them. They come with a proposition, though: join the army, be one of them. You get to travel everywhere, and you can do anything you want. What a proposition! The two men join, leaving their wives (tellingly named Cleopatra and Venus) at the shack.

What follows is a fantastical account of war. The characters speak French, but they don't seem to be meant to be any specific nationality. Their supreme commander is "The King." They travel around the world, including Egypt and the USA, killing whoever gets in their way. They play sickening games with their victims. Why? Because they can. They have guns, their victims don't. Between the scenes where our heroes reak havoc, Godard inserts stock footage of real wars. Over the fictional footage, Godard inserts the sound of explosions and gunfire. This lack of realism creates a stunning surrealism.

At first, I was thinking the film was about the fact that your average soldier is an ignoramous with a deadly weapon. Transferred, this speaks illy of the government who willingly supplies its young morons with deadly weapons. One particularly hilarious scene (yes, it has elements of comedy, too) which shows these folks to be country bumpkins occurs when one, Michelangelo, attends a movie, his first ever. It begins with a train arriving at a station, a la L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat, a Lumiere film made in 1895, often regarded as the first film ever made (though it wasn't, not even by the Lumieres). Michelangelo covers his face as it moves forwards on screen, as everyone has heard the first movie patrons ever did (which isn't true, either). The film he watches moves on to a scene where a woman undresses and takes a bath. Michelangelo is so impressed, he jumps up and tries to jump into the action, a la Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. The results are hilarious. I don't think this theme holds up through the whole film, but, c'est le Godard!

Further on, it seems to take more of a Marxist viewpoint (I believe Godard was a Marxist at this point in his career). Two communists ambush the carabiniers at one point, claiming that, though they may be allied with the carabiners' country, they are obliged ideologically to murder capitalists. Here I realized that a large number of aggressive nations during this time were capitalist. Later, near the end, a very long scene serves to criticize capitalism: the boys return home, saying that they have gathered everything in the world for their girlfriends. Yet they carry nothing but one suitcase. Here commences the longest single scene in the film, where the men reveal the contents of their suitcase. They have not collected everything on Earth, per se, but rather photographs of them. For one thing, this depicts Godard's main objective in life: to make us realize that we are watching a film, not involved in any sort of reality. With just photos, the lack of the real objects is even more ironic. Also, most of these objects photographed are objects that can never be owned: natural wonders, man-made wonders, and tons and tons of women, including ones long since dead. This petty ownership of photos (they also call them deeds) is a reductio ad absurdum for capitalism: the most important things in the world are unownable, and thus to own pictures of them is truly absurd.

throughout his work in the early to mid-sixties, jean luc godard rode the nouvelle vague by employing and twisting the classic features of a specific film genre. examples of this are his sci-fi (alphaville), and his beloved gangster film (breathless).

when examining les carabiniers, his take on the war movie, one must see godard's purpose in two parts; one, as an anti-war movie, and two, as an anti-war-movie movie.

that is, in addition to the visual social commentary which displays the standard horrific shots of dismemberment and destruction, godard uses the structural components of his film as a whole to mock films along the lines of 'private ryan'.

this means that he refuses to use the concept of war as something that will prove to provide the viewer with any degree of vicarious pleasure, whether that pleasure be derived from identification with a noble lead (which is surely why he has ulysses and michelangelo be such jackasses), beautiful glimmering visuals, (hence the low-caliber film stock), or enjoyable montage and pacing (akin to the conclusive lengthy postcard recounting).

to end this brief rebuff to those who compare this film to tomb raider, i will quote critic david steritt, who states that in les carabiniers, godard refuses to turn aggression into commodification.

While this is certainly not Godard's most enjoyable work some of the negative comments here are world-class examples of point-missing.

Godard had already shown with "A Bout de Soufflé" and "Vivre Sa Vie" that he knew how to make a film with style, romance and flair. Therefore it's clear that the crude editing and sound dubbing, continuity lapses, bad acting and overall cheapness on display here were deliberate.

What we seem to have here is "War for Dummies". Godard spells things out as if talking to backward children and absolutely refuses to invest his subject and his protagonists with any sort of spectacle or dignity, both by giving us moronic and unsympathetic characters and by refusing the audience any catharsis or vicarious pleasure.

Francois Truffaut once said that no war movie can be truly anti-war, since the camera automatically aestheticizes its subject. Godard here goes all-out to disprove that thesis.This does of course make the film hard to watch but it's a deliberate slap in the face, not the result of incompetence.

Incidents from many wars are parodied - for example scenes of the women having their hair cut off refer to the treatment of French women who had consorted with Germans during the Occupation. "America" is represented by a car with tail fins and some French tower blocks, in a prefiguring of "Alphaville"s approach to location. Apparently the letters used as intertitles are genuine letters home from French troops in various conflicts, although this does not seem to be made clear in the film.

I tend to agree that this is a film for Godard completists only and certainly not the best place to start with his work. The best comparison to make would be with Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" which takes the same crude approach, and apparently the project started life as a stage play.

See "Weekend" for a similar approach to 'peace', only with a lot more fun and games.