1963 Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
During the Algerian war for independence from France, a young Frenchman living in Geneva who belongs to a right-wing terrorist group and a young woman who belongs to a left-wing terrorist group meet and fall in love. Complications ensue when the man is suspected by the members of his terrorist group of being a double agent.
Vojácek, Pikku sotilas, O Soldado das Sombras, Маленький солдат, Der kleine Soldat, El soldadito, Pieni sotilas, A kis katona, Le petit soldat, 小さな兵隊, 작은 병정, O Pequeno Soldado, Den lille soldaten, Küçük Asker, 小兵
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France
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Germany16
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Brazil14
Netherlands12
Germany
Brazil
France
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Netherlands
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"I had a dream I went to the theater. During the intermission, I met the devil. He was well dressed."
this movie is so french it has a scene where a character lights a cigarette with all the matches he has in his pocket at once. i cant even begin to describe how much of a jolt of pure cinema this is, it hits every sweet spot imaginable including sweet spots i didnt even notice in myself. absolute heaven.
Filmed in 1960 but released until 1963, Le Petit Soldat is Godard's second feature film which sensitive political content caused the French censors to ban the film for three years.
The incredible Nouvelle Vague was kicking off with a bang, and Godard is maybe the filmmaker that best envisioned the movement's eccentricities perfectly with a trademark style of his own since his debut. He didn't give birth to the movement, but he made a massive international contribution to a successful dissemination of its uniqueness. Le Petit Soldat is no exception.
The film places a man against French involvement in the war in Algeria as a protagonist. He is given instructions to assassinate Polidova, who is pro-FLN (National Liberation Front of…
old woman at film forum said she fell asleep cuz there wasn’t enough anna karina in it and u know what... i felt that
35mm. Film Forum.
Cinema is truth 24 times a second, but the words and images that comprise it contain nothing but deception in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat.”
Godard’s second completed work after “Breathless,” “Soldat,” about a deserter from the Franco-Algerian War who assists a right wing group in Switzerland, sat on a shelf for three years after filming due to censorship from the French government.
The primary official reason given by the Ministry of Information for the censorship was a prolonged torture sequence, not aided in cause for release by a presentation of the controversial war as morally devoid of meaning.
Meaning, has little of itself in “Soldat,” which is a work of bleak borderline nihilism. As the respective governments involved in…
Le Petit Soldat, Jean-Luc Godard’s sophomore effort shot immediately following the instantly seminal Breathless, is supposedly a commentary on the Algerian War of Independence but unfortunately plays out as a lazy, shallow representation of decolonization, and the political convictions within the film are portrayed as flimsy indoctrinations on both sides. It had moments of action and suspense, but the plot was inconsistent and truly of little importance to Godard. The final act was arid, futile rambling and the closing action was presented as a clumsy anticlimax with rushed voiceover.
The central figure, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is an ideologically apathetic Frenchman living in Geneva working for a right-wing terrorist group. Throughout the film we see him less engaged with the…
This film will make you fall in love with Anna Karina in a matter of five minutes.
I liked it more when I suspected that Godard had filmed his friends driving around Paris and simply dubbed in the narration to make the story about espionage and the Algerian War at the editing stage. The constant references to art are cute, but when characters read from Maoist texts (as Godard characters are wont to do) or act as (butt) trumpets for whatever sand was blowing up Godard's skirt at the moment, the movie grinds to a halt for me. Still kind of amazing that this early on he was breaking so radically away from the style of movie his cohort were making, and ballsy of Godard to directly confront the Algerian War while it was still occurring.
Reminds one that, along with, say, Paris Belongs to Us, and the Tiger films by Claude Chabrol, that there is an unheralded sense of the Cold War in some early New Wave films, eventually and quickly overtaken by Vietnam, May 1968, and other political, international, and national concerns. But this film is still an oddity, even in the Godard canon, and can be grouped with Les Carabiniers in a category of films whose styles and tones are often forgotten when talking about Godard in the 1960s. While that film is caustic and bitter, this one is grave, subsumed by its spy game atmosphere of automotive threats, fear/danger of photography and audio (so ironic this was banned for an audio/radio reference to…
Interesting in that this is sandwiched between Breathless and A Woman is a Woman in his filmography and Le Petit Soldat would make more sense sitting alongside his later works. Politically conscious, but immature, Godard can't quite find the right footing, but his attempts at experimentation keep this one visually interesting. I find the scenes depicting torture the most emotionally and thematically cognizant. The image of one man's face being doused with water, while the bag around his face works like a mask breathing in and out is powerful. It's probably the best image of the movie for what Godard was going for, but he's just too "cool" at this point in his career to really grapple with the political ideas he's trying to juggle. Instead this often plays more like a gangster picture than a theoretical play on political allegiances.
Godard second feature is at the same time a huge departure and very close to Breathless. The exciting camera work and location shooting, the use of old spy movie standbys in place of the early movie gangsterism and the prominence of the couple in a dangerous dissolving world. It does makes the sad desperation underneath far more pronounced. It, of course, adds Anna Karina and politics into Godard's world. She is a much more immediate presence and his relationship towards her follow suit. The movie relationship towards the Algerian war are ambivalent and in some ways it function like some later subjects would for Godard as a good starting point for his musings which are at this point far more…
