Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (102 page)

Shortly thereafter, Karmitz recalled, Godard called him again and said, “I made a mistake, I should have made it with you,” in response to which Karmitz, angered, hung up on him. The two never spoke again.
²

Godard announced plans for this film in December 1987, but with Karmitz out of the picture and no mention of Mastroianni. He knew, in any case, that he would not be able to get to it before completing the first installments of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and several other commissioned videos. He expected the delay to last two years and he called it his “vacation from fiction.” The project’s title,
Nouvelle Vague
(New Wave), aroused anticipation: Godard said that the film would “have to do with the sea,”
³
and, though the gag on “wave” was obvious, the real question was whether he planned to film an autobiographical account of the adventures of the group from
Cahiers
. He deliberately left the question open to speculation; in fact, the project was the one intended for Mastroianni.
⁴

T
HIS “VACATION FROM
fiction” was tied to Godard’s difficulty getting approval from Gaumont for his fiction projects, which included
Conversations with Dmitri
and a film based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Conversations with Dmitri
(which had been in development with the television channel La Cinq since 1986) concerned the last four years of a hypothetical occupation of France by the Soviet Union. Dmitri, the Russian commissar of the French film commission, wanted to delegate filmmaking to French directors, but
they were unwilling to collaborate with the Russians, except for one older filmmaker. The film would feature four conversations, one for each season, over four years, between the willing filmmaker and the commissar, and it would end with the departure of the Russians and the reinauguration of the Deauville festival of American films (which, Godard said, was “what’s left of the Normandy landing”).
⁵
The Ninth Symphony
would feature the singer-songwriter Léo Ferré as Beethoven. But Nicolas Seydoux was not ready to finance these projects solely on the basis of a title and an idea; he wanted to see “a real script,”
⁶
which Godard was unwilling to provide.

Instead, Godard fulfilled commissions for promotional videos from the fashion designers Marithé and François Girbaud, the appliance store chain Darty, France Télécom, and
Le Figaro
, the first three of which were related to the
Histoire(s) du cinéma
by technique, the fourth by theme. These works were no mere commercials; ranging from thirteen to fifty minutes in length, they were cinematic essays that honored their patrons only glancingly. Yet because of Godard’s celebrity and cultural status, the executives who commissioned them could justifiably expect these videos to get far more attention in the general press than standard-issue promotional or industrial films.

The first three were principally works of editing. For the Girbauds, Godard made
On s’est tous défilé
(We All Marched—“défilé” being the word for a parade, a political march, and a runway show). He sent Caroline Champetier to shoot footage by herself, and then he took her shots of models at work and passersby in the street and, in the editing room, applied to them the slow-motion “decomposition” technique that was so important to
Sauve qui peut
. Adding a text by Mallarmé that he read on the sound track, he likened the models’ movements to the grace of daily gestures latent in street life. In the process, he flattered the Girbauds with the suggestion that fashion, like the cinema, is an art of fiction nourished by documentary, and is, as such, an art akin to Godard’s own.

Darty commissioned Godard in late 1987 to make a videotape about the company itself.
⁷
Hervé Duhamel did the camerawork on his own, having been instructed by Godard to “show that there are people who go into the store, who buy things and who go home with them.”
⁸
In 1989, Godard and Miéville belatedly completed the film with their own voice-over duet, reciting philosophical texts selected by Duhamel and his wife. The film’s techniques of superimpositions and juxtapositions of text and image resemble exercises for the
Histoire(s)
; nonetheless,
Le Rapport Darty
(The Darty Report or The Darty Revenue) generates a distinctive emotional current through the joint self-portraiture of Godard and Miéville. They conclude the video with a moving and audacious stroke, likening themselves to one of the most exalted of cinematic pairs, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, by
way of a visual citation from the end of
Modern Times
, in which the little tramp and his beloved walk the lonely road together.

France Télécom, the French telephone company, commissioned a promotional film,
Puissance de la parole
(The Power of the Word). Godard drew on a text by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words,” in which Poe suggests that each word has the power to change the course of history. Godard excerpts a lovers’ dialogue from James M. Cain’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
to convey the practical force of language. He again employed the editing techniques of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, superimpositions and rapid-fire alternation, to create the film’s strongest visual metaphors, linking the sky and the sea to suggest the quasi-supernatural link that makes conversation at a distance—telephone service—possible.

The fourth commission,
Le Dernier Mot
(The Last Word), a promotional film for
Le Figaro
, is a remarkably condensed account of a powerful story concerning France during the Second World War. A man who is doing research visits a house in order to ask its inhabitants about a nearby place that he is seeking. He is trying to find the exact spot in a nearby forest where a man who had once lived in that house was killed by the occupying Germans in 1942. The current resident is a violinist, and he brings his instrument along as he accompanies the researcher on a walk into the forest. There, the violinist plays the Chaconne from Bach’s D-minor Partita, as Godard conjures on-screen the execution of a young philosopher, Valentin Feldman, on July 27, 1942. While preparing Feldman for execution, a German soldier asks him if he has anything to say, and then sardonically jokes, “Everyone knows that the French always want to have the last word.” Feldman’s response, his last words, are: “Imbecile, it’s for you that I die”—an anecdote cited in Claude Roy’s
Moi je
, the book that lent its title to the self-examination that Godard had intended to film in 1973.
⁹
The substance of
Le Dernier Mot
was connected with
Histoire(s) du cinéma
(the philosopher Feldman and his fate are mentioned in episode 1A), but the thesis of the short video, the embodiment of history in the artistic classics, formed the starting point for the film with which Godard ended his “vacation from fiction,”
Nouvelle Vague
.

D
ISAPPOINTING THOSE WHO
hoped Godard would tell the story of his formative years alongside his
Cahiers
comrades,
Nouvelle Vague
was set not in the world of filmmaking but in the world of big business, not in Paris of the 1950s but on a rural French estate in an indeterminate timeless era which blended the 1930s and the present day. Yet Godard’s film nonetheless fulfilled the audacious promise of its title: he reconceived the history of cinema, and his place in it, as a biblical allegory.

Godard’s two-page synopsis for
Nouvelle Vague
, from 1988, starts, “A
woman. Rich, beautiful, authoritarian, active. At the wheel of her BMW, she knocks over a guy in the street.”
¹⁰
She takes him in, cares for him, and they become lovers. She neglects her business for him, and he remains passive and dependent. When she teaches him to water ski, he falls in the lake and calls for help, but she lets him drown. “She returns to Paris, takes up her work again, her business,” but one day there’s a knock on her door: “A man who resembles the other like a brother,” and who claims to have seen the drowning. This man is “enterprising and a charmer.” He becomes her lover; she becomes passive, and he takes control of her affairs. The next summer, she falls in the water but he saves her from drowning. “Several days later, at breakfast on the terrace, she looks at him pensively. In the second man, she recognizes the first.”

The tale’s allegorical aspect is unambiguous: the first man is the Old Wave, the second is the New Wave; and the woman is the producer, the industry. In a subsequent draft of the synopsis, Godard made the biblical analogy explicit, calling the story’s two parts the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament depicts the classic era of cinema in its industrial-age dynamism. The first coming is that of the classical director, who is raised to unexpected dignity by the cinema and disposed of by the cinema (such as Griffith, Stroheim, Welles, and other great directors who were made and destroyed by the system). The New Testament is the story of the New Wave, Godard’s own story. Though the cinema itself is weakened (as it was, economically, by television) at the time of the second coming, the dynamic newcomer is endowed with knowledge of his predecessor’s experience and fate. Taking the torpid cinema in hand, he re-infuses it with his energy, nearly doing away with it in the process, but ultimately bringing it back from the brink of disaster.

The idea had its origins in the heyday of the New Wave itself: Godard first proposed it to the producer Mag Bodard in 1964 as a project for Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. At the time, it came to naught when Bodard insisted that the female lead be played instead by Catherine Deneuve. Now the project was being coproduced by Alain Sarde’s Sara Films and by Vega Films, the company of the Swiss producer Ruth Waldburger. For them, Godard amplified his synopsis with evocative details: the first man and the woman spend the summer at “the splendid estate she inherited,” where he becomes even more passive “upon contact with astonishing nature, the devastating green and blue beauty of the waves, the tranquil severity of the immense trees, the grace and innocence of horses, etc.”; the second man persuades the woman to take him to “the beautiful prewar estate which she had told him about, to brighten her cheeks with the caress of foliage.”
¹¹
This milieu of material opulence, of natural splendor as an attribute of wealth, is that of Godard’s own childhood.

Godard’s assistant Hervé Duhamel recognized the subject’s literary implications and was inspired by them. Duhamel offered to do research to
find texts from the history of literature that could go into the film. Godard accepted the offer. Working full-time as assistant on
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and on other video commissions, Duhamel—who, Godard said, “knows a good deal of literature”
¹²
—also spent his weekends, together with his wife, rummaging through his library to locate quotations he thought would be apt for each scene. He gave Godard a collage of photocopies—from Hemingway, Faulkner, Georges Bataille, and René Char, among others—that ran to more than a hundred pages. Months passed with no response from Godard. Duhamel, somewhat disheartened, asked him whether he had looked at it; the director answered, “Later, later.”

“Later” came in May 1989, when, after the Cannes festival, Godard asked the renowned actor Alain Delon to play the double lead role in
Nouvelle Vague
. Delon immediately accepted.
¹³
Delon expected that Godard’s film would get him to the Cannes festival, where he had not been since 1963, with
The Leopard
, by Luchino Visconti; moreover, he told Godard that he was getting bored with the run of police stories in which he usually starred. But when, soon thereafter, Delon met Godard at the bar of the Plaza-Athénée Hotel in Paris, he laid down one condition: that there be a screenplay with dialogue.
¹⁴
Godard was in luck: he took Duhamel’s file of citations and turned it into a screenplay for Delon; though prior to the shoot Godard rearranged, tore apart, and (literally) threw out the file (which he then asked Duhamel to reconstitute), almost all of the dialogue in the film is composed of literary citations from Duhamel’s research.

During the summer of 1989, Delon met with Godard only twice more: once when Godard introduced him to the lead actress, Domiziana Giordano (who had played the lead in Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Nostalgia
), and again, to discuss Delon’s wardrobe for the double role.

T
HE SHOOT BEGAN
on September 4, mainly at a majestic old house on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva. The shoot was unusually long—two months—the crew was large, the equipment was burdensome, the action was complex, and Delon’s demands for written dialogue were stringent: though Godard prepared text in advance, he kept changing it at the last minute. Delon, who had never worked that way before and whose last-minute memory was not good, became very frustrated. For some scenes, strips of paper with his lines were pasted on walls or doors out of camera view. Moreover, Delon found Godard’s instructions, or lack of them, confusing. The two had bitter arguments, and Delon later admitted, “If I had yielded to my inclination, the film would never have been completed.”
¹⁵

In what was by now a familiar pattern, Godard’s relations with the film’s other participants were not much better. For a part as a governess, he called
the young actress Laurence Côte, who had been in his video
Puissance de la parole
. In her audition, he told her, “Since the video, Laurence, your soul has gotten thinner.”
¹⁶
She reacted with outrage, but he mollified her and then cast her in the role—which, during the shoot, he reduced to a few lines.