LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963) B/W & C 88m dir: Jean-Luc Godard

w/Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet, Paul Beauvais, Laszlo Szabo, Georges de Beauregard, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilbert Edard

Originally banned by the French government, Jean-Luc Godard's second film (following 1959's BREATHLESS) tells the story of a hired assassin who is used as a pawn by both sides in the French-Algerian War. This beautifully photographed (by Raoul Coutard) film offended both Right and Left, especially with its uncompromising depiction of brutality and torture. It was made in 1960 on location in Geneva, and was passed with minor cuts and first shown in 1963. The director appears in the film as a bystander at the railway station.

From Godard by Richard Roud: "While [Godard] was shooting [LE PETIT SOLDAT], he resolutely maintained that the political aspects were simply the données of the scenario, that the action was not seen from a political point of view at all. But, of course, it was. On the other hand, Godard is above all thoroughly honest, and so a film by him about the repercussions of the Algerian situation could only be somewhat confused, because he himself was confused about the rights and wrongs involved. 'I wanted to show a confused mind in a confused situation,' he said afterwards. 'Well, that could be considered wrong, because perhaps one should not have been confused. But that's how it was. My film, in any case, was a kind of auto-critique.'

"This attitude is perhaps too defensive for, after all, at the time the film was made, the French were just about as undecided. According to public opinion polls at the time, as much as eighty percent of the population didn't know what to think of the question, and, in fact, didn't want to think about it at all.

"Le Petit Soldat was a film about a man with no ideals, who wanted desperately to find some. Like Jimmy Porter, he looked back nostalgically to the Spanish Civil War, when the lines were, or seemed to be, clearly drawn. In Godard's case his hero looked back also to 1944 when the French had an ideal, when they really seemed to believe in something.

"Asking questions, says the hero of the film, is more important than finding answers, and Le Petit Soldat asked a lot of questions. The controversial torture scenes, which probably contributed as much as anything to getting the film banned for three years, were an attempt, not 'to make the audience faint' but to make them think. The real horror was not so much in the actual torture as in the fact that the torturers did not find it particularly horrible --- hence the frighteningly ordinary scenes in which the torture is interrupted by a girl delivering the weekly bundle of clean shirts. Or notice, too, the jar of hair-cream in the bathroom in which the torture takes place --- another reminder of the banality of it all."