Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (107 page)

La fémis was located in the Palais de Tokyo, near the Cinémathèque; Godard had plans to install a studio-like facility there that would, he said, include an editing room, an office, and a library that would feature both a laser copier and a wall against which to hit tennis balls.
⁷
He decided to call his new studio the Palais des images (the Palace of Images), and it was scheduled to open in the fall of 1991.

The studio never materialized. Jack Lang had envisioned a grand renovation of the Palais de Tokyo that would involve the relocation there of other
French film institutions, including the Cinémathèque, but this ambitious project was stalled by a combination of high costs and institutional resistance.
⁸
The delay entailed a postponement of the construction of Peripheria’s space, and Godard bitterly declared, in a diatribe in
Le Monde
on October 8, 1991, that since his studio would not be completed at the specified times, he considered that La fémis had abrogated the agreement. He therefore deemed the agreement annulled, and he enumerated and mourned the projects that he considered “canceled” as a result, including
Histoire(s) du cinéma
itself.
⁹
But, most significantly, he charged that the failure of La fémis to meet its obligations was, above all, political :

The United States feeds a more-or-less good part of the world with its agriculture. It does the same with its culture. It is the right of this more-or-less good part of the world to make this choice, but it certainly is not its duty.

   The day that every television station in Europe regularly broadcasts a Greek, Portuguese, or Slovakian film, whether insipid or not, Europe will be made. Otherwise, it will remain American.

Principally, Godard was suggesting that his project with La fémis had fallen through because the school did not live up to the word “European” in its title—that the school could not fulfill its obligations to Godard because it did not distance and distinguish itself from the American cinema, as its name implied it must. Broadening the scope of his rant, Godard complained about the cultural implications of high-definition video, which was to have played a role in his production of
Bérénice:
“This term, ‘high’—fidelity, definition—doesn’t it come by way of the Germanization of the United States that Siegfried describes to his woman friend in Giraudoux’s novel, from ‘Herr Oberst’ or ‘Ober Kommando’?”

If Godard was infuriated by what he considered America’s dominance of the television and movie industries—and, by implication, its quasi-Nazi dominance of modern audiovisual technology—he was equally furious at what he considered the resulting Americanization of aesthetics, which he considered inflicted on him by the unnamed producers who expect him to “tell a story”: “But which story do they mean? That of the battle of Borodino and of the end of French domination that Tolstoy told? That of the battle of Baghdad, told by CNN, that of the triumph of American television and its servants?”
¹⁰

T
HE
CNC
RESPONDED
in
Le Monde
three days later, ignoring the charges and stating that the contract had merely been “prolonged,” but Godard
treated it as null and void. Although construction work at the Palais de Tokyo began in October 1992, it did not involve a tennis wall; Godard continued to work with La fémis, but only as an occasional visitor.

According to Alain Bergala, however, Godard’s complaint in
Le Monde
was a means of breaking the engagement while shifting responsibility for the break onto the school.
¹¹
Godard had been dissatisfied with the people he was meeting at La fémis, telling him, “They’re zeroes, I can’t work with them.” Although Godard’s desire for collaborative work was strong, and the notion of a studio-like atmosphere was appealing, the burden of founding an institution-within-an-institution and of committing himself to working long-term with students of varying ability and temperament did not correspond to his desires, and he got out of the arrangement. Godard told a journalist what he really wanted instead: “What I’d like is to teach cinema at the Collège de France or elsewhere and get paid for my films as for laboratory work.”
¹²
The Collège de France, a research institution, offers public lectures by its professors but has no classes or students.

Godard’s informal connection with La fémis did allow him to help younger filmmakers in diverse ways. For example, after seeing a short film by Noémie Lvovsky, he advised Alain Sarde to help her launch a feature film project, which became
Oublie-moi
(Forget Me), an extraordinarily intense and intimate melodrama that was released in 1995; he also lent a camera to Xavier Beauvois for the film
N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir
(Don’t Forget That You’re Going to Die), released the next year. But his help came without any direct involvement in their work or personal mentoring (indeed, Lvovsky, who owes her career to Godard, has never met him).

The didactic impulse had guided Godard’s recent work, including
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, in which he rescued, preserved, and transmitted the remains of the cinema, and which was originally conceived for use in classrooms. Though Godard’s teaching mission remained unfulfilled, the question of youth and the transmissibility of his thought became the central question of his next film. And where, in
Nouvelle Vague
, Godard had imagined the problem in terms of an Old and New Testament, his new film would make explicit the religious implications of that schema.

A
FTER SEEING
M
AURICE
Pialat’s 1987 film
Under the Sun of Satan
, Godard had contacted its lead actor, Gérard Depardieu, to praise his performance.
¹³
The two met again soon thereafter, and Depardieu said that he would like to work with Godard. Although they had discussed projects in the 1970s, Godard now admitted to having doubts. But with
Germany Nine Zero
completed and Godard having no feature film project awaiting him, Alain Sarde suggested that the time had come to make a film with Depardieu.
¹⁴
Godard
knew that the actor’s involvement would “put bread on his plate,”
¹⁵
and when Depardieu accepted, financing indeed came rapidly. Now Godard had to find a subject.

When Godard read the poem “To the Patriarch; or, on the Origins of the Human Race,” by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), he got an idea for a film. The poem describes, in Godard’s words, “the slow and difficult journey of humanity, the anguish, the constant worries and the permanent disturbance of its creator before the numerous misadventures of man.”
¹⁶
He envisioned a film about life on Earth as seen by God. Godard then brought in a classic story that was in the air due to a much-discussed Paris stage production of Kleist’s play
Amphitryon
. In the Greek myth, Amphitryon is betrothed to Alcmene, who refuses to marry him unless he avenges her brothers’ death. Amphitryon goes to war to fulfill this duty. While he is away, Zeus comes to Alcmene’s bed in the form of Amphitryon, and she becomes pregnant (she will bear Zeus’s son Heracles). The same night, Amphitryon himself returns to Alcmene and consummates the marriage, making her pregnant a second time (with Heracles’s fraternal twin, Iphicles).

Godard read three plays that told this story: Kleist’s
Amphitryon
, Molière’s comedy of the same name, and one that was closer to him in time and sensibility: Jean Giraudoux’s
Amphitryon 38
, from 1929. Joining Leopardi’s notion of God observing humanity from above and the myth of Amphitryon concerning the lusting Zeus come to Earth, Godard put together a story, and then, in a departure from his usual practice, he wrote a full-length screenplay.

He also began to assemble his cast and crew. At the Venice Film Festival in 1991, where Godard presented
Germany Nine Zero
, he saw Philippe Garrel’s latest film,
J’entends plus la guitare
(I No Longer Hear the Guitar). Godard, who had known Garrel since the 1960s and admired his films, was greatly impressed. He asked Garrel’s director of photography—his own former associate, Caroline Champetier—to rejoin him. He also hired Garrel’s lead actress, Johanna Ter Steege, from the Netherlands, to play Alcmene opposite Depardieu’s Amphitryon.

The legend of Amphitryon comprises three stories: a man leaves home and his place is taken by another; a woman, thinking herself faithful to the man she loves, is unfaithful to him; a god, in love with a woman who is otherwise unapproachable, uses his godlike powers to possess her. The story of a man and his double revisits the plot of
Nouvelle Vague
. The story of the god’s lust for a human woman reprises the key element of
Hail Mary
, God’s sexual possession of Mary, and Godard thought about it in those terms, speaking of the new film with reference to the book that had inspired
Hail Mary, The Gospel at Risk of Psychoanalysis:
“Man especially needs to feel himself a god.
Woman is different: she needs a god. Françoise Dolto said, ‘Doesn’t every woman seek in her man the shadow of God?’”
¹⁷

In the new film,
Hélas pour moi
(Woe Is Me), Godard would depict God’s appearance on Earth, reinventing the myth of Amphitryon in terms of Christian theology. But his approach to the New Testament differed now from that which marked
Hail Mary:
it was inflected by Godard’s work on the subject of testaments in
Nouvelle Vague
as well as his recent, failed efforts at passing along his knowledge as a teacher. The subject of
Hélas pour moi
became the very nature of a testament, whether in words or in the cinema. Godard’s speculations regarding testaments led him to wonder what was new about the New Testament; in harking back to the Old Testament, he would make
Hélas pour moi
his first expressly Jewish film—and not his last.

I
N LATE
1991 and early 1992, the French press was making much of the critical theoretician Walter Benjamin (the centennial of his birth was in 1992) as well as of his lifelong friend, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem. Godard drew on a newfound familiarity with these thinkers’ work to nourish
Hélas pour moi:
Benjamin, Scholem, and mystical Judaism became central elements of the film.

Champetier recalled that the screenplay for
Hélas pour moi
had eighteen sequences (eighteen being the Hebrew number signifying “life,” a key number in Jewish mysticism), and that its bravura centerpiece would show God’s wanderings on Earth, where “he was supposed to see all the battles of history.” She and Godard worked together on video tests of special effects that would produce such spectacular moments as Depardieu, playing God in the guise of Amphitryon, walking on water.

The shoot was scheduled to take place in June and July 1992. But right before it began, Godard made two major changes. First, he dismissed Johanna Ter Steege. He had chosen her, he said, because she had what he called “a Dutch nature, similar to Dutch painting.” But, recalling the decision humorously, he added: “There was something like blindness on my part. Nobody noticed that she didn’t speak French… I couldn’t get her to speak a text by Claudel, nor have her play the role of a mute, which would have been uselessly meaningless for the story.”
¹⁸
But Champetier observed the problem from another point of view: “In my opinion, she fell in love with him, and Anne-Marie Miéville intervened, and he fired her. He took the other actress… but he wasn’t happy.”
¹⁹
Laurence Masliah, “the other actress,” had played a small role in
Soigne ta droite;
with her traditional theater training, speaking a text by Claudel was precisely what she was prepared to do. (Other theater actors, whom Godard had seen in a Geneva production of Botho Strauss’s play
Time and the Room
, directed by Patrice
Chéreau, had been cast as well, including Roland Blanche, a friend of Depardieu’s.)

The second change concerned the script. Godard had written a long and detailed one because, he felt, the exalted subject matter demanded it: “I didn’t want to have a shot of the god just arriving and starting to talk.”
²⁰
But he was not satisfied with what he had written, and—in what had become a familiar pattern—still had no clear idea of what he wanted to do. He told his producers that the production was heading toward “a sure catastrophe”
²¹
and that he wanted to delay the shoot by a year in order to rework the material.
²²
Depardieu, however, would not be available then, so Godard was told to make the film that summer, as planned.

Nonetheless, before the shoot started, Godard undid his script. As Champetier later recalled, he was “afraid” of the practical and technical complexity of the elaborate project he was about to undertake, and he “withdrew from everything. He removed eight or nine of the eighteen sequences. He systematically destroyed his screenplay.”
²³

Once the shoot started, Godard lost confidence in Depardieu as well, who, he said, “could not stay in one place. He makes phone calls, he moves around, he can’t work.”
²⁴
In what was by now a predictable response, Godard was dissatisfied, too, with his crew: they did not take seriously his advice that the only way for them to do good work on a film about a god on Earth was to go to church. He told them, “‘Listen to the silence, think about yourself or don’t think about it…’ Nobody in the crew did it.”
²⁵
He seemed to reach new levels of irritation while directing Roland Blanche, who played a supporting role. Blanche described their conflict: