Godard's suburban years
Résumé
Jean-Luc Godard's 'Karina years' were also his 'Paris years', critic Alain Bergala once noted. They were no less Godard's suburban years, for in addition to the portrait of greater Paris in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s the director shot several films around the French capital. As Eric Rohmer noted, the banlieue offers the film director 'a choice subject-first of all, because millions of people live there, and secondly, because it's a newer and more varied setting than Paris' (Beylie and Carbonnier 1985: 7). As expressed in Godard's work the heterogeneity of the banlieue is indeed remarkable, from suburban houses and villas in Une Histoire d'eau (1961) and Bande à part (1964) to the high-rise estates in La Courneuve in Deux ou trois choses … (1967) or the office buildings of La Défense in Alphaville (1965); from wastelands dotted with makeshift huts in Les Carabiniers (1963) to the shantytowns of Nanterre in La Chinoise (1967), from the banks and islands of the Marne River (Bande à part) to the alluvial plain and woods around Villeneuve-Saint-George (Une Histoire d'eau), from the Villacoublay airfield and the new airport of Orly Sud shown in A Bout de souffle (1959) and Une Femme mariée (1964) all the way to the roads of Seineet-Oise and the forests of the outer suburbs such as Rambouillet in Weekend (1967).
