Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (104 page)

But the widespread critical enthusiasm was in vain, because Vincent Canby’s review in the
New York Times
, which appeared at the time of its festival screening, was the equivalent of an assassination. He called the film “featherweight,” likened its visual beauty to “a feature-length lipstick commercial,” and declared that there was little beside this beauty “to occupy either the mind or the eye.” He asserted, “Mr. Godard’s passion for Cinema now seems perfunctory,” and concluded with a murderous judgment: “Only people who despise the great Godard films, everything from
Breathless
(
A Bout de Souffle
) (1959) through
Every Man for Himself (Sauve Qui Peut la Vie
[
sic
]) (1979) could be anything but saddened by this one. The party’s over.”
²⁸
Nouvelle Vague
was never released commercially in the United States. After this hatchet job, no film by Godard played at the New York Film Festival until 2001.

W
HILE
G
ODARD WAS
shooting
Nouvelle Vague
, the Berlin Wall fell, and, with it, the Soviet satellite states of Central Europe began their inevitable collapse.
The United States seemed poised to increase its political and cultural influence in Europe, a turn of events that Godard viewed as ominous. For him, the fate of the film only confirmed his recent invidious statements regarding the United States and its cinema. For instance, a principal and recurring theme of a series of interviews that Godard had done with the critic and novelist Noël Simsolo in June 1989
²⁹
was the American “hegemony of the spectacular” and the American plot to dominate the world through mass culture in general and the audiovisual in particular:

For the moment, it’s their problem and their drama—Americans have no History… They have perhaps chosen not to have one, they suffer from this greatly, and for this reason they need to take over the History of others, who usually accept being the valets, because that’s how they get some savings and a pension.

In these interviews, Godard repeated his position, which he had expressed in the first of the
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, that the cinema’s definitive fall resulted from the American domination of it that followed the Second World War. He said that America’s entry into both world wars served “to impose, by way of images, their economy, which permits them to re-impose their images. That’s all.” He considered the Second World War from the same revisionist perspective: “If one does a historical summary of the events, America has always been a sort of big sister to Germany. The brother rebelled for a moment, but after the second war, the situation became the same as it had been before.” Godard cited the German film production company UFA, which continued to function under Hitler, as “the only company that wanted to struggle knowingly against the American hegemony that Fox, Paramount-France, etc., installed before the war.”

In a subsequent interview, he went further: “The German cinema under Nazism is the only cinema that wanted to be European… The German cinema is the only one that fought against America, that did what Jack Lang would like to do.”
³⁰

At Cannes in 1988, discussing his
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, Godard set forth an underlying principle: “I have always detested America and adored the American cinema. I do not understand the French political obsession which results, if not in outright genuflection, in always turning toward the West rather than toward the East.”
³¹

And so now Godard turned his attention toward the East.

twenty-six.

GERMANY YEAR 90 NINE ZERO

“One week after the fall of the Wall”

I
N MID - 1989
,
THE PRODUCER
N
ICOLE
R
UELLÉ ASKED FOUR
directors—Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, and Ingmar Bergman—to make a film for television on the subject of solitude.
¹
Godard accepted, but with a catch. “I didn’t want to make a film on a lover’s or a drug addict’s solitude,” he explained. “I rather wanted to concern myself with the solitude of a country, of a state, of a group. I said to myself: why not East Germany?”
²
Then after the Berlin Wall fell in October 1989 and East Germany itself collapsed, Godard decided that the film would instead be simply about “the Eastern part of Germany,”
³
or, more invidiously, “on the east and the west of Germany, on a landscape of the east that was about to be retaken by its former owner.”
⁴
The project had its political agenda built into it. But after formulating the idea, Godard did little to realize it until late 1990 when, acknowledging that he had to deliver the film in 1991 or reimburse his advance, he got to work.

For Godard, contemporary Germany was a triple palimpsest. First, for him, it meant German cinema, the “haunted screen”
⁵
of Murnau and Lang, of
Nosferatu
and
M
, of
The Last Laugh
and
Siegfried
. Second, it stood for his own youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he first saw those films at the Cinémathèque and the CCQL. Third, it had a personal significance, in relation to his father, who, Godard said, had been a Germanophile and who had introduced him to the literary classics of German romanticism, especially the poetry of Novalis and the novels of Goethe.
⁶

Godard was teeming with ideas and references, allusions, and associations, but had no organizing principle for a film. He also had another, greater, problem: unlike
Nouvelle Vague, King Lear
, or Godard’s other recent

Lemmy Caution meets Freud’s Dora in Berlin and Lotte in Weimar.
(TCD-Prod DB © Gaumont / Peripheria / DR)

works, a film about the eastern part of Germany could hardly be shot where Godard lived, whether in Rolle, Paris, or his Trouville apartment. He would have to go to Germany; he would have to scout locations and organize a cast, a crew, and equipment far from home. He was not up to doing either job alone; he sought an experienced film companion who could help him develop his ideas into a synopsis for a film and could also manage the practicalities of a shoot on the road.

After
Nouvelle Vague
was completed, Hervé Duhamel left his job as Godard’s assistant and Godard asked Romain Goupil, now an important film-maker in his own right, to work with him for a year to help him pull together the film about solitude. One of Goupil’s first responsibilities was to join Godard on a location-scouting trip through Germany. Before they left, in the fall of 1990, Godard typed out a list of preliminary ideas. Many of them ended up in the film, including a Don Quixote character (defined as “in search of: Dulcinea, History, mise en scène, the cinema”), and a female character, Lotte in Weimar (from the Thomas Mann novel about Goethe’s later years), who would “come back to see the old man in his house.” Other plans involved the violist Kim Kashkashian (who recorded for ECM) playing “the last notes (b-a-c-h) of the Musical Offering,” and a Russian soldier or officer who “comes to say goodbye to his fiancée who is teaching or rehearsing a violin sonata in a house by the North Sea”—the last sonata of Shostakovich (actually for viola).

Godard wrote that if he chose to appear in the film, it would be under a name made from the acronym for “Gulf Oscar Delta Alfa Romeo Delta.” He noted that there might be an appearance in the film by “Lemmy Caution, American federal ex-agent,” and suggested that the film might make reference to “the camps,” specifically, Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrück (the latter, as “the supreme stage of capitalism: not to provide sustenance to the workers’ bodies”).
⁷

Once in Germany, Godard, Goupil, and the actor Hanns Zischler—who was very well read in German literature and philosophy and had appeared in Anne-Marie Miéville’s
Mon cher sujet
—drove around together to search for locations. As Goupil later recalled, “We didn’t talk in the car, [Godard] doesn’t like that.” When Goupil and Godard got back to Rolle, on November 18, 1990, Godard preferred that they not talk about the trip: “If we say it, it just spills out.”
⁸
Instead, Godard asked Goupil to type up his impressions in one room while Godard did the same thing in another; then they exchanged documents and discussed what they had written.

The trip through Germany left Goupil with an impression “contrary to the thought behind the project”: instead of finding the solitude that was at the core of the commission, he saw “traffic, passers-by, street-sweepers, markets,
cars. In all this incredible activity, there’s the feeling of an overturned anthill which seeks nothing but its place, its brands, its path, but this all exists, the goal is there: THE WEST.”
⁹
In his impressionistic jottings, Goupil seemed to have difficulty finding the fall of the Berlin Wall as unequivocally dispiriting as Godard did; what Goupil saw made him want “to talk about the future.” He proposed to Godard a main idea for the film: “You as Don Quixote, your horse straining to drag my Trabant on the sands of the beaches of Rostock, and we head toward the two Berlins, and we seek, without finding, the traces of one of your thoughts.”

Godard had no intention of playing Don Quixote; he preferred not to appear at all, and thought of having Eddie Constantine reprise the role of Lemmy Caution. (At the time, Constantine, the star of
Alphaville
, was seventy-three years old and had not appeared in a film since 1987.)

To this embryonic story Godard appended a list of references, two of which left no doubt as to his intentions: “the hope of Europe: the death of Communism (find the speech or text by Goebbels),” likening American post–Cold War triumphalism to Nazism; and “one week after the fall of the Wall, the porn cassettes come through the Brandenburg Gate,” suggesting that the end of communism means the start of capitalist debasement and vulgarity.

Godard now put together a simple framework for the film: “I had this idea of an old spy from the West who finds himself all alone in the East after the fall of the Wall, and who tries to return to the Occident.”
¹⁰
Offered the role of the old spy, Eddie Constantine accepted at once. Godard’s choice of a mythical actor as his own questing surrogate, as well as the decision to shoot the story on 35mm film stock, indicates that although the project was commissioned for television he considered it cinema. Even the choice of title made clear that its model was cinematic: Godard rejected the producer’s recommended
Solitudes
in favor of
Allemagne Année 90 neuf zéro
(
Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
), an allusion to Roberto Rossellini’s film
Germany Year Zero
, filmed in West Germany in 1947, which dramatized the failure of the postwar reconstruction to suppress Nazi ideas and sympathies.

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
(or, as Godard nicknamed it,
Germany Nine Zero
) would embody history—or, rather, Godard’s view of it. A work of a tendentious grandeur, a diatribe with Olympian airs,
Germany Nine Zero
took on a monumental aspect akin to that of
Nouvelle Vague
. Unlike
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which offered a historical thesis in terms of Godard’s personal experience,
Germany Nine Zero
does the opposite: it presents a strong historical thesis—one crucially related to that of the
Histoire(s)
—but suppresses Godard’s speaking voice and on-screen presence.

A
FTER WORKING OUT
the story, Godard sent Goupil back to Germany to arrange the practical aspects of the shoot. In early 1991, Godard joined him there and brought a crew along, including the director of photography Christophe Pollock, who had been William Lubtchansky’s assistant on
Nouvelle Vague
. The crew, which traveled through Germany in two cars, was never more than eight people, according to Goupil. Because of the complex logistics, involving many shoot locations throughout Germany, Godard was agitated and indecisive. “There were lots of discussions about everything,” Goupil recalled, “about clothing, shoes, cars, locations.”
¹¹

Despite Godard’s elaborately sketched shooting notebook that, with his thick-lined cartoons, resembled a storyboard, very little was decided in advance. Instead, the two cars would reach a given location and Godard then tried to figure out what to do. He described the process: “When we saw things, we filmed them. I told Eddie Constantine, ‘Walk a bit in this setting and then we’ll see.’”
¹²
He wanted Constantine to walk across a frozen lake, and first sent Goupil to test whether the ice would hold. Another day, according to Goupil, “He did a shot of Eddie Constantine reading. He watched it the next night… he looks at the shot and says, ‘It’s empty.’ But there’s a moment when Constantine gets up, and he says, ‘Voilà’—and we went back to the same place and redid it.”
¹³