Long Take from *Weekend* (1967)
Year: 1967
Director / Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France / Italy
Director of Photography: Raoul Coutard (Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le fou, La Chinoise)
Assistant Director: Claude Miller (future director—*The Best Way to Walk*, *The Cheeky One*, *A Secret*)
Edited by: Agnès Guillemot
Music: Antoine Duhamel
Camera: Mitchell, 35mm
Setup: 300 meters of tracking rails laid along the road
Duration of the clip: 7 minutes 50 seconds (from 16:14 to 24:04)
Structure: TWO shots ~3 min + ~5 min, interrupted by three intertitles at 18:48–18:54 (“1:40 p.m.,” “WEEKEND,” “2:10 p.m.”)
Dolly shot direction: sideways, from left to right, parallel to the road, no forward movement
Distance from the traffic jam: ~1.2 km (¾ mile)
Filming location: a road near Guyancourt, south of Versailles (not Oinville; the "Oinville" sign visible in the film was pasted over the village's real name)
Budget: very low (Godard worked quickly, with limited resources)
Godard's last "classic" film: yes, after *Week-end*, he turned to militant cinema (Dziga Vertov Group)
A country road south of Versailles. An endless traffic jam. The camera is mounted on rails, parallel to the road. It begins to glide from left to right, slowly, inexorably. And for nearly eight minutes, it does nothing but move through a traffic jam. But what a traffic jam. Cars at a standstill, bumper to bumper, stretching for more than a kilometer. Drivers honk their horns nonstop; the sound of the horns is deafening, continuous, unbearable. A couple plays chess in front of their overturned car. Children are playing next to a wrecked car. A man is struggling with the sails of a boat on a trailer. Animals (monkeys, llamas) can be seen in the stranded trucks. A huge yellow-and-red Shell tanker truck blocks the road. And at the very end of the traffic jam, bodies. Dead people. Blood. An accident. The Durands (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc), in their convertible, make their way up the line on the opposite side of the road, passing everyone, indifferent to the dead, the honking horns, and the hostile stares. And the camera, on its 300 meters of track, glides alongside them without judging them.
Why This Scene Is a Cult Classic
Antoine de Baecque, Godard’s biographer, called it “the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema.” In 1967, that was probably true; *La Soif du mal* (1958) was 3 minutes and 20 seconds long. Godard’s shot is 7 minutes and 50 seconds. But what makes this shot unique in the history of cinema isn’t its length—it’s what Godard does with it.
Brian Henderson, in his academic essay “Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style,” identified the technique: a pure lateral tracking shot, with no forward movement whatsoever, along a baseline that is exactly parallel to the scene. Henderson argues that this style is “a single-layered synthetic construct, acknowledged as such, which the viewer must critically examine, accept, or reject.” The camera does not penetrate the space; it scans it, like a barcode reader. It does not enter the characters’ lives; it catalogs them. Every car, every face, every living tableau (the chess players, the children, the animals) is an entry in a catalog of bourgeois society in decay.
And then Godard sabotages his own shot. At 18:48, right in the middle of the tracking shot, he inserts three intertitles: “1:40 p.m.,” “WEEKEND,” “2:10 p.m.” Three intertitles that interrupt the continuity of the shot, shatter the illusion, and brutally remind you that you’re watching a movie. Senses of Cinema noted that Godard “undermines the effect by interrupting the shot with repeated intertitles, thereby shattering any certainty the viewer might have about the technical mastery required for the shot.” Godard creates the longest sequence shot in the history of cinema and then deliberately breaks it in two to prevent you from admiring it. Technical virtuosity is bourgeois. The viewer’s admiration is bourgeois. The long take itself is bourgeois. Godard creates it and destroys it at the same time.
How They Filmed It
Senses of Cinema revealed the setup: “a Mitchell camera on 300 meters of track to film a nightmarish traffic jam.” Three hundred meters of tracking rails laid along the road—a monumental physical setup for 1967, when most tracking shots were 5 or 10 meters long. Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer—the man who had invented the visual style of the French New Wave with *À bout de souffle* (1960)—operated the Mitchell camera on this seemingly endless track.
Coutard was a former war photographer in Indochina who became a photojournalist (Paris Match, Look). He learned to use a movie camera on the job, “by trial and error” at first, according to Criterion. His background as a war photographer is evident in the shot of the traffic jam: the camera scans the scene with the same clinical detachment as a reporter crossing a battlefield. It doesn’t linger on the dead. It doesn’t zoom in on the distraught faces. It moves on.
The filming location was long believed to be the D913 near Oinville-sur-Montcient (as Baecque writes in his biography of Godard). But The Cine-Tourist has shown that the “Oinville” sign visible in the film is a fake, pasted over the village’s real name. Filming took place on a road near Guyancourt, south of Versailles. Claude Miller, the assistant director (and future filmmaker), also served as location scout, and Guyancourt was the film’s logistical hub—the same place where Godard had met Anne Wiazemsky on the set of Bresson’s *Au hasard Balthazar* in 1966.
The vehicles in the traffic jam were cataloged by The Cine-Tourist: Citroën DSs, Peugeot 404s, Renault 4Ls, trucks, a boat on a trailer, a Shell tanker truck, and farm vehicles. Each vehicle was positioned manually, one by one, bumper to bumper, over a distance of more than one kilometer. The extras in the cars had to hold their positions for the entire duration of the shot, honking their horns, shouting, playing chess, or reading the newspaper.
Godard had said, “Politics is a tracking shot.” Henderson analyzed this statement as the manifesto of the traffic jam shot: the camera’s lateral movement is not a narrative device; it is a political act. By showing French society lined up along a road—motionless, hostile, indifferent to the dead—Godard turns his tracking shot into a political statement. The camera does not follow a character; it interprets a country.
What to Look For When Watching It Again
The Intertitles (~18:48) Right in the middle of the shot, Godard inserts three intertitles: “1:40 p.m.,” “WEEKEND,” “2:10 p.m.” The shot is split in two. Intentionally. Godard destroys his own 8-minute long take to prevent you from admiring it as a feat of virtuosity. It is the most subversive act in this entire collection.
The Durands in the opposite lane (~entire shot) Roland and Corinne drive back up through the traffic jam on the open lane. No one else does this; the other drivers remain stuck in their lane, as if trapped by an invisible wall. The A.V. Club noted the absurdity: “They’re driving through the traffic jam without giving the stranded drivers a second glance.” It’s capitalism personified: individual advancement at the expense of the collective.
The Dead at the End (~last minute) The traffic jam ends in an accident. Bodies on the road. Blood—or rather, fake blood, which Godard himself described as “not blood, but red.” The Durands drive past without stopping. And the camera moves on as well.
Did you know?
*Week-end* is the last film of Godard’s “classical period,” and the film’s closing credits read: “The End of Cinema.” After *Week-end*, Godard abandoned commercial cinema for the Dziga Vertov Group (Maoist militant cinema) and would not return to “normal” cinema until *Sauve qui peut (la vie)* in 1980, thirteen years later. Week-end is thus a double farewell: a farewell to bourgeois society (in terms of content) and a farewell to narrative cinema (in terms of form). The traffic jam sequence is the last great formal gesture of the New Wave, and it sabotages itself.
This shot is the forerunner of two shots in this collection. The lateral tracking shot in the opening sequence of *Deadpool & Wolverine* (2024)—which also moves from left to right, focusing on Madonna—is a direct descendant of this movement. Shawn Levy cited *300* and *Watchmen* as influences, both of which in turn reference the comic book, which itself references Godard’s cinema. And the lateral tracking shot in *Code Unknown* (Haneke, 2000)— the camera gliding along a Parisian boulevard — is an explicit homage to Godard’s method. Haneke took the lateral tracking shot from *Week-End* and stripped it of its irony: where Godard depicts indifference with sarcasm, Haneke depicts injustice with gravity. Same tool, same movement, two diametrically opposed temperaments.
Sources
Raoul Coutard - Archived Interview (Criterion DVD/Blu-ray Extras)
Claude Miller - Archived Interview (Criterion Extras)
Philippe Garrel - On-Set Footage (Criterion Extras)
Senses of Cinema - "Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)" (September 2017)
Brian Henderson - "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style" (academic essay, 1970s)
Antoine de Baecque - Godard at Work: The 1960s (Cahiers du cinéma, 2008)
The A.V. Club - Criterion Review (November 2012)
The Cinema Archives - "Weekend – 1967 Godard" (May 2021)
The Cine-Tourist - "Weekend: Time, Place, and Cars" (analysis of filming locations and vehicles)
The Latest Picture Show - "Cinema's Greatest Scenes: Weekend" (May 2016)
Avant-Guardian Musings - "Quick Compare: Long Tracking Shots in Film History"
Criterion Collection - Official Page + Extras
Wikipedia - Weekend (1967 film)
See also:
Long Take in *Rope* (1948) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/la-corde - The other great long take that sabotages itself: Hitchcock shoots an entire film without a cut, then admits it was a mistake. Two directors, two forms of creative self-destruction.
Narrative Effectiveness: Long Take vs. Shot Sequence https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/efficacite-narrative-plan-sequence-contre-decoupage - When Godard inserts intertitles in the middle of his own shot to prevent admiration: the long take as a political act against his own virtuosity
