Ep 29 // Pierrot le Fou
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965's 'Pierrot le Fou' is an exercise in self-referential metatextualism on the part of the filmmaker.
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It’s Stephen’s 5th pick: Pierrot le Fou, the 1965 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard himself said the film was "connected with the violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France."
And with its fourth wall breaks, often jarring editing style, and tendency to internally jump among mass culture and/or pop art references in both extremely metatextual and self-referential ways, the film is at once recognizable as a Godard film, a French New Wave film, and in a broader way, a certain type of arthouse film that is at once exciting for many and probably challenging if not off-putting for many more.
As for our purposes, the movie has never actually appeared in the top 10 of Sight And Sound’s critics or directors surveys, but it was tied as a runner up with Hiroshima mon Amour and The Gold Rush on the 1972 list.
In the 2012 polling, it was tied at #42 by critics and #91 by directors. And since we recorded this back in October, it tied for #85 on the 2022 critics list and was not included on the directors top 100 list.