Band of Outsiders · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Three kids get up from a café table on the rue de Rivoli and dance. The Madison: side-steps, a clap, a turn, nothing a professional would envy. Then Godard does the strange thing. He cuts the sound, and not the music but the world. The clink of glasses and the murmur of other patrons vanish, so that Franz, Arthur and Odile move through a pocket of silence that belongs to no real café. Into that hush he drops his own dry, nasal voice, telling us what each is thinking: Arthur watching Odile's mouth, Odile wondering whether the boys notice her, Franz thinking of everything at once. It is the most beloved minute Godard ever shot. It is also a quiet demonstration that something in cinema had come loose.

Here is what came loose, in Deleuze's terms. The classical film runs on a circuit he called sensory-motor: a character perceives a situation, is moved by it, and acts to change it. See, feel, do; the cut serves the deed. Band of Outsiders hands its characters a situation built for exactly that machine, a house in the suburbs, an aunt, a rumoured stack of cash, a robbery to pull. Then it watches them do nothing with it. They take an English class. They drive around. They sprint through the Louvre to beat a tourist's speed record. They dance. The heist sits in the corner like a coat no one puts on, and when it finally happens it is fumbling and fatal, an afterthought that kills. Deleuze had a name for this slackening: the crisis of the action-image. The characters perceive fine. They simply can no longer turn perception into a decisive act. The link between seeing and doing has gone soft.

He even listed the symptoms, and the film has all of them. A dispersive situation: not a tight hero-and-goal but a loose trio bound by competing crushes and shared boredom, each only half-attached to the plan. Weak links: Agnès Guillemot's editing lets time drop out between scenes, treating continuity as a convenience rather than a law, so that causes and effects stop clicking together. The voyage form, what the New Wave turned into the balade, the aimless stroll, where the Louvre run and the long drives are trips that change nothing and lead nowhere the plot needs. And above all a consciousness of clichés. Franz and Arthur do not act like gangsters; they act out being gangsters, posing inside images borrowed from American crime pictures they have watched too many times. They live in a second-hand mythology and half-know it, which is why their tough-guy gestures always seem to carry quotation marks.

This is where Deleuze locates a hinge in the whole history of film. The crisis of the action-image is the doorway out of classical cinema and toward what he calls the time-image, where watching and waiting begin to replace deciding and doing. The café dance is the clearest case. Strip the diegetic sound and the scene stops being an event in a plot; it becomes a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign and a sonsign, an image offered to be contemplated rather than read for what happens next. Nothing is accomplished by the dance. It exists to be looked at. And the bodies doing it carry the film's real meaning. Deleuze would call the Madison a gest: a posture that lays bare a relationship. Three young people perform American cool for each other and for a private religion of the movies, and the awkward, tender sincerity of the performance tells you more about who they are than any line of dialogue could. The minute of silence that Arthur later proposes, and that Godard grants by killing the entire soundtrack, is the same gesture pushed to its limit. A film briefly empties itself to show you the artifice holding up every other frame.

None of this fell from the sky. Coutard's hand-held camera and fast film stock come straight out of Breathless, but where that film fired the jump cut like a starting pistol, this one softens it into elliptical drift. The trick of running a hard-boiled American novel, here Dolores Hitchens's Fools' Gold, through plain Parisian streets was Melville's in Bob le Flambeur and Truffaut's in Shoot the Piano Player before Godard refined it. Anna Karina's luminous opacity and the third-person literary narrator both walk in unchanged from My Life to Live. The available-light, lightweight-camera texture is the cinéma vérité of Rouch and Morin's Chronicle of a Summer pressed into the service of fiction. And the use of ellipsis as a principle rather than a mistake, with a voiceover that reframes the image instead of explaining it, descends from Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour.

What Godard added was the lightness. He showed that you could keep the genre skeleton, the gun and the girl and the doomed plan, and treat it not as a track to run along but as a trellis to hang digressions on. The crime film could become an essay about young people who have confused their lives with the movies, and it could be funny and sad and offhand while doing it. That move made Band of Outsiders one of the most imitated films the New Wave produced. Watch it again and notice the moment you stop waiting for the robbery. When the plot stops mattering and the dancing does, that is the whole turn of modern cinema, happening in a café.