Les carabiniers, Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1963)

"Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers, an anti-war allegory told from the viewpoint of those who fight, is a refreshing antidote to the recent spate of war films. It details the adventures of Michelangelo and Ulysses, two peasants who, eager to partake in illicit and amoral activities made suddenly licit by the declaration of hostilities, agree to fight their king's war. It is not a particular war, but one which, in Raoul Coutard's landscapes and Roberto Rossellini's script, takes place nowhere and everywhere. A Brechtian anti-narrative, filmed objectively and dispassionately, eschewing emotional, visceral reactions, Les Carabiniers portrays the futility and absurdity of war. Coutard's newsreel-like images serve as a counter 'truth' to the image modern civilization creates of itself. In fact, Godard's exploration of Western consciousness, and its rationales for waging war, turns on an examination of images-the personal, stylized, collective and anonymous images that shape our view of the world. When Michelangelo and Ulysses return home from the war, they proudly bear a suitcase full of postcards. In their conviction of the equivalence of the 'mechanical reproduction' and the real thing, they've accepted the postcards as title-deeds for their spoils of war. On his first visit to the movies, in a classic confusion between the representation of reality and reality, Michelangelo ducks from a train and attempts to peek into a woman's on-screen bath. While Michelangelo and Ulysses' reality is literally reduced to images on cardboard and the movie screen, it is also part of a 'larger picture,' an ideology constructed on possessions and possessing."

—Kathy Geritz

• Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Written by Roberto Rossellini, Jean Gruault, Godard, from a play by Benjamin Joppolo. Photographed by Raoul Coutard. With Genevieve Galea, Catherine Ribero, Marino Mase, Albert Juross. (80 mins, In French with English subtitles, From Institut Français, permission Rialto Pictures)