Movie of the Week: BAND OF OUTSIDERS

“…the stare is much more interesting for what it means in movie technique. When this pensive, larger-than-life profile, back of the head, or full face, fills the screen with a kind of distilled purity, the image becomes purified abstract composition, a diagram, and any soul-searching is secondary. The movie, in a mysterious fashion, diverts at this moment from the clutter and multiplicity of story-telling, naturalism, to a minimal condition. The screen is reduced to a refined one-against-one balance, and the movie’s excitement has shifted strictly into a matter of shape against shape, tone against tone.”
– Manny Farber, “Carbonated Dyspepsia”

To cinephiles, the late Manny Farber needs no more introduction than the magnetic stare of Anna Karina. The firm-handed iconoclast of a film critic (and painter, professor, and carpenter) is the impetus for a LACMA tribute series beginning tomorrow, Underground Films & Termite Art: A Tribute to Manny Farber. Opening night begins with Raoul Walsh’s ME AND MY GAL, but for my money the lynchpin is the evening’s second feature, Jean-Luc Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS, which also needs no introduction. In addition to helping cement Karina as a fetish object, Godard’s heist romp/tragic love triangle made a number of appearances in Farber’s writing:

“…the inclement charm Godard gets with drizzly weather, the Paris outkirts, and three nuts scurrying around the same overcast BAND OF OUTSIDERS terrain — are in the termite range, and no one speaks about them for the qualities I like.”
– Introduction to NEGATIVE SPACE

“BAND OF OUTSIDERS, a parody of a sex triangle, its people not real, but more like fleas, is also crammed with ricochet movements; a Madison danced in a two-bit bar with its nonsense trio led by Sami Grey, building a spacious rectangle over and over, punctuating the construction with a witless hop and clap at one corner, and a foto stamp at another.”
– “Carbonated Dyspepsia”

“…the idiot children in BAND OF OUTSIDERS — waferlike, incubated snits — are beset by, and get their meaning from, the darkling air around them. The moralizing is always a tone that sneaks in despite the ambivalence that keeps [Godard's] surface brittle and facetious.”
– “Jean-Luc Godard”

“…Arthur, memorable for his woolen stocking cap pulled down over his most malignant Jim Thorpe face to his nose, is an argyle-sweatered sweetheart to forget. As the chosen beau in a triangle, he implacably keeps his eyes, like a hungry airedale, glued to the curb, while Claude Brasseur acts him with the unyielding sneakiness of a furtive fireplug.”
– “Jean-Luc Godard”

BAND OF OUTSIDERS strikes me as ideal for opening night, as Godard and Farber had more in common than either might suspect. Besides both being professional critics, they were enigmatic intellectuals, as ensconced in high art as in populism and often playing a trickster role. Each approached his art and life uniquely from left field, sometimes as precociously as pretentiously, and never straying from his vision. Farber’s 1968 sort-of love letter to the director famously ends, “In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.” I’ve always read that as a good thing.

LACMA must already know the audience to expect for the Farber series: a righteous band of film lovers and thinkers who rose up to save the museum’s dying film program less than a year ago; termites, all of them. Perhaps I’m giving LACMA too much credit, but it seems like a thank you card. Other films in the series highlight Farber’s eclectic taste and touch upon titles he often revisited in his writing — Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE, WAVELENGTH, and THE MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER, to name a few. This Sunday is a panel featuring Patricia Patterson, Farber’s widow and collaborator.

Maybe the whole thing is less a gift than a master class from beyond.

WHAT: BAND OF OUTSIDERS

WHEN: Friday, April 16, 9:10 PM

WHERE: LACMA’s Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA