Analysis of a scene from Jean Luc Godards Pierrot le fou 1965
The scene I have chosen is the escape sequence where the couple - Ferdinand/Pierrot [Jean-Paul Belmondo] and Marianne [Anna Karina] - flee from Mariannes apartment after having knocked out the character of Frank [Dirk Sanders] with a bottle of wine. The scene takes place 18 minutes into the film and continues for four minutes. Following the the song Jamais je ne tai dit que je taimerai toujours, the film cuts from a medium close up of Marianne looking directly at the camera to a painting of a clown. It is Paul en Pierrot (Picasso, 1925). ... Three other paintings proceed it - La blouse roumaine (Matisse, 1940), an extreme close up of Paul en Pierrot again, and the face of a woman from Baigneuse (Auguste Renoir, 1880). Ferdinand is linked in various ways to this famous French clown figure of Pierrot. Firstly with the diegetic picture on the wall behind him and in the non-diegetic sequence of paintings, and also with the piano music that is played over the pictures - from the famous French song Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot. If Ferdinand can be linked to the Pierrot painting then Marianne can be linked to Baigneuse. ... Mariannes surname is Renoir and she was associated with a different Renoir painting in the previous scene. ... Before the voices were spoken more like from a conversation, but now they seem fractured and are spoken in the past historic tense. For the rest of the scene the voiceover dialogue continues to shift tenses. ... We later hear "gun-running" and see pictures on the walls from wars. ... From the beginning the audience has been made to associate with Ferdinand the most. ... From her body language we can tell that she doesnt find what she is looking for as she throws down the papers in anger. ... Like the Al Capone book before it is yet another influence on the couple, who are soon to be travelling from Paris to the south of France. ... There are several examples where directions of movement clash from shot to shot.