Film Forum

France/Italy, 1963
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Co-written by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Marino Masé, Patrice Moullet, Geneviève Galéa, Catherine Ribeiro, Barbet Schroeder
Approx. 80 min.

Jean-Luc Godard had long been a champion of Rossellini’s cinema (He famously stated, “All roads lead to Open City.”), even as the younger man’s own filmmaking quickly evolved towards a more modernist and abrasive style. (Upon seeing VIVRE SA VIE, Rossellini admonished Godard that his work was drifting towards “Antonioni-ism.”) Nevertheless, Rossellini gladly accepted a scenario credit and payment from Godard for LES CARABINIERS, a loose adaptation of Benjamin Joppolo’s anti-war play, I carabinieri. Rossellini had directed a stage production in Spoleto, in defiance of a government ban on the play, and his sole contribution to the film was providing an oral summary of Joppolo’s script, which Godard transcribed, cut up, and pasted in his notebook. Godard’s version lets two country bumpkins, Michelangelo and Ulysses, loose upon the world, their only directive from their military recruiter being death, destruction, and any other war crimes they can dream up. The duo’s atrocities are intercut with newsreel footage, postcards of plunder, and other Godardian digressions.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“Godard’s strangest movie... Perhaps the most usefully extreme film of its kind ever made.”
– Tony Rayns, Time Out (London)