SCREENING ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21ST.

Ferdinand/Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is an unhappily married man who flees Paris for the south of France with Marianne (Anna Karina), an impulsive young woman on the run from her own murky past. Filmed in glorious widescreen colour by Raoul Coutard, Godard wilfully ignores cinematic conventions with counter-intuitive editing and breaks in continuity and, as a result, Pierrot le Fou is free-spirited, impulsive, glib, and lyrical. As director Samuel Fuller, famously defining cinema, says in a cameo appearance: ‘A film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death — in one word, emotion.’

Notes by David O’Mahony

Screening as part of Truth, 24 Frames per Second: The Films of Jean-Luc Godard