BAND OF OUTSIDERS (BANDE A PART)

France, 1964, 92 minutes, Black and White.
Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur.
Directed by Jean Luc Godard.

Band of Outsiders was partly intended as a popular feature giving the public a girl and guns. Godard does give the public an entertaining amateur gangster story with farcical details. However, the film is obviously something more. The characters are well developed in ordinary situations which make us respond to them as persons rather than types. The crime must be more than mere routine. It is an attempt at achievement by three little outsiders. Pauline Kael suggests (in "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.") that it is a work of art, poetry, using comic-book material as its subject. Godard has done this with Breathless, Alphaville and, outstandingly, Pierrot Le Fou.

1. Why were the three characters a band of outsiders?

2. Did the film give any depth to its characters? Did it intend to?

3. While the film had Hollywood gangsters in mind, was this merely a gangster film?

4. What popular gangster ingredients did the film use? How did it transcend and humanise them?

5. How were character and feeling established in such sequences as the English lesson? How do we come to understand the relationship between the three?

6. What was the point and impact of the restaurant scene and, especially, the dance with the three independent, isolated dancers dancing together?

7. How was song used in the film?

8. Why did Arthur and Franz want to commit the robbery? Did they have adequate motivation?

9. Why did Odile tell Franz about the money? Why did she want to get involved in the robbery?

10. Did Odile love Arthur? Was this important?

11. How was the robbery a parody of robbery films? Why did the robbery fail?

12. Death seemed a joke, but Arthur dies. He had parodied gangster death in the opening of the film. (They had acknowledged they could die.) Even though the death is heavy parody, what did Arthur's death mean in the film?

13. The narrator says at one stage. "Franz did not know whether the world was becoming a dream or a dream was becoming the world." What did he mean? This is a Godard theme. What light does it throw on the film?

14. "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."? Pauline Kael on the film. Is she right? If so, what value is there in a film like this?