- Godard uses both montage and long take duration as stylistic tools in his last great hurrah, Weekend. There are six or seven individual shots that take up about half of the overall running time (Cuaron’s Children of Men is the same way)—this is new for Godard. Godard’s approach is very different from Ophuls, Renoir, Hitchcock and Welles—but still a very important film when talking about the history of the tracking shot and long takes.
- Godard’s 14th archiveable film, and at age 37, in a blaze of furious glory, he’s really done as a top auteur. He’d go on to be more of a didactic essayist after this- usually far away from the top 10 films of the year. His run from 1960 to 1967 may never be topped. That’s 15 total films, 14 archiveable, and I believe nine (9) will be on the top 100 of the 1960’s when I update that list. This meteoric rise and short yet prolific run sort of mirrors The Beatles (though I’m sure Godard would prefer Motzart!).
- The prologue has several comic black and white titles- including the hilarious “a film found in a dump” – haha
The glorious full frame “Weekend” in red, white and blue – setting the tone for the primary color rush (though this is not the accomplishment in color Contempt, Pierrot or Made in U.S.A are)
A sustained long 10-minute take from the 4-minute to the 14-minute mark. The couple here Mirelle Daric as Corinne Durand and Jean Yanne as Roland Durand are talking in shadowy silhouette in front of the window. The music goes in and out, Godard’s camera slowly does the same and never really stops moving. I could watch an entire movie like this- so striking. The conversation is erotic yet banal and bourgeoise, to Godard, meaningless—and the duration and the uncomfortability of it is precisely the point
- Weekend is a road trip, apocalyptic, nightmare comedy. Haha. This bourgeoise couple goes on a trip, the world is ending, and Jean becomes a cannibal (eating a English tourist).
- Godard is dedicated to the Armageddon here in his world-building. It is clearly the end of civilization with countless traffic accidents, bodies lying around, upturned (and often burning) cars as part of the décor. The characters in the film are angry, car horns fill the audio mix constantly, there is shouting, fighting.
- The most famous sequence in Godard’s career are the two left to right tracking shots of the traffic jam. It starts at the 16-minute mark and runs for three minutes at first. He cuts and then runs for another five minutes. It is about the absurdity of the shot. Yelling between the characters, animals, people playing chess, a big yellow and red Shell gasoline truck and ultimately grim death.
arguably Godard’s finest hour- the traffic jam tracking shot
The prolonged nature of the shot is partially about postmodern reflexivity— calling attention to itself and the artifice of being a movie– but is also about Godard holding your head underwater and making you uncomfortable
- Throughout the journey for the Durands—Godard splices in blue titles and political messages as he bounces us from skit to skit. There’s the fight with the bourgeoise woman and farmer (onlookers in front of colorful advertising), the Lewis Carroll skit, with time and date titles on this Saturday reminding us that this is a weekend trip. A title for “The Exterminating Angel” which is Bunuel of course. At one point the Corinne character screams about a Hermes handbag while her car is up in flames.
- Artifice- a ridiculous sheep jump cut flub– and at one point the frame seemingly gets caught between reels. A few times Godard makes the film seem it is stuck or caught in a brief loop that repeats itself.
- Camoes from past stars of La Chinoise: Leaud and Anne Wiazemsky—if you want a piece of trivia- people forget that Godard actually used Leaud more often than Belmondo. Belmondo may have more overall screen time in his three films but Leaud (best known for working with Truffaut of course) is in six archiveable Godard films.
Weekend is remembered for the traffic jam long take— but there are many other noteworthy long takes (including the erotic silhouette scene mentioned above). Another is the Mozart 360-degree shot at the 54-minute mark with the onlookers at the farm. It is a six-minute shot- a stunner.
- at the 61-minute mark Godard tracks to empty space and tracks back (a sort of version of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver hallway shot)—this is a four-minute take along the road as the couple attempts to hitchhike. It is like an absurd variation on It Happened One Night.
- the film is not flawless- there is this awful segment of just Godard filming political speeches while we occasionally get a replay of the past portions of the film in like a highlight reel
Eventually when we’re free of that, and we’re in the woods for the final act of the film. Godard pans to the right to reveal the drummer playing what we thought was non-diegetic music – he’s pulling back the curtain
- Part Warhol and part Bunuel
- At the 94-minute Godard is tracking the camera along the pond, characters are bobbing their heads (wearing primary colors of course) to the drum music, a political soap-box diatribe is angrily filling the audio mix, the shot is sustained for four minutes—and then the camera elevates over the pond. Godard uses his favorite films as radio signals during the guerilla war scene “Johnny Guitar” “The Searchers”
- Ebert – “Year after year, Jean-Luc Godard has been chipping away at the language of cinema. Now, in “Weekend,” he has just about got down to the bare bones. This is his best film, and his most inventive. It is almost pure movie. It is sure to be ardently disliked by a great many people, Godard fans among them. But revolutionary films always take some time for audiences to catch up” https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/weekend-1968
- The silly shootout finale is part of Godard’s trademark. This is Godard mocking—but I do believe this is also the best he could do at a shootout. He’s not Kurosawa or Peckinpah as far as execution – it just isn’t who he is- I don’t think he’d have the technical skill or patience of a scene like that
- A masterpiece – maybe a little closer to the must-see edge than some of Godard’s masterpieces like Pierrot Le Fou
@Malith- yes, thank you
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Leaud is also in Detective(1985). That means he is in 7 archivable Godard films.
In my opinion (typing this a month after watching it), this was not far from topping Breathless – and eventually, in my book at least, it would have – when that awful scene with the political speeches came in and literally knocked the film down hundreds of spots back into MS territory for me. The film did in time recover due to the strength of the segments following it, and I did come back around to calling it a masterpiece by the end, but that scene did irreparable damage to the film and, like you, I’m not close to calling it his singular masterpiece.
Funny story of when I watched this is that, in the last act of the film after the couple get captured by the cannibal hippie Maoists – for the uninitiated to Week-End, yes, that’s the plot of this movie – I totally and utterly lost track of wherever the hell the story was headed as the film just got more and more abstract and plotless, and I began to wonder what actually happened to the couple under the control of the cannibals as I didn’t understand what was actually going on (the film being in French so that’s what I’m hearing while reading dialogue didn’t help). I wondered wherever the husband was and noticed one of the “revolutionaries” resembled the wife but I couldn’t tell if it was her or not since she had a different outfit to what the wife wore earlier in the film, and eventually one of the other men says to her “I think part of your husband is in what you’re eating there,” when I find out he did in an escape attempt and she eventually joined them which completely passed over my head. Absolutely hilarious moment for me watching this film.
Also, now that you’ve seen them both again, are you willing to say whether Contempt or Pierrot le Fou is better? I’m going with Contempt myself after I saw it for the second time, and for what it’s worth, TSPDT has it ahead as well.
@Zane- it is close, I do have Contempt much closer
Ok, so, this is a very controversial decision, but for right now I’m choosing to ignore that one awful scene with the political speeches in my all-time ranking for Week End and I placed it as my #8 film of all time, between Stalker (#7) and Raging Bull (#9). I’m not saying this in relation to however Drake is going to rank it, just in relation to me alone, but it just didn’t sit right with me ignoring the mindblowingly brilliant cinema present in this film and placing it down at like #171 or something (or wherever it would be if I took that scene into account, but it would be much lower), I don’t have it within me to place it that low.
Do you think Weekend perhaps influenced Coppola on Apocalypse Now? I mean you’ve got the couple journeying through this insane surreal landscape of crashed cars, hellish fire, and a bunch of wild, angry people, not unlike the environment Sheen and his team encounter whilst traveling down the river, and along the way both groups, in a series of fantastic vignettes like the 360-degree long take scene with the piano at the farm in Weekend or the refueling with the Playmates as Sirens (only in Director’s Cut of course) in Apocalypse Now, discovering the craziness of the world around them but remaining blind to it in Weekend’s case or choosing to ignore it because its hold on you is too strong in Apocalypse Now’s case, and in both films the characters of course suffer for it. Furthermore, both films see their endings with the main characters encountering a group of insane and also hypocritical revolutionaries occupying a forest outpost, that being the communist revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front who exhort the overthrow of the bourgeoisie whilst also being an idiotic, disorganized bunch of cannibals who I’m pretty sure (hard to tell with the perfected narrative anarchy of this segment of the film that carried it into my Top 10) also had a minor civil war, comparable to Brando’s Montagnard God-Kingdom which preaches the brutality of and need to destroy the US forces in Vietnam as well as the Viet Cong whilst also indiscriminately killing virtually everybody they encounter, save for those who could make significant contributions to the cause if they were to join like Sheen. Both films are also studies in man’s degeneration into a wild animal as his psyche is tested of course. I guess if I could come up with another one… they both have really early scenes (the first in Apocalypse Now and within the first 10 minutes of Weekend but I think there was a scene or two before it) as the characters have long – and very good – monologue scenes set in hotel rooms.
I also have not read Joseph Conrad’s novel, so a lot of the elements in Apocalypse Now that remind me of Weekend could simply be derived from that… or just originally created by Coppola of course.
Bad formatting:
Do you think Weekend perhaps influenced Coppola on Apocalypse Now? I mean you’ve got the couple journeying through this insane surreal landscape of crashed cars, hellish fire, and a bunch of wild, angry people, not unlike the environment Sheen and his team encounter whilst traveling down the river, and along the way both groups, in a series of fantastic vignettes like the 360-degree long take scene with the piano at the farm in Weekend or the refueling with the Playmates as Sirens (only in Director’s Cut of course) in Apocalypse Now, discovering the craziness of the world around them but remaining blind to it in Weekend’s case or choosing to ignore it because its hold on you is too strong in Apocalypse Now’s case, and in both films the characters of course suffer for it.
Furthermore, both films see their endings with the main characters encountering a group of insane and also hypocritical revolutionaries occupying a forest outpost, that being the communist revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front who exhort the overthrow of the bourgeoisie whilst also being an idiotic, disorganized bunch of cannibals who I’m pretty sure (hard to tell with the perfected narrative anarchy of this segment of the film that carried it into my Top 10) also had a minor civil war, comparable to Brando’s Montagnard God-Kingdom which preaches the brutality of and need to destroy the US forces in Vietnam as well as the Viet Cong whilst also indiscriminately killing virtually everybody they encounter, save for those who could make significant contributions to the cause if they were to join like Sheen.
Both films are also studies in man’s degeneration into a wild animal as his psyche is tested of course. I guess if I could come up with another one… they both have really early scenes (the first in Apocalypse Now and within the first 10 minutes of Weekend but I think there was a scene or two before it) as the characters have long – and very good – monologue scenes set in hotel rooms, but this one feels like it could be a bit of a stretch.
I also have not read Joseph Conrad’s novel, so a lot of the elements in Apocalypse Now that remind me of Weekend could simply be derived from that… or just originally created by Coppola of course.
Another point I forgot to mention is that both Godard and Coppola hold satirical and also pretty pessimistic views of both sides present in the film: Godard hates the bourgeoisie – there’s a lot of Bunuel on display here – for their materialism and utterly uncaring attitude about the world around them, who are exemplified by the traveling couple, and also is satirizing the kind of young Marxist you could expect to find on any college campus.
Coppola does something very similar: I already talked about his attitude towards Brando’s group, what with the pretentious speeches and monologues he gives out to his captive audience in Sheen, but he is not sympathetic towards Sheen as a result of lacking that emotion for Brando; Sheen is fully complacent in the US Army’s program in Vietnam despite appearing to have misgivings, not to mention the bits with Robert Duvall who has been completely overtaken by the war, finding great enjoyment in the destruction of a Vietnamese village whilst playing music to terrify the populace before their deaths and probably also to amplify his fun, as well as being more interested in surfing than making sure his troops are staying alive.