The Insdispensable Jean-Luc Godard

Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part, FRA, 1964) - Dance Scene

...But most of all, blame it on the Madison dance sequence, later to be quoted by a parade of hip directors, that Band of Outsiders first seems a film of gestures rather than a singular, coherent drama. Utterly seductive in its digressions, limned with Parisian nostalgia and metafilmic quips, it’s a movie for which the flimsy caper plot risks seeming pure pretext. “Un plan?” says Odile, turning directly to the camera: “Pourquoi?” Arrogantly sans souci, such a strategy could have stumbled—particularly for a director just off his first bomb, Les Carabiniers, and perhaps just as disconcertingly, the success of his CinemaScope stab at the mainstream, Le Mépris. But the gestures themselves are surefooted, and too seductively goofy to dislike. And not even the narrator (Godard himself) seems capable of taking the main action too seriously: “A few words chosen at random,” begins the underwhelming overture. “Three weeks earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl.”

Continue to read Joshua Clover's Band of Outsiders: Get Your Madis On here