Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964) finds the director in an unusually playful mood; this black and white feature is from Godard’s early period, and is a combination of sketches and improvisations, loosely wound around a thin narrative thread.
The gif above is of Arthur (Claude Brasseur), Odile (Anna Karina) and Franz (Sami Frey) doing “The Madison,” a dance sequence that sort of “interrupts” the film — which is very free form in any event — for no particular reason at all, other than the audience’s enjoyment.
As Any Taubin famously noted, “Band of Outsiders is the Godard film for people who don’t much care for Godard: a proto-slacker mood piece about two nondescript guys trying to persuade a beautiful girl to help them commit a robbery. Adapted from Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold, an American ’50s crime novel published in France as part of the pulp Série Noire, it’s more [Jean] Renoir than [Samuel] Fuller—the least preoccupied with American culture of any of Godard’s ’60s films [. . .]
Godard’s adaptation vacuums the novel of its predictable character psychology and plot twists, leaving only the most minimal narrative. In between the play-acted and the real shooting, the film kills time with a series of set pieces: the celebrated mad dash through the Louvre [. . .] and of course, there’s the sequence where Odile, Franz, and Arthur dance the Madison in a half-empty café (the sequence that both Quentin Tarantino and Hal Hartley fell in love with and borrowed for their own films).”
You can view the dance sequence from Band of Outsiders here, or by clicking on the image above.
Tags: Band of Outsiders, Jean-Luc Godard
