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Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) occupies a unique, highly polarizing space in the landscape of 1960s anti-war cinema. While other films of the era tended toward psychological realism, grand spectacle, or biting satire, Godard’s approach was one of Brechtian detachment and existential absurdity.
Here is how Les Carabiniers compares to its contemporaries across several specific dimensions:
In many 1960s anti-war films, the soldier is portrayed as a victim of a rigid hierarchy or a cog in a heartless machine. For example, in Joseph Losey’s King and Country (1964), the soldier is a tragic figure crushed by military law.
In contrast, Godard’s protagonists—Ulysses and Michelangelo—are "lumpenproletariat" peasants who are neither heroic nor particularly sympathetic. They are motivated by pure, base greed. When the King’s recruiters promise them they can steal anything they want (including "the Parthenon and women"), they join the war with enthusiasm. Godard suggests that war is not just forced upon the poor, but that the poor are often seduced into it by the false promise of upward mobility and consumerist acquisition.
The most famous scene in Les Carabiniers involves the soldiers returning home with a small suitcase. Instead of gold or jewels, they reveal hundreds of postcards categorized by type (monuments, transport, animals, women).
This is a radical departure from the anti-war films of the time like The Longest Day (1962), which focused on the "greatness" of the event, or even Dr. Strangelove (1964), which focused on the absurdity of high-level politics. Godard argues that war is the ultimate form of imperialist consumption. To Ulysses and Michelangelo, "owning" the world through images (postcards) is the same as conquering it. This critique of the "society of the spectacle" is absent in more traditional 60s war films, which still treated war as a physical, territorial struggle rather than a conceptual one.
The 1960s saw the rise of both the "Big Budget" war epic and the "Gritty Realism" film.
Godard rejected both. Les Carabiniers is intentionally "ugly." It was shot on high-contrast stock to look like a decaying silent film or a primitive newsreel from the early 1900s. He used intertitles (e.g., "The Battle of the River") to describe action that the audience often doesn't even see clearly. By making the film look "antique," Godard suggests that war is a repetitive, archaic human stupidity that hasn't evolved, regardless of the technology used.
Most anti-war films of the 1960s used violence to shock the audience into a pacifist stance.
Godard’s violence in Les Carabiniers is banal and clumsy. Executions are staged in a flat, matter-of-fact way. There is a famous scene where a partisan girl recites a poem before being shot; the soldiers fumbling with their rifles makes the death pathetic rather than tragic. By stripping the "excitement" or "pathos" from the violence, Godard prevents the audience from finding any entertainment value in the combat—a trap that even the most well-meaning anti-war films (like The Great Escape) often fall into.
While films like Dr. Strangelove end in a nihilistic "Big Bang" (the nuclear apocalypse), Les Carabiniers ends with a cynical political betrayal. The King makes peace with the enemies, and Ulysses and Michelangelo—who thought they were heroes—are executed by their own side because they are no longer useful and their "crimes" (which were authorized during the war) are now a liability.
Compared to other 1960s anti-war films, Les Carabiniers is:
While audiences at the time largely hated the film for its abrasive style and "stupid" characters, it remains perhaps the most rigorous critique of how war, capitalism, and the consumption of images are inextricably linked.
The film was released in 1963, just after the end of the Algerian War. Its portrayal of French-speaking soldiers as greedy, stupid war criminals was seen as a direct insult to the national mood, contributing to its massive failure at the box office.
The film was co-written by Roberto Rossellini and based on a play he had previously staged. This connection between the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism is a significant historical detail.
The wives are named Venus and Cleopatra, which, along with Ulysses and Michelangelo, creates an ironic contrast between their 'high culture' names and their 'lumpenproletariat' reality.
Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) is a radical departure from 1960s anti-war cinema, characterized by its 'Brechtian' detachment and rejection of emotional identification. Unlike the psychological realism of King and Country or the grand spectacle of The Longest Day, Godard presents war as a form of mindless consumerism. The protagonists, Ulysse and Michel-Ange, are not victims but complicit 'lumpenproletariat' motivated by greed. The film's central metaphor is the 'postcard sequence,' where the spoils of war are revealed to be mere images, critiquing the 'society of the spectacle.' Stylistically, Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard used high-contrast stock to create a 'primitive' newsreel aesthetic, suggesting that war is an archaic, repetitive human failure. The film was heavily influenced by Roberto Rossellini (who co-wrote the script) and was released in the sensitive immediate aftermath of the Algerian War, which led to its hostile reception by the French public who saw its portrayal of soldiers as an affront.