Given the half-century or so of his career spent bouncing between televisual experiments, incendiary collectivist agitprop, and narrative ruminations on the fractured state of culture, it can be easy to overlook that for a few years in the 1960s Jean-Luc Godard was considered a bankable box office prospect. The director’s 1964 announcement of his forthcoming adaptation of Lionel White’s crime novel Obsession gave little sense for how far afield he was about to stray from the era’s commercial cinema. By the time the cameras were scheduled to roll on Pierrot le fou, Godard still had no concrete plans for the production beyond a handful of scheduled location shoots and a cast which included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Godard’s ex-wife Anna Karina as the leads. Ostensibly guided by the source novel’s plot, in which a middle-class father abandons his family to pursue a relationship with their criminally-connected babysitter, Godard and his collaborators made the film up as they shot it, taking inspiration from the era’s political upheavals, Godard’s own personal and professional crises, and, inevitably, the films and art the director loved. The result is as unconventional as its technique, careening through a series of episodes between the unfortunate lovers Marianne (Karina) and Ferdinand (Belmondo) in which they petulantly argue about romance and philosophy, perform lo-fi musical production numbers, accumulate a menagerie of exotic pets, pantomime the colonial occupation of Vietnam, and, in a climax which inspired a 15-year-old Chantal Akerman to (cinematically) blow up her town, explode.

Preceded by: “Duck Amuck” (Chuck Jones, 1953) – 7 min – 35mm