Bande à Part (Godard, 1964) is iconic for the world of Art Cinema, precisely because of Godard’s use of an ample set of its conventions. Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave, as much interested he was in breaking the rules of classical cinema, he was equally faithful to the institution of the French Art Cinema that was being developed at the time. In this essay, I will discuss three main themes that define Bande à Part as an Art Cinema film: the objective realism of Parisian life, Godard’s authorial expressivity and the role of ambiguity as a philosophical stance. I will mainly focus the discussion on three representative scenes that describe the themes above: the opening, the café, and the metro scenes. All three are examples of documenting real life in Paris in the 60s, whereas the first two carry the stamp of the auteur, and the emblem of ambiguity.  

Bande à Part is primarily filmed at real locations. Godard’s camera takes us through the streets of Paris; whether we are following Arthur’s and Franz’s car or Odile’s bike, we experience real-time Paris in the 60s. Cars, trucks, buses passing by, a traffic controller at a busy intersection, pedestrians going about their daily lives, going shopping, walking to work, crossing busy streets, but most of all, they don’t seem to be startled by the presence of the camera; after all, these were the days that films were made in Film Studios, how would they expect that at that moment their image would be eternalized and they would be participating in one of the most famous films of the 20th century? As Odile rides her bike, we evidence the Parisian streets and shops, but not the touristic sites, as the American musicals of the 50s-60s used to be overflowing with; the Tour Eiffel and the Arch de Triomphe are not part of the everyday reality of the Parisian citizens, not everybody lives in the high-class expensive districts, nor everyone has time to walk about Paris and visit these places. For all we know, most Parisians see the touristic sites once in their lives!

The café scene is another way that Godard uses to emphasize realism in Bande à Part. This is an approximately 13-minute scene, taking place at a Parisian café. The group of friends is having drinks, chatting about this and that, joking, flirting, and towards the end of the scene dancing the iconic Madison. The scene starts with a high-angle view of the café, revealing the bar, its bartenders, waiters, other clients. The sound is a protagonist in this scene, where voices, steps, glasses, coffee cups, billiard sticks and balls, blend in the background. Nothing that happens in this scene has a contribution to the development of the story; Godard aims at offering us how a meeting of young people at a café really is, just hanging out, no major things to think about or decide, no goals. Frank’s one-minute silence adds to the irony of everyday life’s inertia and ennui. Bordwell (2008: 153) aptly suggests that “had the characters had a goal, life would no longer seem so meaningless”.

Another moment in the film that documents reality is when Arthur and Odile are in the metro. Godard chooses to show them in public transportation during the night, after a night out, when the city takes on a different tone. The train arrives at the station, framed by Godard in a way that references Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), and Arthur and Odile are running to the platform to catch it. In the metro, the couple sits without talking, and the ambient sound of the train on the rails and in the tunnel are prominent. A man is reading his newspaper, another one is staring out the window – or who knows, into oblivion. Odile’s self-consciousness and lack of confidence matches the insecurity of night time in the Parisian metro. And even Odile’s idea of the meaning of marriage takes an extra-realistic note when she answers that marriage is “offering your breasts and your thighs”. Odile’s loneliness in the thought of such kind of marriage is extended to the passengers when she realizes that “people in the metro always look so sad and lonely”.

The most characteristic of all Art Cinema conventions used in Bande à Part is the authorial expressivity imposed by Godard. Bordwell (2008: 155) suggests that the concept of authorship is used as a means to unify the text and alert the competent viewer, and Neale (1981: 15) calls it “a commodity-based practice of production … the mark of the author … as a kind of brand name”. It would be impossible not to think that Godard is foregrounding his artistic persona in the film, and he could not have chosen a more apparent device than the narrator’s voice-over. During the entire film, Godard’s voice is directing us to see things that do not exist on the frame, hear sounds that are not chosen to be heard, explain characters’ emotions that they do not even realize they experience. At the beginning of the film, he narrates: “For the spectators arriving now, we offer a few words chosen at random: Three weeks earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl.” He aims at acknowledging the audience, and the audience acknowledging him, occupying a major part of the film. He simply lists the thematic focal points of the story within seconds, pushing them from the foreground, where they conventionally exist in Classical Cinema, to the background, and therefore disregarding them; the “random” elements of the story are not as important as the voice relating them. His jests display an irony; not an arrogance, but the irony of life and how “la condition humaine” is a priority in Art Cinema than the traditional forms of filmmaking (Bordwell, 2008: 153). Godard remains nostalgic to the Hollywood film noir, musical and melodrama, but his obsession with the paradox and the use of meta-cinematic elements (Kline, 2014: 173) both break the rules and make him a dominant figure in the film.

Godard’s authorship in the film is undeniably present during the Madison dance at the café scene, where Arthur, Odile and Frank are dancing a repetitive and simple choreography for about 3.5 minutes. During this shot, the camera is static, the actors are engaged strictly and entirely to their dancing steps, but the sound deviates completely from the convention. Diegetic and non-diegetic sound is interchanged in a successive manner; the non-diegetic song that the group of friends is dancing on is interrupted by Godard’s voice repetitively every few seconds. He initiates his narration with an announcement that “now is the time for a digression, in which to describe our heroes’ feelings”, and that is exactly what he does: Arthur’s and Odile’s romantic thoughts and Franz’s existential daydreaming. During Godard’s narration, diegetic sounds from the actors’ steps, rhythmic snapping fingers, ambient sounds from clients’ voices and café noises are still prominent. And then suddenly the non-diegetic music is on again, matching the dancers’ steps. Where did that music come from? What kind of music are the group of friends listening to while dancing? 

Naturally, the immediate effect of this use of sound is confusion, and it may primarily be interpreted as an attempt to break the rules. Is Godard trying to break the traditional approach to the added value of image and sound (Chion, 1994: 5), by substituting the almighty soundtrack in this scene that references the genre of musical with his own voice? Chion’s (1994: 22-23) description of the reciprocal effect of the added value of image and sound says that “for the spectator, it is not the acoustical realism, so much as synchrony above all, and secondarily the factor of verisimilitude (arising not from the truth but from convention) that will lead him or her to connect the sound with an event or detail”, and in this scene Godard plays with most of the dimensions of sound: rhythm, fidelity, space, time and perspective (Bordwell, Thompson and Smith, 2017). The rhythm of the non-diegetic song becomes the diegetic rhythm of their steps and finger-clicking, the verisimilitude of the musical genre disappears when Godard’s voice takes over, the musical reduces to realism by the change of space from the big screen to a regular Parisian café, and Godard’s sketch of the psychological portraits of the characters adds an inner point-of-view perspective. However, Godard’s vision goes much further than a mere rebellion against classical conventions, as he aims at elevating the significance of the image, and by “separating” it from the sound, he composes an homage to the art of cinema.

The two main elements of Art Cinema discussed above which Godard uses substantially, realism and authorship, introduce a serious contradiction: realism is described by the objective, whereas authorial expressivity is unquestionably subjective. But as Bordwell (2008: 156) teaches us “Art Cinema seeks to solve the problem in a sophisticated way: by the device of ambiguity”. Godard’s narrative gaps, complex psychological characters, aimless wondering scenes, and the misleading narrator’s voice-over, are all defined by ambiguity. But this ambiguity has a philosophical aspect, rather than a mere technical solution to the problem arising from the oscillation between the objective and the subjective. Is there eternal truth? Is realism as real as it can get? Isn’t reality simply a superposition of subjective realities? And therefore, isn’t ambiguity more real than real life itself?

As Godard relates all the story elements at the start of the film, he piles them up like they don’t matter, intensifying the lack of cohesion in the story he is about to present. The same attitude towards the narrative is applied for the rest of the film, with lack of explanation of the plan of the break-in, lack of information about the characters and their lives, as well as constant changes in moods, change of romantic partners, and unrealistically connected locations (sometimes the group arrives from the front of the house, sometimes by boat from the river form the back of the house, with no logical explanation). Even at the climax of the story, Godard is using a rather questionable gunfight, by featuring possibly the most “unsuccessful” shootout in the western film history, where a single gunshot – delayed by Arthur for no reason – kills the gunfighter that miraculously missed 5 of his attempts.  

The Madison dance scene is a perfect example of this use of ambiguity by Godard, as a futile repetitive dance scene becomes a statement for how significant the subjectively insignificant can be. Godard is laughing at his own scene before it even starts by adding a little bit of drunk wisdom when a drunk man says to Frank “Empires crumble, republics founder. But fools go on.” And right after, the only thing that matters to the group of three is to synchronize their childish, simplistic steps that are repeated in a loop. Who are the fools? Is it the bande à part? Is it Godard himself? Are the fools really the fools since they seem to go on even after empires collapse? This is how Godard succeeds in offering maximum intelligibility from something as vague as a dance.

Unlike Lars von Trier’s suggestion that “a film should be like a pebble in your shoe” (Bordwell, 2008: 163), Bande à Part is the perfectly flat pebble that is used for stone skipping on the surface of a lake. Godard’s own presence in Bande à Part balances realism and ambiguity, offering a raw yet optimistic point-of-view of life, without resorting to the use of extreme dramatic devices. The only ingredients he needs are his favorite Classical Hollywood scenes, and a few moments of real life sprinkled with moments of dreams, as in the powerful moment during the Madison scene, when Godard orders Franz to wonder “is the world becoming a dream, or is the dream becoming the world?”.             

Filmography

Godard, Jean-Luc. Bande à part. 1964. Film. FR: Anouchka Films/ Orsay Films

Lumière, August & Lumière, Louis. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. 1895. Film. FR: Lumière

Bibliography

Bordwell, D. (2008) ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Poetics of Cinema. New York, London: Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 151–169.

Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. and Smith, J. (2017) ‘Sound in the Cinema’, in Film Art: An Introduction. 11th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 263–302.

Chion, M. (1994) ‘Projections of Sound on Image’, in Audio-Vision. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 3–24.

Kline, T. Jfferson (2014) ‘Bande(s) à part: Godard’s Contraband Poetry’, in Conley, T. and Kline, T. Jefferson (eds) A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard. USA - UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 171–186.

Neale, S. (1981) ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22(1), pp. 11–39.