Customer Reviews

Pierrot Le Fou

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My exposure to Godard films were through VHS tapes. I was too young to watch his 60's films in their original formats. The transfer is not too great but good enough. The colors are right, it is thankfully letterboxed, etc. even if there are a few image distortions, artifacts and the sharpness and overall quality leaves a lot of room for improvement. There is something very wrong, however, with the sound especially towards the fifth chapter (that's the 5th access in the chapter search of which there are only 6 - thanks to Fox/Lorber!) Thankfully, this is a subtitled film (can't be switched off/on, they're pasted on the screen) otherwise, even the French won't understand the French dialogue. The noise distortion is terrible, but could it be Godard's deliberate way to convey sound since it is the part in which the CB radios or walkie-talkies were being used in the scene? My impression is that the technician in charge was probably asleep or didn't care when this noise distortion was taking place and the DVD didn't go through quality control which could have fixed it. I haven't seen the original so I don't know but since this is a Godard film, anything goes. But then the distortion continued even after that scene so any reasoning to defend Fox's negligience on this matter proved futile. I found it terribly distracting and I thought it pulled down the quality all the more of this already mediocre DVD transfer. Is this the best version yet? How does the VHS version rate? Fox/Lorber is hit and miss with DVDs. They did good with Seven Beauties, Last Year at Marienbad, and the already LD Criterion-restored Umbrellas of Cherbourg and 400 Blows but did very poorly with A Woman is a Woman, several Truffaut films and even the relatively recent Padre Padrone. What a shame that a company like Fox/Lorber gets the rights to release these great Foreign films but doesn't have the interest to come up with quality transfers. I think this is a waste of our hard-earned money to buy the DVDs that they produce. Next time you buy from Fox/Lorber, read the reviews... otherwise just rent or wait for a better re-release in the future.

I saw a print of this film in NYC in the late 80s. It was pristine, colorful and a great experience. Along with Truffaut, Godard epitomized the French New Wave of the '50s and '60s, and this film along with "Woman is a Woman," was one of his best. The use of color is amazing. Sadly, the source print for this DVD is oddly washed out, contains a few tears and pops in the sound track. It's hard to believe there wasn't a better copy available for Fox Lorber to use.

At my local UC PIERROT is shown in the survey of film history class they offer. I was invited to sit in once. Normally the professor shows the film, then lectures. He screened PIERROT. When it was over, there was total silence. He started to lecture, but almost the entire lecture hall of students walked out. A good friend told me later that she had been profoundly moved, and she simply didn't want to understand why. She didn't feel it was respectful to what she had just seen. PIERROT is on of the few examples of true mystical cinema that we have. Yes, there are the references to Rimbaud, Hollywood musicals, gangster films.... The visual puns, the references to Godard and Karina's life at the time, the improvisations, the barbs about American commercialism, the Gish-rebeling-against-Grifith quality of Karina's amazing performance... But what do they matter?

Sunlight/love/color/the face/poetry/emotion/loss of love/slapstick/image/life: PIERROT LE FOU

The five stars go to the movie, not to the dvd edition.This is a joyful, playful, charming movie by Godard, of course. But the dvd edition is simply infamous and shows and amazing contempt for the viewer.The picture quality is poor, the sound is even worse and half of the subtitles can't be read. Although the letterbox format has been respected, no one has bothered to place the subtitles in the lower black fringe. When the white letters happen to be on white and pale colours you can't read a thing. Godard does not seem to be much fancied at Fox/Lorber quarters: they haven't spent a dime on this edition.

Its amazing how certain people considers themselves know-it-alls in film, but really don't know anything. First of all, one person said this was Raoul Coutard's method in making the film look this way... Umm, wrong. And the reason why I know because I just bought a perfect print of Pierrot le Fou from Amazon's French website. The print and sound is so perfect, you'd think Criterion did it. So this horrible Fox Lorber version just doesn't cut it. They did a lazy job in restoring this masterpiece, so there's no excuses for its horrible print. And it makes me ponder as to why anyone would defend Fox Lorber and its not-so-good track record.

The beautiful version I bought (must have a multifuction DVD player to play it. And it comes with English Subtitles) totally unliminated that irritating sound where the scene with the walky-talky came up. (Trust me, if you have the Fox Lober version, you'll know what scene I'm talking about).

When I watched this film I found it to be quite unlike anything else I had seen. To really appreciate the flow of this one, I realised early on that I would have to cast aside my general expectations of a plot and storyline being the focus of the film and just see it as being a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions. I had heard that this film was shot without a script, and was almost entirely improvised by the director and the actors. This had the brilliant effect that on seeing it that there was a feeling that that anything could happen, and it carried a genuine sense of freedom and exhiliration, because the actors themselves were often actually experiencing for the first time whatever their impulse was for their characters to perform. When I first saw this I was very new to arthouse-type films and it really turned me on to the thinking that a film could simply be made up of emotion and experience, and that it doesn't necessarily have to be giving some moral or meaning or following some narrative structure, and that as an artform it could be improvised and therefore lived in at the same time that it was recorded. I watch this with a real feeling of being ALIVE. It's what inspired me to watch just about every new wave film around since I saw it. See it with a totally open mind and you might well get a bang out of it.

If you have only seen PIERROT on VHS/Pan & Scan, the letterboxed version here is automatically welcome. In terms of picture quality, it just may be possible that this is how the film was meant to look: a little rough in spots and with a few idiosyncrasies in the sound. Godard's film is deliberately self-aware as a 'put-together' work and is probably not meant to be conventionally beautiful. Nonetheless, several sequences are striking and aethetically pleasing.

Since the packaging currently available is different from a previous DVD incarnation, could it be possible that the disc represents a newer, improved mastering? This is suggested only because to this viewer, the film looks mostly terrific. The sound is another story: mastered at a low-level, it does not come across as well as might be expected. As for the walkie-talkie scenes, they are surely meant to sound the way they do.

4 stars as a rating, because there are no trailers or extras worth mentioning.

An acceptable, if not ideal, DVD of a one-of-a-kind film experience

Why Fox Lorber doesn't just turn its catalog over to Criterion and stop desecrating great films is a mystery. I love this film, the 400 Blows and others. But i would never never never buy anything from Fox. I've rented this release and others. They have bad video and audio

This is a great movie, probably Godard's best. But I'm afraid that the transfer to DVD by Fox Lorber is very poor. It's got a very soft, almost pixillated look with a lot of strobing on panning shots. At the cinema, Pierrot le Fou is one of the most colourful, vibrant films ever , but this DVD has a sad washed-out, de-saturated, dirty look and the sound level is also very low. All in all, it's a great shame that one of the classics of modern cinema has been treated with such a lack of care... I would recommend that you wait for a decent label to release this film properly. I have to say that it's made me wary of all titles on Fox Lorber now.

In 1964, Jean-Luc Godard went to work on his tenth film, a color film titled "Pierrot Le Fou" which would feature his ex-wife Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo (who worked on Godard's "A bout de Souffle" (Breathless) and "Une femme est une femme" (A Woman is a Woman).

The film is his most ambitious film yet, not only reuniting with two stars that he has worked with before but the fact that elements of his previous nine films shows up on "Pierrot Le Fou".

The film was released by Fox Lorber in the US back in 1998 and received The Criterion Collection treatment in February 2008. Over a year later, the film became the first Jean-Luc Godard film released by the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray.

VIDEO & AUDIO:

"Pierrot Le Fou" is presented in 1080p High Definition (2:35:1 Aspect Ratio). The film is probably the most gorgeous film I have seen by Jean-Luc Godard to date. The film is full of colors, absolutely vibrant, reds and blues just pop. For fans of Godard's '60s work, "Pierrot Le Fou" is his most colorful film. It's important to note that the restored high-definition digital transfer was approved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard.

Accord to Criterion, the HD digital transfer was created on Spirit Datacine from the 35mm negative and color corrected on a Specter Virtual Datacine. Thousands of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter and flicker were manually removed using MTI's DRS system and Pixl Farm's PFClean system, while Digital Vision's DVNR system was used for small dirt, grain and noise reduction.

"Pierrot Le fou" is featured in its original French language and features a monaural soundtrack remastered at 24-bit from a 35 mm optical track print. Dialogue is clean and understandable and Anna Karina's singing voice is crystal clear in this film. Clicks, thumps, hiss and hum were manually removed using Pro Tools HD. Crackle was attenuated using AudioCube's integrated audio workstation.

Subtitles are provided in English.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

"Pierrot Le Fou" comes with the following special features:

* Anna Karina - (14:55) A 2007 interview with Anna Karina at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. Anna talks about working with her former husband and her role in "Pierrot Le Fou" as Marianne Renoir.
* A Pierrot Primer - (35:58) Commentary by filmmaker and educator Jean-Piere Gorin (Tout va bien, Letter to Jane, My Crasy Life) presents an introduction to "Pierrot Le Fou".
* "Belmondo in the Wind" - (9:21) Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina talk about Belmondo's role in "Pierrot Le Fou". Recorded by journalist Mario Beunat for the television series Panorama and aired back in June 18, 1965.
* Venice Film Festival, 1965 - (3:57) Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina were interviewed by Maurice Seveno and Christian Durieux for a French TV new segment on the Venice Film Festival back in Sept. 2, 1965.
* Godard, L'Amour, La Poesie - (52:59) A 2007 documentary by French filmmaker Luc Lagier tracing Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina's marriage and films from "Le Petit Soldat" through "Pierrot Le Fou". Featuring interviews with Karina and Godard collaborators Charles Bitsch, Raoul Coutard, Jean Douchet and Jean-Paul Savignac.
* Trailer - (2:06) The theatrical trailer for "Pierrot Le Fou".
* 46-Page Booklet - The following booklet contains the essays "Self-Portrait In Shattered Lens" by Richard Brody, "Sarris on Pierrot Le Fou" and "Let's Talk About Pierrot: An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard".

JUDGMENT CALL:

Perhaps one of Godard's most accessible films, "Pierrot Le Fou" is a film that is best enjoyed after watching a good number of his films that preceded this film. With the film now released on Blu-ray for the first time through the Criterion Collection, many people will will be introduced to Jean-Luc Godard but in my opinion, this film is not a starting point for the beginner. It's more of a film that can be appreciated even more after watching his previous films and seeing how things have culminated in his work before he started to focus more on his political films.

"Pierrot Le Fou" is often seen as an early paradigmatic example of postmodernism in film. In the film, Godard shows his feeling towards American pop culture but Godard also becomes gets political as he uses the film for his characters to discuss the Vietnam and Algerian war. For many viewers familiar with Godard and his work, many believe this is Godard's way of using characters to flesh out his true feelings about society. While many feel the film is a paying homage to his nine previous films leading to "Pierrot Le Fou".

Personally, what I enjoy about this film is the adventure that Godard takes you. We wonder how these two people who are in love with each other, are yet so different. Ferdinand is reserved, quiet and just wants to enjoy the simple and peaceful life he has at the moment. Marianne just is tired of settling down and not doing anything. The fact is that she's a bad girl. She's involved with some shady characters dealing with illegal activity but in some way, that is her form of fun and she wants to expose Ferdinand to that life.

The way that Godard has shot the film is quite intriguing. We see things in the film but rarely are they explained. Why does Marianne enjoy killing and hurting others and why is it that both see or do things but not much is mentioned about it. It's like it's something natural for them.

Nevertheless, its the adventure of these two unlikely individuals that I find so interesting. Personally, I found it great to see Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina together as the primary leads for the film. The two have really good chemistry onscreen and the fact that we are enjoying this adventure of two people involved in criminal activity is quite interesting.

Godard has done a great job and utilizing many scenes with the two together to show their story of life together, when things start to become problematic leading up to a pivotal scene that comes out of left field (granted, this is common theme with Godard's '60s films, always expect the unexpected).

Overall, "Pierrot Le Fou" is an enjoyable stylish, arthouse film. It's also one of those films that I feel is appreciated the more times you watch it. Again, this film is not where you should start out if you are wanting to get into Godard films, otherwise you will find yourself a bit puzzled by how the film is paced, how the scenes were cut and how Godard's endings tend to be.

"Pierrot Le Fou" is a Godard masterpiece, but I highly recommend watching a few of his films such as "Breatheless", "A Woman is a Woman", "A Band of Outsiders", "Contempt", "Alphaville" and "Masculin Feminin" before tackling on this film. Once you start appreciating Godard's filmmaking, then you'll definitely appreciate this film even more.

Definitely recommended!