Ep 29 // Pierrot le Fou

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 & 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.

Produced by Stereoactive Media