The title – Pierrot le fou – is the name of a legendary French criminal of the post-war era: reckless and ruthless, but with a name that evokes the melancholic moonstruck stock character and a hint of insanity. In Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Pierrot le fou becomes a synonym of a wild adventure. The name is in fact given to Ferdinand (the unsatisfied, kept husband of a rich Italian woman) by Marianne, who seduces him and rescues him from the dullness of bourgeoisie life and marriage, dragging him on a long trip – with the guardian spirits of Les Pieds Nickelés (a comic book which Ferdinand reads constantly). Godard makes a departure from Parisian scenarios and urban chessboards for a journey in le Midi studded with scathing deaths, dangers and gags. Based on a noir story by Lionel White about “criminal lovers on the run”, Godard creates a new variation of amour fou and the impossible amorous affinity between men and women, poisoned by betrayal and, here, headed to a violent end. He observes nature, submerging the lovers in an unreal Eden (as he did in Le Mépris and would do again in Nouvelle Vague). He cites Elie Faure, Laurel & Hardy, Rimbaud, Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Hitchcock, Minnelli, Michael Powell, King Vidor, Michel Simon, Chaplin and especially (secretly) Bergman, “hosts” Fuller and Devos and parodies the war in Vietnam. He employs an iridescent chromatic range of reds, greens, yellows, azures and blues that dominate the film’s figurative fabric: “What do you we see when walking around Paris at night? Red, green and yellow traffic lights. I wanted to display these elements, but without having to represent them as they are in reality. Instead, they are like a memory: red and green stains, splashes of yellow that roll by. I wanted to re-create an impression by starting with the elements composing it.” Pierrot le fou ends the period that began with À bout de souffle and vaguely foreshadows Godard’s future political militancy. In contrast with what was believed for decades, a recent study by Alain Bergala (Godard au travail. Les années 60, Cahiers du cinéma, 2006) shows that the film was made after a long, careful preliminary preparation. The film left Italian co-producer Dino De Laurentiis speechless; he had ten minutes cut from the Italian edition and changed its title to one more reminiscent of the French translation of White’s novel (Le démon de onze heures).

Roberto Chiesi

In the beginning there’s the Série Noire… a few gangsters, two convertibles, guns, blood the color of ketchup, and finally, the sea gone off with the sun… In order to film this escape to the south, Godard chose a perfectly suited format, Techniscope, the panoramic format brought out by Technicolor Italy in 1963. Raoul Coutard remembers: “With Cinemascope, you have four perforations in the image, then you use an anamorphosor which flattens the image. With Techniscope, there are two perforations, which means you have an image which is already in Cinemascope. (…) And when you print it, you enlarge it by anamorphosing it in such a way that it again has four perforations for the projector. At that time, we had problems of definition with film, it was very grainy.” (From an interview with Laurent Devanne in 1999)

Certainly, all the various lab processes required to establish the elements for printing, notably the four-perforation dupe internegative which was done on Truca, considerably increased the graininess of the final copy. Today, the two-perforation dupe interpositive of the film, printed off the Techniscope negative no longer exists (nor does the four-perforation dupe internegative). The dupe interpositive was destroyed because it was very damaged after years of use. In 1990, a new dupe internegative was made, this time on reversible film-stock, a common practice at the time, which saved having to print a dupe interpositive and hence improved quality. Unfortunately, the Kodak 5249 emulsion, which is quite complex to develop, was often inconsistent in the quality of the colors. Having enabled close to 150 copies to be made, the film stock is now worn out, and the emulsion is becoming unstable. Today, this element no longer reflects the qualities of the original. It was impossible to make new prints using 5249 and still maintain the color saturation. Finally, the equipment used at the time to make prints from Technoscope elements no longer exists. So, it was essential to undertake the restoration of the film so it could be seen on a wide screen, but also in order to create a stable element of preservation, other than the original negative. The original negative is in good physical condition; all in all it was hardly used and only has a few scratches and a couple of customs stamps at the beginning to each reel. Yet we noticed slight signs of chemical decomposition. The element was beginning to be unstable. It was time to act.

For the restoration, we digitised the negative in 2K and began working on the image to retrieve the original Eastmancolor colors (Eastman Color emulsion, Negative 5251), which was beginning to fade. The main problems we encountered during the matching were due to the nature of Techniscope itself. As Raoul Coutard stated it, “We found ourselves working with much shorter focal distances, practically blowing up 16mm. This caused problems with printing, with lack of definition. To restore some semblance of definition and sharpness to the image, we needed to have an image with relatively high contrasts. Meaning using side lights. We couldn’t work with back light, for example. Even for exteriors, we had to shoot in such a way that there would be shadows so that the image had some consistency, otherwise you got a flat image with no definition. So this implied working at certain hours, changing the axes and the angles because we couldn’t get what we needed in the light.” (From an interview with Laurent Devanne in 1999). So, variations of light are important, notably in the sequence shot in the pine forest, moving from the shadow of the pines to the blinding southern sunlight. At times the image was pushed to the limit. As Coutard explains, the sun is often lateral to the image and burns the colors. The other recurring problem in terms of calibration was the skin tones of the actors. They had little or no make-up and that meant painstaking work to render natural skin tones. The film was shot almost entirely outside, in natural light which, incidentally, was made easier by Techniscope. Contrary to the other scope systems, this system made it possible to work with conventional lenses. Some camera manufacturers even boasted that their cameras were compatible with Techniscope, notably Mitchell and Arriflex (the two cameras used for Pierrot le fou). L.T.C., the original lab, was selected to do the restoration work. The digital restoration was transferred back to film, in anamorphic format. As for the sound, we started with the original mix of the magnetic track. The sound was digitised and cleaned of any non-inherent faults in the sound system and laid on the film in order to obtain a new conservation element. The original stereophonic sound was retained. Today, and for the first time, we are able to fully appreciate Pierrot le fou.

Camille Blot-Wellens (Cinémathèque française) and Béatrice Valbin- Constant (StudioCanal), restoration supervisors