Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (109 page)

In the United States,
Hélas pour moi
did not attract the interest of the major film distributors, and was released by Cinema Parallel, a small company founded and run by the filmmaker Rob Tregenza. The New York opening, on March 18, 1994, was at a small nonprofit screening room at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre. The admiring reviews focused less on the film than on Godard himself (Caryn James of
The New York Times
called him “warm and cerebral, and more quietly provocative than he has been in years”).
³⁵

I
F
G
ODARD’S PRESENCE
and persona had become more valuable in the film marketplace than his actual work, he proceeded with a project that was calculated to take advantage of that state of affairs—and that he turned into a study of his own solitude. In conjunction with a centenary retrospective of Gaumont’s productions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that opened in January 1994, the company commissioned Godard to make a film about himself to premiere there. Godard came to New York to present it, on May 6, 1994, and to answer questions afterward. The sixty-two-minute film,
JLG/JLG
, is an extraordinarily moving document that fulfills Godard’s ambition to make not an autobiography but a self-portrait, in keeping with the classic genre of painting. Godard shows himself—or rather, stages scenes of himself—at work, at home, at thought, playing tennis—and also creates several fictional sketches that exemplify his thought in action.

A small video camera with a pivoting lens is set on a table in a night-dark room and used for a stunning self-depiction by firelight: Godard strikes a match and brings it to the cigar in his mouth, the match providing the sole light on the extreme close-up of his face on the tiny video screen in the film frame. He shows himself walking on a strand in Lake Geneva, tramping through the shallows, and approaching the camera while, comically mimicking
the gesture of a waiter in his
King Lear
, he points across the water and declares with a smile, “The kingdom of France”—a double reminiscence of his recent film and his childhood, which was divided between the two countries.

But the key view of himself that the film features is a black-and-white photograph of Godard as a child. Contemplating his own childhood image, Godard wonders why that unsmiling face has such a somber aspect: “I was already in mourning for myself, my sole companion, and I suspected that the soul had stumbled on the body and that it had left again without offering its hand.” He poignantly suggests that the basis of the problem is “the unconscious,” specifically, “the two forms of existence between which living matter navigates. Crystal and smoke also designate the tragic element of the deaths which, in my parents’ generation, struck down those individuals carrying on that tradition”—i.e., Jews—“the night of crystal and the fog of smoke.” His mourning for himself, for his lost soul, was, he suggests, an unconscious mourning for others, for those lost in the concentration camps.

World War II, its shocks and aftershocks, provide the crucial historical theme of Godard’s self-portrait. A jolting notebook inter-title—preceding shots of a tennis game played in prewar costume, with women wearing long dresses and Godard wearing first a striped shirt and then an old-fashioned V-necked ivory-colored tennis sweater—introduces a writer and a thread of references that persisted in Godard’s work for the rest of the decade. The title, in Godard’s handwriting, is “notre avant-guerre” (our prewar)—the name of a memoir written by the rightist collaborator, Robert Brasillach, in the first months of the German invasion and occupation of France in 1939 and 1940.

Godard’s films were now motivated by a single philosophy of political aesthetics: nostalgia for a cultural aristocracy. That nostalgia extended, peculiarly, not only to ideas that equivocated with race prejudice, such as Jean Giraudoux’s, but also to the right-wing politics of Godard’s childhood and even to the German occupation and French collaboration—a period which he seemed to consider immensely fertile for the arts. A leftist, Godard now openly adopted a rightist style.

The peculiarity and ambiguity of the reference to Brasillach are shown in another sequence, which Godard calls “the true legend of stereo” and places soon after the comment about “night” and “fog,” itself a reference to Alain Resnais’s documentary about Auschwitz. Showing a close-up of white paper on a desk, Godard draws a triangle, then superimposes another triangle on it, making a Star of David, which he calls “the mystic hexagram,” and then, taking another piece of white paper, redraws the same figure, saying, “But in history, the history of history, there was Germany, which projected Israel, Israel which reflected that projection, and
Israel found its cross, and the law of stereo continues. Israel projected the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people, in turn, bore its cross. This is the true legend of stereo.”

The “legend of stereo”—the modern recording industry—was that of Jews who, having suffered, inflict suffering. This was, for Godard, not merely a law of history but one that was uniquely inscribed in Jewish identity. In his way, Godard was inveighing not only against Israel but against the Jewish media. Godard’s self-portrait was ultimately dominated by his reflections on Jews and Judaism—indeed, by his inability to stop thinking about Jews, negatively—by what can fairly be called his anti-Semitism.

A
S OBSESSED AS
Godard may have been with Claude Lanzmann’s film
Shoah
, and, for that matter, with the horrors of the Holocaust which the cinema could neither prevent nor, on his view, properly document, many of his remarks recalled the genteel anti-Semitism of the prewar period, when the terrible consequences of such prejudices were largely unanticipated. While discussing
Histoire(s) du cinéma
on radio in 1989, Godard spoke of the inevitable association of Germans with Jews.

The Germans… took themselves for a chosen people. That ended up putting them in conflict with another chosen people, who said: “No, pardon us, we’re the chosen people, and for a lot longer than you.” This virus—taking oneself for the chosen people of Europe—Germany transmitted it to America. Those are the two countries that understood both the image of industry and the industry of the image, the cultural and economic role that this represents.
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In the same interview:

For a long time, certain Jewish producers who had to emigrate were working with money from UFA, mounting French-German coproductions in which they hired technicians like Eugen Schüfftan, director of photography, or Robert Siodmak, director, who were also expatriates. And these producers profited by underpaying these anti-Nazis, who cost them less than the French Republicans. One should draw lessons from that too.
³⁷

The suggestion of Jewish miserliness and crass disregard for political morality—as well as the hint of French protectionism against the refugees who were undercutting French natives—could be dismissed as an aberration if Godard hadn’t found so many different contexts in which to recycle and repeat it. In 1994, he explained the point of his Bugsy Siegel project, which had filtered into
King Lear:
he wanted to show, he said, “How, in fact, Hollywood was
invented. How all the gangsters from New York”—Jewish “gangsters,” since, as Godard well knew, the producers who created Hollywood were predominantly Jewish—“came to California and took over the film business.”
³⁸
It was the cinema of this Hollywood, which Jews had created, that betrayed its own birthright and corrupted the cinema, by failing to depict the Holocaust in its time.

Some years earlier, in 1985, Godard discussed the founding of Hollywood by Jews in terms of the familiar slander of the Jewish usurer.

What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt. The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew. They’re the ones who invented the cinema, they brought it to Hollywood… Making a film is visibly producing debts.
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But the problem with the Jews, Godard said on television in 1981, went back even further: “Moses is my principal enemy… Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn’t show what he had seen. That’s why the Jewish people are accursed.”
⁴⁰
In Godard’s obsessive view of the Jews, they are to blame for the fundamental cultural flaw of society, its preference for text over images, its anti-cinematic prejudice.

In Godard’s formulation, Jewish people, who were crucial to the development of the cinema, were also fundamentally responsible for its downfall—its repudiation of the image, specifically, its failure to prevent the Holocaust.
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His argument, such as it was, depended on a reformulation of age-old prejudice. His expressions of sympathy for the Jews killed in the Holocaust were interwoven with expressions of disdain for the Jews not killed in the Holocaust. In 1980, in a context of personal aesthetics, Godard let slip a disturbingly detached and indifferent view of the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust:

When I began making films, I started with fiction, or what my parents thought was fiction—whether my real parents or John Ford. But as I worked, I felt the need for documentary. Society told me I must choose between the two. But I don’t like to choose. I don’t like to choose between Cain and Abel, between the Nazis or the Jews—one too dreadful torturers, the other too dreadful martyrs.
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Godard’s view of Jews has been conditioned by many factors: the milieu of his childhood; ambient French prejudices; the pro-Palestinian politics of post-1968 radicalism; the turn against Hollywood; the renewed interest in Christian theology; the perverse fascination with the German occupation
and the art produced under it; a speculative historiography of the conflict between image and iconoclasm. All contributed to the hardening and sharpening of Godard’s anti-Semitic attitudes; but the unifying premise of these factors is his obsessive, all-consuming devotion to the cinema. By viewing all of human history as a precursor to or tributary of the history of cinema, Godard stood on its head the stereotypical question of clannish self-interest, “Is it good for the Jews?” and interpreted all events, from Biblical times through the Nazi era to the current day, from the perspective of the question, “Is it good for the cinema?” And whether it was good for the Jews, the French, the Russians, or society as a whole, was utterly irrelevant.

S
EATED AT A
desk in
JLG/JLG
, Godard is visited by “inspectors from the Centre du cinéma” who include André S. Labarthe and the film historian Bernard Eisenschitz. As they inspect his shelves of videotapes and books (and register sixteen rows of American films, two of German, two of Russian, one of Italian films, and two devoted to films by Jean Renoir), a young, scantily-clad cleaning woman declares, “Europe has memories, America has T-shirts.” She states that “in 1914, Senator McBridge declares to Congress, ‘Trade follows films,’” and repeats Godard’s remark from
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, 1A, that Georges Méliès’s New York offices were “stolen by Paramount during the offensive of Verdun.”

The concluding encounter of
JLG/JLG
shows Godard walking on a snowy country road and finding an old woman bundled in an old coat, resting on a log and reciting Virgil in Latin—with some modifications, as becomes clear when Godard sits beside her and translates: “Whatever the extent of America’s power over conquered lands, its people will read me, and, once famous, for all the duration of eternity, if I believe that there is some truth in the mouth of poets, I shall live.”

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
, Godard presented, along with
JLG/JLG
, two new episodes of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, 2A and 2B,
Seul le cinéma
(Only the Cinema) and
Fatale beauté
(Fatal Beauty), both of which extend the themes of the first two episodes, the cinema’s failure to document the concentration camps and the irreparable deception that the fallen cinema inflicted on Godard.

Seul le cinéma
is dominated by two long sections: Godard’s videotaped discussion from 1988 with the late critic Serge Daney (who had died in 1992) concerning the New Wave and its historical approach to the cinema, and a reading by Julie Delpy, also filmed years earlier, of Baudelaire’s poem “The Voyage.”

Daney suggested that what made the New Wave new was its approach to film history, and specifically its understanding of the succession over time of film styles and forms. Godard disagreed, claiming rather that he and the others
of the New Wave had a novel understanding of their personal relation to cinema; for him, the cinema “was the only way to do, to tell, to recognize, myself, that I have an ‘histoire’ in and of myself… if there had been no cinema I would not have known that I have an ‘histoire.’” Godard meant at once a history and a story, and the overwhelming power of the cinema compelled him to identify his history and story with the ones it told. As he explained to Daney, “For me, the big history is that of cinema; it is bigger than the others because it is projected, whereas in a book, it is reduced.”

After again citing the discovery of projection by Poncelet, “a French prisoner pacing before a Russian wall,” Godard turns to the reading by Julie Delpy of Baudelaire’s poem “The Voyage,” which he remarkably excerpts to turn it into an allegory for his own youthful discovery of the cinema:

“We want to travel without steam and without sail! To brighten the boredom of our prisons, make your memories, which are framed by the horizon, pass over our minds which are as taut as a canvas”—a movie screen.