Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Band of Outsiders
1964 · Jean-Luc Godard · Band of Outsiders on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the trio suddenly rise and dance in the cafe. (sound)
Franz, Arthur, and Odile stand up from their table and dance the Madison while Godard cuts every ambient cafe sound, leaving only Michel Legrand's score.
Payoff: For one dance, the whole world of the cafe disappears so only the three of them are left. In the reading: the-gest. Deleuze would call this a gest: a posture that lays bare who these three are to each other better than any line could.
Listen for the entire soundtrack suddenly cutting to silence. (sound)
One of them proposes a minute of quiet, and Godard actually grants it, killing every sound in the film for that stretch of screen time.
Payoff: The silence reminds you that everything you have been hearing was a choice, not a given.
Watch the three of them sprint through the Louvre. (camera)
Coutard's camera tracks them at a newsreel pace as they try to beat a tourist's speed record through one of the world's most famous museums.
Payoff: Running through one of the world's great museums for no reason at all is the whole design of the scene.
Listen for the narrator describing what each of them is thinking. (sound)
A dry, nasal voice, Godard's own, breaks in over scenes to say what Franz or Odile or Arthur is privately thinking, like a novel read aloud.
Payoff: You are told what is inside them at the exact moment you are watching what is outside them.
Watch how the two men imitate gestures from gangster films. (performance)
Franz and Arthur carry themselves like American movie outlaws they have only ever seen on screen, posing inside borrowed attitudes rather than having attitudes of their own.
Payoff: You can watch two young men trying on someone else's whole way of being a man. In the reading: consciousness-of-cliches. Deleuze's term is consciousness of cliches: characters who know they are imitating an image and cannot quite stop.
Once you have seen it
Notice how little time the actual robbery takes on screen. (structure)
After nearly the whole film spent dancing, driving, and sprinting instead of planning, the heist itself arrives late, fumbled, and over almost as fast as it starts.
Payoff: The plot everyone assumed was the point turns out to be the least important thing that happens. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: characters who perceive a situation perfectly well and still cannot turn it into a decisive act.
Notice the printed text that closes out the story. (structure)
The film ends with a brief written announcement of a departure for Latin America, a storybook ending the preceding chaos has already made impossible to take straight.
Payoff: The happy ending arrives as a caption, not a scene, which is its own kind of joke.
Track the gaps in time the editing simply skips over. (structure)
Looking back, whole stretches of plan and consequence are missing between scenes, cause and effect loosened so much that the film reads more like a string of episodes than a plot.
Payoff: None of the connections you expected a crime film to make were ever really there to begin with.
Carry this in: Watch for the moment you stop waiting for the robbery. That moment is the whole point of the film.