Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (101 page)

From Vienna to Madrid, from Siodmak to Capra, from Los Angeles to Moscow, from Renoir to Malraux and Dovzhenko, the great directors of fiction were unable to control a revenge that they had staged twenty times.

This “revenge,” that of reality on the imaginary, was the Second World War. Though Godard was obsessed with the Holocaust as an unparalleled horror, he relativized the monstrosity of the political force that brought it about. As Godard asserted in
All the Stories
, the war resulted in not one but two attempts at world dominion—Germany’s unsuccessful military conquest, and America’s successful cultural one: just as “after the First World War, Hollywood destroyed French cinema, after the Second World War Hollywood destroyed all the cinemas of Europe with television and money.”

On-screen, Godard flashes the word
Endlösung
(final solution), suggesting that, while Hitler had used the cover of war to try to exterminate the Jews of Europe, the United States had used it to wipe out the national movie industries of Europe. He shockingly presented these two deeds as parallel, as motivated by a similar sense of national self-righteousness and drive for hegemony. Thus, rather than considering Germany alone to have been the invaders and the United States the liberators, Godard saw wartime France and the other European nations as innocent victims caught between these two behemoths (a notion that he would develop more deeply later in the series and in other works to come). If his view remained abstracted from the practicalities of life under occupation (the adolescent Godard spent the war years in Switzerland), it nonetheless implied a harshly self-deprecating judgment on his own cinephilic devotion to the American cinema, an avowal of something like a mental collaboration.

T
HE SECOND SECTION
, 1B,
One Story Alone
, is dedicated to John Cassavetes. With the flashing title “Cogito ergo video” (a play on Descartes’s
“Cogito ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am), Godard asks, “What about me, my
histoire
? Where do I come into it?” He describes the cinema as “a world without history but a world that tells stories,” claiming that, thanks to cinema, “men saw that there was a world there, a world of stories.” He asserts that the cinema is “the only place where memory is a slave,” and that “cinema, like Christianity, is not based on historical truth; it gives us a story and says, ‘Believe it.’” And Godard, who had been, in his youth, blissful in that faith, was now repentant, because the stories in which he had put his faith had been corrupted: “Later one or two world wars will suffice to pervert this state of childhood.” The cinema had been born “with the colors of mourning, in black and white,” but the postwar decades of oblivion, through television, did their best to distract viewers from mournful reality by means of “infantilisms.”

Like the other New Wave filmmakers who were true believers in the cinema, he had put his faith in a simulated world, one shorn of political and historical consciousness. As a consequence, he had been doomed to create work that made inadequate contact with politics and to devote himself to the attempt to redeem that original artistic sin.

Here Godard echoes the theme he had been repeating since his midsixties’ repudiation of the pure cinephile heritage of the New Wave: he and his friends knew nothing of life and had learned what they know from the movies. He was suggesting that, having identified with the stories he saw on-screen in the years after World War II, he had sworn fealty to this postwar cinema of historical ignorance and was, even now, even against his will, in its thrall. The completed version of episode 1B, first shown in 1989, ends with Godard as seen in
Soigne ta droite
, the Prince/Idiot, carrying film cans down an airplane stairway moments before he tumbles and falls to his death. He depicts himself as a martyr to his faith in the cinema.

Godard suggests that he was thus the unwitting yet all too eager victim of a delusion and a snare: if, at the cinema, he did not think but was thought, if his mind had been colonized by a cinema of concealment and of distraction rather than of revelation and of accusation, then he had been an acolyte of a false faith. Now, living the life of the damned, in a contemplative redoubt which seemed penitent or monastic, he was enduring an all too fitting punishment for his peculiar sin, that of having believed, with a profound faith, what the fallen postwar cinema had told him.

D
ESPITE THE SOLITUDE
of the enterprise, Godard did not work entirely alone. As Hervé Duhamel later recalled, Godard “found his bearings by talking,” and would say, “Let’s go see some people.” To start out, Godard invited the film critic and historian Jacques Siclier to Rolle for an open-ended conversation
that he videotaped. Duhamel, who took notes, found Godard to be “typically brilliant” and Siclier to be “intimidated”; Godard was dissatisfied with the results and threw away the cassettes.”
¹¹

He brought in others who represented for him a diverse set of personal associations and memories: he called upon Julie Delpy, Alain Cuny, the actress Maria Casarès (who had starred in Robert Bresson’s
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
, in 1945), the actress Sabine Azéma (the star of Alain Resnais’s
Mélo
, from 1986), and others, to read texts that he selected. He invited Isabelle Huppert to his studio, sharply criticized her way of reading a text by Schopenhauer, and decided not to record her. He videotaped an extended discussion about film history with the critic Serge Daney, of
Cahiers du cinéma
and
Libération
.

The project did not progress rapidly. Though René Bonnell of Canal Plus, who often visited Godard at his studio in Rolle to observe and to discuss the work-in-progress, had announced, in May 1987, at the Cannes festival, that the station would broadcast the first installments of the series in the fall of that year,
¹²
Godard did not have anything to show until the 1988 Cannes festival, where he presented forty minutes of rough video sketches.

The presentation was received with great enthusiasm and interest by critics in attendance. It also piqued the curiosity of journalists, who wondered how Godard was able to get the rights to the innumerable clips of films and music, still photos and texts, of which the videos were comprised. Danièle Heymann reported in
Le Monde
that Godard was “fighting to obtain excerpts from films, and swears that, if he is refused them, he will go to court.”
¹³
When first conceiving the series, in 1979, Godard had suggested that the cinémathèques and film museums of the world install equipment to create video transfers of their collections in order to make them available for researchers—for Godard himself. Now that videotapes of films were readily obtainable, Godard simply took the clips he needed, on the self-proclaimed basis that he was using “citations,” which were not being utilized for their commercial value but as the subject of study and analysis. As he told Nicolas Seydoux, the head of Gaumont, he considered himself to be not a filmmaker but “a philosopher who uses a camera,”
¹⁴
and asserted that his citations were not the domain of media or even of art, but of science and scholarship. With the approval of his producers, Godard simply forged ahead, assuming that the legal right of citation would suffice.
¹⁵
(René Bonnell of Canal Plus later claimed that Gaumont, which coproduced the series, gave its rights for free, and that “for the others, we knew that no one would do anything to Godard.”
¹⁶
)

These citations served a dual function. In the series, Godard expressed his view that the cinema—as a medium that is essentially both popular and
artistic, fictional and documentary, grand and intimate, spectacular and personal, of its times and enduring, pulp and philosophy—had come to an end. The
Histoire(s) du cinéma
was thus a memorial, a personal remembrance of the cinema and a public commemoration of it, a reminiscence and a monument. But it was also the repository of shards of cinema that Godard rescued from oblivion—the oblivion that ultimately resulted from the modern cinema’s original sin, overlooking the Holocaust.

Episodes 1A and 1B were broadcast on Canal Plus on May 7 and May 14, 1989, and were received with great admiration if little comprehension, generating a profusion of reports and interviews. According to the programming executive René Bonnell, “We had great press, but nobody watched. It was practically a grant—the films hardly had an audience, they had an audience too small to be measured—but we had extraordinary press, and Canal Plus doesn’t live on viewership alone, but also on its image.”
¹⁷
In
Le Monde
, Jacques Siclier wrote that Godard “remade, according to his dreams, a lost paradise” of cinema: “So strong is his love of the cinema that Godard communicates it to us like a trance.”
¹⁸
The journalist and novelist Noël Simsolo conducted ten half-hour interviews with Godard about the series for broadcast later in the year on the France Culture radio station.

Most important, because of the favorable interest in the first two episodes, its producers, together with the television channel FR3 and the new seventh, cultural channel, La Sept, commissioned a continuation of the series. In the later episodes of the
Histoire(s)
and in the other works that developed concurrently with them, Godard’s approach to questions of history and memory—particularly the Second World War, Germany and America, and the Jews—remained constant. The
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, with their collection of clips, anecdotes, and allusions, were a funeral oration in the grand tradition, a rescuing of fragments from the great library after its sacking. And the political orientation of the series left little doubt as to who had sacked it.

Alain Delon flees the cruel world and finds a refuge.
(TCD-Prod DB © Peripheria / DR)

twenty-five.

NOUVELLE VAGUE

“I have lived two dreams in my life”

O
N
M
ARCH 7, 1987
, G
ODARD WAS AWARDED AN HON
-orary César, an official sign of his now-canonical status in the French film industry. He attended the ceremony and, carrying a trenchcoat over his arm, came to the podium, where, not without irony, he thanked “the professionals of the profession.” He also offered “thanks to the girls of the negative cutting department at the LTC laboratory, thanks to the switchboard operator at Gaumont, because without her I wouldn’t know Nicolas [Seydoux].” Godard was asked by the master of ceremonies, the talk-show host Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, whether it was important for his films to be successful at the time of their release; in response, Godard referred to a van Gogh exhibit taking place in Paris at the time: “There are two million people waiting outside in the rain a hundred years later.”
¹

Yet in a way, the evening’s festivities were an anticlimax to the afternoon’s events: Godard had met Marin Karmitz for lunch to discuss a new project. Godard had recently called Karmitz claiming to need money (since he was in the process of completing
King Lear
under pressure), in exchange for which he had offered video rights to some of his older films. Karmitz told him on the phone, “I’m not an antiques dealer, make me something new,” and Godard responded, “OK, you’re the producer, give me an idea of what I should do.” On the spot, the producer made two suggestions: either a film with no story whatsoever, comprised of images set to music, which would be called
La Musiqu
e, or a film with a well-defined story. Godard asked, “What story?”

At the time Karmitz had no answer, but when they met for lunch on March 7, as Karmitz later recalled, he offered Godard a more concrete suggestion:

I told him, “Do something about an actor.” He said, “Now you’ve really said something; but which actor?” I had no idea, I just said it like that, now I had to come up with something; and all of a sudden, I said, “Mastroianni.” He said, “That’s brilliant, I’ve never worked with him.” So I arranged a meeting. Mastroianni did nothing but talk about his romantic troubles. In his superb accent, he said, “Oh, she cuckolded me,” etc. Godard was delighted, they got on famously.

The actor asked Godard for a story; Godard came up with something that pleased Mastroianni and Karmitz, in which Mastroianni would play two roles, a man and his double. Then, Mastroianni said he was going away for two months and asked Godard to write the idea up in “two pages.” Godard agreed. Yet then, as Karmitz recalled:

Two months later Godard calls me. He talks in a small voice when he has screwed up. He said, “Listen, I made a mistake. Another producer offered me more money to do it. I need the money, so I’m doing it with him.” I said, “OK, as you wish.” He said, “But you came up with the idea, so I’ll pay you the percentage that you would get as screenwriter.”