Year : 1967
Director/Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard
Countries: France / Italy
Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard (Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, La Chinoise)
Assistant director: Claude Miller (future director - The Best Way to Walk, The Impudent Girl, A Secret)
Editing: Agnès Guillemot
Music: Antoine Duhamel
Camera: Mitchell, 35mm
Setup: 300 meters of tracking rails laid along the road
Sequence duration: 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 ("13H40", "WEEKEND", "14H10")
Direction of the camera movement: lateral, from left to right, parallel to the road, no forward movement
Distance to the traffic jam: ~1.2 km (¾ mile)
Filming location: road near Guyancourt, south of Versailles (not Oinville; the "Oinville" sign visible in the film was pasted over the real name of the village)
Budget: very low (Godard worked quickly, with limited resources)
Godard's last "classic" film: yes, after Weekend, he moved into 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 drive through a traffic jam. But what a traffic jam. Cars at a standstill, bumper to bumper, for over a kilometer. Drivers honking incessantly, the sound of the horns deafening, continuous, unbearable. A couple plays chess in front of their overturned car. Children play next to a wreck. A man struggles with the sails of a boat on a trailer. Animals (monkeys, llamas) are visible in stuck 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, drive up the line on the opposite track, passing everyone, indifferent to the dead, the honking horns, the hostile stares. And the camera, along its 300 meters of track, glides beside them without judgment.
Why this scene is iconic
Antoine de Baecque, Godard's biographer, called it "the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema." In 1967, that was probably true; Touch of Evil (1958) was 3 minutes 20 seconds long. Godard's shot is 7 minutes 50 seconds. But what makes this shot unique in the history of cinema is not its duration, but 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, without any forward movement, along a baseline exactly parallel to the scene. Henderson argues that this style is "a single-layered, synthetic construct, accepted as such, which the viewer must critically examine, accept, or reject." The camera does not enter the space; it scans it, like a barcode reader. It does not enter the lives of the characters; it inventories them. Every car, every face, every tableau vivant (the chess players, the children, the animals) is a box in a catalog of decaying bourgeois society.
And then Godard sabotages his own plan. At 18:48, right in the middle of the tracking shot, he inserts three intertitles: "1:40 PM," "WEEKEND," "2:10 PM." Three title cards that interrupt the continuity of the shot, shatter the illusion, and brutally remind you that you are watching a film. Senses of Cinema noted that Godard "sabotages the effect by incising the shot with repeated intertitles, thus ruining any certainty the viewer has about the technical mastery required for the shot." Godard creates the longest single take 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 continuous shot 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 dolly track laid along the road—a monumental physical apparatus for 1967, when most tracking shots were only 5 or 10 meters long. Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer, the man who had invented the visual style of the New Wave with Breathless (1960), operated the Mitchell camera on this seemingly endless dolly.
Coutard was a former war photographer in Indochina who became a photojournalist (Paris Match, Look). He learned to use a film camera on the job, initially "by trial and error," according to Criterion. This background as a war photographer is evident in the shot of the traffic jam: the camera scans the scene with the same clinical detachment a reporter uses to cross a battlefield. It doesn't linger on the dead. It doesn't zoom in on faces in distress. It moves on.
The filming location was long thought to be the D913 near Oinville-sur-Montcient (as Baecque wrote in his biography of Godard). But The Cine-Tourist has demonstrated 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 a 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 DS cars, 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 a kilometer. The extras in the cars had to hold their positions for the entire duration of the shot, honking their horns, shouting, playing chess, and reading the newspaper.
Godard had declared: "Politics is a tracking shot." Henderson analyzed this phrase as the manifesto of the traffic jam shot: the lateral movement of the camera is not a narrative tool, it is a political act. By showing French society lined up on 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 reads a country.
What to observe when reviewing it
The intertitles (~18:48) Right in the middle of the shot, Godard inserts three title cards: "1:40 PM", "WEEKEND", "2:10 PM". The shot is cut in half. Deliberately. Godard destroys his own 8-minute sequence shot to prevent you from admiring it as a virtuoso piece. It's the most subversive act in this entire collection.
The Durands are in the opposite lane (see the entire shot). Roland and Corinne are driving through the traffic jam in the open lane. No one else is doing so; the other drivers remain stuck in their lane, as if trapped by an invisible wall. The AV Club noted the absurdity: "They're driving through the traffic jam without giving a second glance to the other drivers stuck in it." This is capitalism incarnate: individual advancement at the expense of the community.
The deaths at the end (last minute). The traffic jam ends in an accident. Bodies on the road. Blood, fake blood that Godard himself described as "not blood, red." The Durands drive past without stopping. And the camera drives past too.
Did you know that?
Weekend is the last film of Godard's "classical period," and the film's final title card states it clearly: "End of Cinema." After Weekend, Godard abandoned commercial cinema for the Dziga Vertov Group (Maoist militant cinema) and would not return to "normal" cinema until 1980 with Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), thirteen years later. Weekend is therefore a double farewell: a farewell to bourgeois society (through its content) and a farewell to narrative cinema (through its form). The traffic jam shot is the last great formal gesture of the New Wave , and it sabotages itself.
This shot is the grandfather of two shots in this collection. The lateral tracking shot in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), always from left to right, on Madonna, is a direct descendant of this movement. Shawn Levy cited 300 and Watchmen as influences, which themselves cite comics, which in turn cite 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 Weekend and emptied it of its irony: where Godard shows indifference with sarcasm, Haneke shows injustice with gravity. Same tool, same movement, two diametrically opposed temperaments.
Sources
Raoul Coutard – archived interview (Criterion DVD/Blu-ray supplements)
Claude Miller - archived interview (Criterion supplements)
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 60s (Cahiers du cinéma, 2008)
The AV Club - Criterion review (November 2012)
The Cinema Archives - "Weekend – 1967 Godard" (May 2021)
The Cine-Tourist - "Week End: 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 + supplements
Wikipedia - Weekend (1967 film)
Also read:
The 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 makes an entire film without cuts and then admits it was a mistake. Two directors, two forms of creative self-destruction.
Narrative effectiveness: long take vs. editing 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
