Pierrot le fou (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard.

“The first time I’ve seen a film by Jean-Luc Godard I really learned a lot about filmmaking. But most of all, I’ve learned that you have to do the films as freely as you can. Pierrot le fou for example changed my way of filmmaking.”
Young yakuza Koji Wakamatsu was sent to prison in his twenties; there, he learned that power leads to repression and brutality. After his release, he wrote a book about his experience, and found in filmmaking a way to expose the abuse of power. In 1959, he worked for television and, four years later, shot his first films. He was granted total artistic freedom, as long as sex and violence predominated. His “pinku-eiga” (erotic Japanese movies) attracted a lot of attention and, step by step, he realized that eroticism was necessary to the development of his political discourse; thus, the original constraint had become a necessity. In 1965, he created his own production company, Wakamatsu Productions, and directed Secret Act Inside Walls (aka Affairs Within Walls). The film was submitted to Berlin Film Festival that same year and was nominated for the Golden Bear. It caused general indignation; Wakamatsu’s camera had thus become an active political weapon exposing the faults of a hypocritical government and the mouthpiece of the identity crisis of young people. Wakamatsu’s films, shot frenetically (around ten films a year), with a simplistic touch in their bare staging that reminds Jean-Luc Godard, but with sexual excesses and brutality that are typical of exploitation films, are virulent anarchist manifestos that are still maddening Japanese authorities, while Wakamatsu is still forbidden on American grounds for his left-winged position.
Read his interview.

About Pierrot le fou: After abandoning his wife and infant daughter for the new babysitter, a woman he’d loved and lost several years earlier, an errant husband embarks on a haphazard road to tragedy.
“I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple,” Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful ‘Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard’s misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the romanticism in much of his 60s work–and perhaps never more so than here–but Karina’s charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the time. The movie’s frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo’s character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed.” (Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader)

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