Free Outdoor Screening: Band of Outsiders

(Bande à part)

[Godard’s] most charming and, arguably, influential film: a free-associative meditation on the gangster genre that revealed a new way of framing our dreams and our reality.

David Edelstein, New York Magazine
featuring

Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Louisa Colpeyn,

Would-be tough guys Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) have little better to do than drive around Paris and act out scenes from B movies. But when they team up with Franz’s English-class crush, wide-eyed Odile (Anna Karina), to plot a burglary, they stumble into the gap between playacting and reality. Godard said, “it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them.” The atmosphere arises not only from the actors’ interplay—their dance in a cafe and their sprint through the Louvre are among the most memorable and joyous moments in Godard’s cinema—but from Raoul Coutard’s exquisitely bleak cinematography and Michel Legrand’s jaunty, melancholy score. Pauline Kael called the film “like a reverie of a gangster movie. . . . It’s as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines.”

Juliet Clark
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jean-Luc Godard
Based On
  • the novel Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens

Cinematographer
  • Raoul Coutard
Language
  • French
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 97 mins
Source
  • Rialto Pictures
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Band of Outsiders documents  

Godard's 'Band of Outsiders' returns with its charms intact (review), Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, 2002

Godard's Band of Outsiders (flyer), Film Forum (New York), 2001

Band of outsiders (review), Time Out New York, Mike D'Angelo, 2001

Dark heart (review), Reader (Chicago, Ill.), Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2001

Prime movers (review), Village Voice, Amy Taubin, 2001

Godard forever (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 2001

Jean-Luc Godard : Master of modern cinema -- a definitive tribute (program note), National Film Theatre (London, England), 2001

Band of outsiders (article), Village Voice, Tom Allen, 1987

Filmfacts -- excerpt (article), Filmfacts, 1980

Godard (program note), New School for Social Research (New York, N.Y.), James Monaco, 1974

Displaying 10 of 22 publicly available documents.


View all Band of Outsiders documentation on CineFiles.