1964 / 97 mins / b/w
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard / Sc. Jean-Luc Godard / Cine. Raoul Coutard / Prod. Philippe Dussart
Cast: Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Anna Karina
Based on the novel Fool’s Gold (1958) by Dolores Hitchens
DCP courtesy of Rialto Pictures
Introduced by Rob King, Columbia University
“A Story of Love and Greed”
A substantial amount of women-authored crime and mystery fiction made its way into the hands of film producers and directors during the postwar years. One of the more unusual examples is offered by Dolores Hitchens, whose 1958 novel Fools’ Gold became the source not for an American film noir but for one of the standout films of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part.
Hitchens first started writing while studying to become a nurse at UCLA, and in 1938 published her first book under the name D.B. Olsen – her primary pen name throughout her career in addition to Noel Burke and Dolan Birkley. In 1951, she began publishing standalone suspense novels under her own name, while releasing the last of several series novels under pen names. Fools’ Gold is one of these standalones.
One of the distinctive aspects of the novel is the youth of Hitchens’ protagonists, three nineteen-year-olds who set out on a heist. Despite their criminal aspirations, Hitchens crafts characters that the audience roots for in a way that anticipates some of the conventions of today’s young-adult fiction. The result was a lively and unorthodox source text, which would be adapted by a young French director similarly attracted to freewheeling experiment.
Many who have studied Godard are familiar with his early infatuation with American cinema, most notably westerns and thrillers. Bande à part recontextualizes an American Southwest story into the streets of Paris – a true testament to Godard’s heteroglot spirit, as well as to the centrality of American crime fiction in the formation of the French New Wave. Godard also departs from Hitchens’s chronological narrative in favor of a more improvisational, lax approach to film structure. As a result, according to Godard scholar T.J. Kline, we must read the film against the novel. Yet despite these narrative liberties, Godard keeps many of Hitchens’ words in his own voiceover, which pulls sentences from the novel and paraphrases them to form singular ideas. Godard and Hitchens thus both represent creators who broke from the conventions of their respective media.
Our screening of Bande à part is in tribute to Godard, a filmmaker of incomparable importance, who passed away last year at the age of 91.
– Paige Wills