LES CARABINIERS: An Absurdist Anti-War Film

One is held hostage by Jean-Luc Godard's LES CARABINIERS which presents itself as an absurdist anti-war parable, but eventually reveals itself to be an unremittingly grim story of the futility of conquest, brutishness, and self-delusion. The two main male characters are the atavistic Michel-Ange (Albert Juross) and the not-so-bright Ulysses (Marino Mase). Both are seduced by two military officers into believing that by serving in the King's army they will be intitled to the riches of the countries they conquer. The two pillagers leave their equally mentally challenged wives, Cleopatra (Catherine Ribero) and Venus (Genevieve Galea) and embark on a world wind military campaign (via stock war footage) sending postcards of their exploits back to their wives. Along the way, Michel-Ange lifts up woman's skirts with the end of his rifle, both of them participate in various executions, and Michel-Ange sees a film for the first time and attempts to enter the screen. He succeeds only in tearing down the screen and not entering into the image of a woman taking a bath. When the two return home, they return with all their spoils of victory: Postcards with images of the world's treasures great and small (from the Pyramids to an American convertible). Dissatisfied by the postcards (which they are told are their deeds to their treasures) Michel-Ange and Ulysses track down the military officer who seduced them into joining the army and demand their loot. They are informed that the King has signed a treaty with his enemies. The two are told to wait in a room and then both are summarily shot off-screen. The End.
Now we know from our exposure to absurdism in the theatre that characters in absurdist works are usually reduced to charicature and that the circumstances in absurdist work is often circular and reduced to the barest dramatic reflexes, but there is something quite altogether disturbing in LES CARABINIERS that makes this absurdist work extremely distasteful to even the most jaundiced eye.(1) It has something to do with the reasoning that is presented as the basis for war (all wars as the reductionism of absurdism implies). LES CARABINIERS presents theft and appropriation as the basis for all wars past and present. Godard recognizes this parable-like quality of his work in an interview defending the film from his many detractors in 1962," I assumed I had to explain to children not only what war is, but what all wars have been from the barbarian invasions to Korea and Algeria..."(2) It is perhaps an inarguable fact that many wars are fought for some kind of appropriation of land and materials or 'the treasures of the world', one need only think of the oil in Iraq to entertain this conclusion. Certainly the atavistic and primitive characters within LES CARABINIERS lay bare this ulterior motive of war and make our scrutiny of it a distasteful look at man's basest instincts and his cruelest folly. LES CARABINIERS makes explicit the point that no war is justifiable by the film's consistent demonstration of the meaninglessness of war whether through the various executions within the film (whose reasons are not explained) or the various writings that Michel-Ange and Ulysses send back to their wives which comment on death, violence and tragedy without emotion. But the question LES CARABINIERS forces the viewers held hostage to its perspective to ask is whether or not such a generalization about all wars is true or relevant? Are all wars fought for the appropriation of treasure? I am inclined to say no and that this is an oversimplification to give all wars the appearance of absurdity instead of finding the absurdity within a particular war. (e.g. Joseph Heller/Mike Nichols CATCH-22 or the 'ant-hill' in Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson's PATHS OF GLORY) In fact, the dropping of atomic weapons upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed war from its ancient starting point of appropriation and transformed war into ideological conflicts as demonstrated by the Cold War, the Korean War, the Franco-Indochine War, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War and our current war against terrorism. Although land and materials certainly are a part of the reasoning for wars in general, after 1945 ideology plays a greater role in the reasoning for war. Thus, LES CARABINIERS is an absurdist anti-war film that was already 20 years too late when in it was released in 1963. Much of the blame for this lateness cannot be solely put on Godard for he served merely as a 'metteur-en-scene' for this film as he explained in a 1968 interview: "...it was the only time I really had a script. I mean, a full script. It was not written by me, but by Roberto Rossellini from a play by Benjamino Joppolo. Rossellini did quite a lot of work on it and after that I had just to shoot and nothing more..." (3) These comments explain several things about the film, most importantly its neo-realist visual style (documentary footage, exteriors, non-professional actors), its explicit absurdist tendencies (circular dialogue, charcicatures, brutalism)and also why LES CARABINIERS is such a departure for Godard since we can reasonably assume that he made no changes to the script and worked on the film as if it were a commission rather than an auteurist statement. Godard thought that the film was misunderstood from the vehemence of the criticism he was receiving about it at the time of its release (See: Godard on Godard, edited by Tom Milne, pages 196-200), but I believe the criticism was just and accurate because the source material for the work Benjamino Joppolo's (1906-1963) operetta I Carabinieri (1945) had not been properly updated and adapted by Rossellini. The film coming as it did just after the French-Algerian war and the start of the escalation of the American-Vietnam war could only appear as a slap in the face to every war veteran or audience member who knew that the reasonings behind wars at that time had changed. Joppolo's work, completed in 1945, was a critique of all wars prior to the atomic bomb, it simply could not stand as a generalization about all wars subsequent to 1945 without major revisions; major revisions that Rossellini did not successfully execute nor did Godard bother to re-write as was his custom on any other film he would make. I believe Godard's reverence for Rossellini is what kept him from changing the text and that this indecision is what contributed to what one writer glibly described as his,' pitiful farce' about war. It was as clear then in 1962 as it is now that wars are fought for more than just appropriation. Thus LES CARABINIERS fails as a parable and becomes a less visually interesting didactic tract against war than even some of Godard's more explicitly militant work from the Dziga-Vertov group.

NOTES

(1) The figures in pairs was a standard feature of most absurdist work. (e.g. Estragon & Vladmir in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Ben & Gus in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, Valet & Garcin, Estelle & Inez in Sarte's No Exit). In film one is reminded of the titular nomadic pair of male characters in Roman Polanski's Two Men and A Wardrobe or the master and servant in Joesph Losey and Harold Pinter's The Servant.
(2) Page 197, Godard on Godard, Trans/ed. Tom Milne, Da Capo, 1972, New York.
(3) Page 35, Jean-Luc Godard Interviews, ed. David Sterritt, University of Mississippi, 1998, Jackson.