Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (106 page)

Soon after, the Swiss tobacco company F. J. Burrus, based in Lausanne, approached Godard to make a commercial for its Parisienne brand of cigarette. Its marketing director was undaunted by Godard’s cinematic provocations and was confident that his name would suffice to give the commercials, and the cigarette company, favorable publicity. In January 1992, Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville worked together to shoot, in a shopping mall in the Zurich train station, scenes of a skateboarder slaloming between packages of cigarettes, a tracking shot of bare feet trampling through piles of cigarette packages, and a person kneeling before a woman reading a novel called
Parisienne People
. On the sound track, Godard recited passages from Racine.
²³

The marketing director was right: the commercials tested favorably in a focus group, and Burrus’s hiring of Godard attracted a great deal of attention in the local press.

Then, Godard went to Moscow. His arrival there in early February made the Russian national news. Not only had he paid for the sound installation, but he also sent a truck full of his own video equipment for the students of Naum Kleiman, the director of the Kino-Center. The screenings and the question-and-answer sessions were crowded with enthusiastic and appreciative audiences. With a group of film students, Godard discussed the political implications of film technique, describing stereo as “democratic” and mono as “totalitarian”—but then continued, “We often forget that in Fascist countries the Fascist governments were in the beginning elected democratically.” The students, for whom democracy was still a new enthusiasm, were surprised by what seemed to them Godard’s hinted preference for mono over stereo; one asked, incredulously, whether Godard still thought of himself as “a radical.”
²⁴

Godard praised Naum Kleiman as “a Kutuzov of Russian culture”—a clear parallel between the resistance of the great Russian general to Napoleon’s army and that of Russian cinema to American media—and told assembled film students of his devotion to Russia.

I have visited Russia many times, but they were not physical voyages. I visited your country in books, through music. The Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t have enough money to pay for the renovation of the film center. That’s why my assistant and I shot a commercial for cigarettes. It’s a way of paying my debt to Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Eisenstein, Solzhenitsyn.
²⁵

Le Monde
reported on one cinematic consequence of the trip.

In Moscow, Godard declared that he had come up with the subject of a new film… It would involve recounting a meeting, in a Swiss airport, of a film-maker (himself) and several key elements of Russian literature (
The Seagull, Anna Karenina, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment
), that was prompted by an American producer who is waiting for the departure of the last Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
²⁶

This notion was no pipe dream. There was in fact an American producer behind Godard’s next project. WorldVision, a home-video distribution company owned by the producer Aaron Spelling, which also distributed such series as
Twin Peaks, Beverly Hills 90210
, and
The Fugitive
,
commissioned a series of direct-to-video programs called
Momentous Events: Russia in the’ 90s
. Among the directors approached were Godard, Peter Bogdanovich, Werner Herzog, and Ken Russell.
²⁷
Herzog went to Russia to film
Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia;
Godard accepted the commission but this time, he did not go to Russia.
²⁸
Instead, he made his unwillingness to go to Russia the subject of the video,
Les Enfants jouent à la Russie
(The Children Play Russia). He sent Caroline Champetier to Moscow in his place and he directed her by telephone, as she later recalled:

I made a tremendous number of images, in a chess club that seemed right out of the nineteenth century, in a market where people were selling their possessions to live. Then [Godard] called me; he said, “Today this is what you’re going to do: you’re going to film the death of Anna Karenina.” I was very scared; I said, “I can’t do it.” He said, “It’s simple, you dress her in a big dress, you go to the station, you film the crossing, then the arrival of the train in the station, that’s death.”
²⁹

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Godard himself videotaped scenes with actors: László Szabó played Jack Valenti (in real life, Hollywood’s main Washington lobbyist, but portrayed in the film as a producer); André S. Labarthe and the film historian Bernard Eisenschitz were Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount (the pair of journalists from Jules Verne’s novel
Michael Strogoff
, about a Tartar uprising in Siberia); Godard played himself, in an echo of
Soigne ta droite
, as a filmmaker who is both the Prince and the Idiot (as Valenti says, “If the film is good, he’s an idiot, if it’s bad, he’s a prince”); and the actress Aude Amiot played Valenti’s secretary, Mademoiselle Amiel.

The story concerns Valenti’s offer to Blount and Jolivet to make a film in Russia. The Prince is invited to join them but refuses:

Do what you want, but I won’t go. After Hitler and Napoleon, all the intelligent people have been taking advantage of poor Russia by invading it. Today it’s happening again. I am not intelligent, therefore I will not go. Why does the West want to invade this country again? It’s simple: because it is the homeland of fiction, and the West no longer knows what to invent.

Godard called
Les Enfants jouent à la Russie
an “annex” to
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, and the connection is proven in a scene in which he, as the Prince, explains the birth of cinema. The anecdote is one that Godard claimed to have read en route to Moscow in February 1992, in a popular history of mathematics he had brought along for the flight; and the conclusion that he
draws from it is consistent with the political and historical theses that he had been working out in
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and
Germany Nine Zero
.

In a Moscow prison, Jean-Victor Poncelet, a member of the engineering corps of Napoleon’s army, reconstructs without consulting any notes all the geometry he had learned from his lessons with Monge and Carnot, a treatise on the projection of figures, published in 1822… It took a French prisoner pacing before a Russian wall for the mechanical application of the idea and the desire to project figures onto a screen to take off in practice, with the invention of cinema… One might say that this marked the first Franco-Russian alliance. I am one of the last survivors.

In a subsequent scene, Godard illuminates the implications of his eastward orientation, when Harry Blount (the film historian Bernard Eisenschitz) expounds his idea that in the Russian cinema there is no shot-countershot. Instead, according to Blount/Eisenschitz, there are only images akin to icons, whereas shot-countershot, the standard Western pattern of filming dialogue, was invented in the United States by 1910, because, as Eisenschitz says, Americans found an advantage “in teaching people to look stupidly at things rather than to see.” Godard via Eisenschitz thus ridicules the idea of seeing events from two different perspectives and praises the one truth of one religion, the icon, as the authentic model of cinematic representation.

If Godard’s aesthetic methods were, so to speak, to the left of the commercial cinema, in that they embodied critical judgments of conventional narrative form, their political undercurrent was radically conservative, celebrating and preserving notions of national character derived from static, pre-republican societies. Though Godard praised the Soviet Union over the United States, the political entity and anecdotal history that he chose to celebrate was not that of the post-revolutionary U.S.S.R. but of czarist Russia. The teeming household of the rural estate of
Nouvelle Vague
, though maintained with a modern industrialist’s fortune, is a vestigial feudal manor.

The United States, Godard suggests in
Les Enfants jouent à la Russie
, seeks to conquer Russia in order to supplement its own failed imagination, an imagination that failed because of freedom and secularism. Better, Godard suggested, a prisoner in Russia than free in America.

As the god, Gérard Depardieu walks in water but not on it.
(TCD-Prod DB © Alain Sarde / Peripheria / DR)

twenty-seven.

HÉLAS POUR MOI, JLG/JLG, HISTOIRE(S)DU CINÉMA, PARTS 2 AND 3

“We still know how to tell the story”

H
ISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉA
, A LONG-TERM RESEARCH PRO
ject, had developed from Godard’s first official academic affiliation, the Montreal seminars of the 1970s. Godard had long likened his use of a camera to scientists’ use of microscopes and telescopes and considered his work to belong to the realm of research. Indeed, he thought that the cinema made him a sort of super-scientist because, he said, “Scientists aren’t trained to see. I must be one of the few who want the cinema to go deeper toward philosophy and the sciences, things for which it is made.”
¹
He thought that his investigations should be supported, like a scientist’s, by a research or academic institution.
²

Jack Lang, France’s minister of culture in the mid-1980s, agreed. He recruited Godard to lecture at the CNC and, after the legislative elections of 1988 returned Lang to office, came up with a new plan for him.

The national film school, IDHEC (L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques—the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Study), was mainly a technical school, and it had not recently produced many directors of note. (Alain Resnais, Jacques Rozier, and Louis Malle were its most exceptional graduates.) The school was generally not greatly respected by the artists of the French cinema, who had little contact with it.

The truly important French film school, which had produced the New Wave, was the Cinémathèque, which held its exams in the pages of
Cahiers du cinéma
. In 1986, under Lang’s influence, IDHEC’s name and mission were changed to acknowledge this heritage: it was now called La fémis (Fondation Européenne des métiers de l’image et du son—the European Foundation for Image and Sound Trades). The new school was highly selective (accepting
approximately thirty students each year), and it was meant to teach not only the trade but the art. Working directors and technicians were encouraged to spend time there and, because the reorganization took place under the aegis of Jack Lang, the school was reoriented toward the New Wave.

Lang had recruited Godard for occasional involvement with La fémis, including a preliminary seminar in Toulon on screenwriting (at which he sarcastically asked the students, “What do you really think you can learn?… Does Gallimard offer novel-writing courses?”
³
). He gave a lecture on the subject of montage and also invited a pair of students to assist him in the editing of
Nouvelle Vague
.
⁴
In 1989, Lang sought to formalize Godard’s connection to the school, ultimately brokering a five-year deal for Godard and Miéville, under cosponsorship of La fémis and the CNC, to establish a studio on the school’s premises in Paris for the purpose of producing films in which students would participate, including additional chapters of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
. Their company was to receive three million francs over the course of the contract.

Lang sponsored Godard’s appointment in the hope that the filmmaker would create what Alain Bergala described as “a sort of studio for experimentation where students would come.”
⁵
Godard’s plan, according to Bergala, was “to install himself on the periphery of La fémis.” He even changed the name of his company, JLG Films, to Peripheria, because, now that Miéville had directed her first feature, JLG was no longer the company’s only filmmaker.

Godard conceived two new projects to be realized at the school in addition to
Histoire(s)
. The first,
Science sans conscience
(Science Without Conscience), was to be a four-part series involving the Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, a philosophically inclined physicist who cowrote a book applying relativity to traffic patterns. Godard planned to use consumer-format Hi-8 video, with its ability to record one-hour-long shots, to analyze Prigogine’s ideas and to stage a comic pageant of scientists and their discoveries.
⁶
The second project was a high-definition video adaptation of Racine’s
Bérénice
—a play in which King Titus is compelled for reasons of state to renounce his love for Bérénice, the Jewish queen. (It is also the play that Godard had hoped to direct for television in the 1960s and with which he had concluded
A Married Woman
.)