Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1963 • France
Starring Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet
Before his convention-shattering debut, BREATHLESS, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in France: the use of torture in the Algerian War. Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement. Anna Karina (in her first collaboration with Godard, whose camera is visibly besotted with her) is beguiling as the mysterious woman with whom Forestier becomes infatuated. Banned for two and a half years by French censors for its depiction of brutal tactics on the part of the French government and the Algerian fighters alike, LE PETIT SOLDAT finds the young Godard already retooling cinema as a vehicle for existential inquiry, political argument, and ephemeral portraiture—in other words, as a medium for delivering “truth twenty-four times per second.”
Up Next in Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
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Masculin féminin
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène JobertWith MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...
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2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Joseph GerhardIn 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, langu...
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Weekend
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean YanneThis scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...
