Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (10 page)

In another new film magazine,
Positif
, founded in Lyon in 1952 by left-wing film enthusiasts, the young
Cahiers
writers were derided as apologists for the “American way of life.” In fact, the critics at
Cahiers
avoided politics, but not as a politicized repudiation of left-wing calls for “engagement.” They wanted to talk about the cinema without being labeled as belonging to one or another side of a political conflict. As Fereydoun Hoveyda, who had started writing for
Cahiers
in 1954, recalled, almost everyone there was on the right (except Jacques Rivette and the older writer Pierre Kast), and Godard had the reputation as “rightist, almost fascist.” But nonetheless, the writers avoided the subject of politics: “If we had accepted to write about the Algerian War, which was the major event at the time, it would have prevented us from talking to many people who were interested in the cinema.”
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As another writer for the magazine, Michel Dorsday, recalled, “The love of the cinema came first.”
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Over the next four years, Truffaut published more than 500 articles (an average of more than two per issue) in
Arts
, and his combative reviews were often featured prominently on the front page. Thus the preoccupations, or
obsessions, that “Schérer’s gang” (also called by friends and foes alike the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians,” when not simply labeled the “Young Turks”) debated, theorized, and refined at the offices and in the pages of
Cahiers du cinéma
reached far beyond the specialized precinct of movie-lovers and became familiar to a wide French readership. Through Truffaut’s writings, they gained a beachhead on the French cultural scene at large.

Yet it was also in the pages of
Cahiers
that the group found its most articulate opponent: André Bazin. In an article published there in 1957, Bazin challenged the
politique des auteurs
head-on, charging that “Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, or Nicholas Ray appear, in the light of
Cahiers
, to be more or less infallible authors who never make a failed film”—and identifying in this trend the risk of “an aesthetic cult of personality.”
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He derided the group’s emphasis on the stylistic subtleties of an auteur’s mise-enscène at the expense of the other aspects of a film, including its subject: “Auteurs, yes; but of what?”
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He claimed that the cinema could not aspire to equality with literature, art, or music, because it is merely “a popular and industrial art,” and declared that Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, or Roberto Rossellini were not “on the same level of individuation”—i.e., did not leave as distinctive a mark on their work—as Picasso, Matisse, or other contemporary painters.
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Bazin was at odds with the young enthusiasts he had brought into the magazine. And no one in the group was more openly confrontational toward Bazin, and in sharper opposition to Bazin’s ideas, than Godard. Indeed, as Godard developed his ideas about the cinema in preparation for his work as a director, he continued to wage a theoretical argument against Bazin at a deeper level than that of his colleagues. The December 1956 issue of
Cahiers
brought the conflict into the open: it featured an article by Bazin called “Montage Interdit” (Editing Forbidden) and one by Godard, “Montage, mon beau souci” (Editing, My Beautiful Concern).

Their exchange was a more pointed and passionate reprise of their earlier debates in the pages of
Cahiers
, and Godard’s argument was even more radical than his earlier response. Starting out from his earlier premise—that editing brought about an acute psychological reality through its spatial discontinuities—Godard now explained classical film editing in terms of modern philosophy from Heidegger to Sartre, asserting its power “to make the heart prevail over intelligence in destroying the notion of space in favor of that of time.” In a lapidary phrase, he asserted that “if direction is a look, editing is a heartbeat.”

Where Bazin continued to praise the long take for its presumed fidelity to physical reality, Godard praised editing for rendering the subjective essence of reality: “A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression
of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.” In other words, a well-edited film offered the most artless art: rather than presenting a good representation of reality, it seemed to provide the experience of reality itself.

Godard drew on his incipient experience as a filmmaker to assert that film editing is as crucial to the director’s art as shooting: “One improvises, one invents in front of the Moviola as on the set.” And finally, Godard re-asserted the philosophical importance of editing, “montage,” by suggesting that it is not merely a fact of the cinema but also a fact of life: “To direct a film is to plot [
machiner
], one says of a plot [
machination
] that it is well or badly laid [
montée
].” The action of life is “
monté
,” edited. With this suggestion through wordplay, Godard asserted that Bazin, by repudiating editing, was in fact separating the cinema from reality.

W
HEN GODARD RETURNED
to Paris in January 1956, he had a plan for a feature film. If he would miss his deadline for making his first feature by age twenty-five, as Orson Welles had done, he at least was proposing to make a first feature that would rival
Citizen Kane
in outsized ambition. Godard had written a script based on Goethe’s novel
Elective Affinities
. The title of the script was
Odile
—Godard’s mother’s first name, as well as the French translation of Ottilie, the name of a character from the novel, the story of which hit close to home: Edward and Charlotte, a wealthy couple living harmoniously on a large and serene rural estate, are visited by the man’s friend, the Captain, and the woman’s young protégée, Ottilie. Edward and Ottilie have an affair, and in the complications that ensue, Ottilie dies.

The script was 250 pages long—an extraordinary length, given the industry rule of thumb that a page of script translates into a minute of screen time—and the producer Pierre Braunberger, who read it, estimated that it would be extraordinarily expensive to shoot and would result in a five-hour film. Even for an established director, it would have been a difficult project to produce; for an outsider like Godard, it was impossible. But at the same time, he and his friends at
Cahiers
, all of whom were seeking to become filmmakers, took a lesson in the art of the possible from a director they admired and had come to know, Roberto Rossellini.

Rossellini, born in 1906, was the most important Italian director of the day, though few in Italy still thought so. Although he had made several patriotic films under official auspices during the war, the unauthorized film that he made in 1945 in the last days of the war,
Open City
(starring Anna Magnani in a drama about resistance fighters and collaborators in Rome under the German occupation), inaugurated the neorealist school of filmmaking.

This movement favored stories centered on the lives of working-class Italians, with particular attention to political and social problems, filmed on location, in a manner derived from documentary filmmaking. But in 1950, Rossellini made
Stromboli
, starring Ingrid Bergman (who soon also became his wife). With this film, and even more, with subsequent films that he made with Bergman (notably
Europa 51, Voyage to Italy
, and
Fear
), Rossellini abandoned the working-class politics of neorealism and located the new center of modern Italian life in the bourgeoisie. Replacing overtly political concerns with more abstract questions, Rossellini created a cinema of philosophical contemplation and symbolic abstraction in the framework of conventional melodrama. In effect, Rossellini made American-style films with European methods and ideas; and his new work, which was roundly derided by most of the European critics who had hailed the films of his first style, was appreciated, first and most vigorously, by the young critics at
Cahiers
. (Rohmer’s enthusiastic endorsement of
Stromboli
on the front page of the May 1950 issue of
La Gazette du cinéma
set the tone for their views.)

One of the crucial aspects of the
politique des auteurs
as practiced by the young critics at
Cahiers
was its power to give them a personal “in” with film-makers they exalted and whose work they praised. In 1955, Rossellini left Italy, where he was jeered, for Paris, where he found a more favorable reception. François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, two of the critics who were championing his work, invited him for an interview, and Rossellini took a reciprocal interest in them—especially in Truffaut, the more prominent and outgoing of the two. Rossellini invited him to be his private secretary; he also got his French producer, Henry Deutschmeister, interested in a series of 16mm films to be made by Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, and the documentary filmmakers Jean Rouch and Alain Resnais. Rossellini exhorted them to write their scripts on the basis of practical research into local events. He wanted his young followers, in effect, to produce a new neorealist movement in France.

The collaboration fell through, due to Deutschmeister’s hesitation and Rossellini’s distraction (his own projects in Europe came to naught and he left for India to make a film there), but Godard’s friends had done their research and had written their scripts. Now, with or without Rossellini and Deutschmeister, they were thinking like filmmakers and would realize their plans to make films.

Godard’s massive script for
Odile
, with its literary romanticism, differed drastically from the small-scale, documentary-style stories that Rossellini had urged his young friends to prepare, and that he himself made. His 1953 film,
Voyage to Italy
, shown in Paris in 1955, was a revelation to Godard,
from a practical standpoint. The film presents an English couple (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) who visit Italy in order to deal with a family inheritance, and dramatizes the stresses in their relationship as they travel through the countryside and experience its attractions and peculiarities. With its intimate fiction set in a landscape that Rossellini filmed with a documentary attentiveness and fidelity,
Voyage to Italy
inspired the Young Turks of
Cahiers
to consider the possibility of making highly structured dramas with spartan means. Specifically, Godard later recalled, he drew from the film a practical lesson: that to make a feature film, he needed only a pair of actors and a car. A low budget didn’t entail the constrained subject matter of a low-budget film like Rivette’s
Quadrille
, nor did the dramatic intensity of a script like
Odile
require access to outsized budgets and productions.

When Rossellini left Paris to make a film in India, he invited Truffaut to join him, but Truffaut refused; he didn’t want to put his own career, which was still a dream, on hold. In mid-1956, Truffaut had the idea to make a small-scale film based on the true-crime story of Michel Portail, a petty criminal who, on November 24, 1952, had stolen the car of a Greek diplomat, shot a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and hid out for almost two weeks until he was found in a canoe docked in the center of Paris.
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Portail was tried in November 1954 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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One aspect of the story that appealed to Truffaut concerned the killer’s girlfriend, an American journalist with whom he had briefly lived a fashionable life and whom he attempted to find in Paris and persuade to run off with him. Instead, she turned him in to the police.

Truffaut (who had earlier sketched out the story with Chabrol) intended to direct the film on a low budget and in quasi-documentary style, and he called on Godard to help him rework the idea. The two met to talk it out on a bench at the Richelieu-Drouot station. (At the time Godard was working for a short-lived newspaper,
Le Temps de Paris
, as a gossip writer, having been hired through Truffaut’s journalistic connections.) However, Truffaut failed to interest any producers in the story, largely, he believed, because of the political and bureaucratic difficulties in France of filming news-based stories.
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Instead, Truffaut turned to a purely commercial project, and he enlisted Godard’s help with this too. On January 10, 1957, Truffaut signed an agreement with the producer Pierre Braunberger to write and direct a short film,
Autour de la Tour Eiffel
(Around the Eiffel Tower),
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a rather heavy-handed comedy about a country girl who visits the big city for the first time, a peasant boy whom she meets en route to the Eiffel Tower, a livestock merchant who leads a cow through the city, a comedian (Raymond Devos) who erupts in an orotund comic monologue, and a prostitute whose profession the leading lady naively misunderstands.

At Truffaut’s request, Godard revised the script, making its plot more elegant and its comedy wittier and more visually inventive. Instead of meeting a peasant boy near the Eiffel Tower, the country girl encounters an urbane young Parisian when he “narrowly misses her with his De Soto convertible.” Godard devised a remarkable sight gag to crystallize their rapid courtship. As the pair ascend the tower, the country girl is transformed, floor by floor, through the power of film editing, into a sophisticated Parisienne: at the second floor, “she no longer has her braids… nor her peasant blouse nor her clogs”; after the couple race each other breathlessly up the staircase to the third floor, the young woman “is again metamorphosed, her hair short, a trace of lipstick on her lips, high heels, in a little dress by Guy Laroche.”
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