Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (11 page)

Godard conceived yet another unusual editing technique for the film. He planned to break the visual and narrative continuity by introducing into the story a literally documentary aspect: “With each specific action, a document (old film, photos, engravings, drawings) is inserted.”

Truffaut worked up a budget and put together a cast, but then abandoned the project, which no longer resembled one of his. Its tone, simultaneously debonair and flippant, arch and gallant, profound and loopy, did, however, resemble the short films that Godard was about to make.

W
ORKING WITH
R
OHMER—FOR
whose short adaptation of Tolstoy’s
The Kreutzer Sonata
he had purchased film stock with the cash that he had brought back from Switzerland—Godard sketched out a series of short films revolving around a pair of young women, Charlotte and Véronique (Véronique being the name of Godard’s younger sister). In the fall of 1957, Pierre Braunberger produced the first film in the series,
Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
(All the Boys Are Called Patrick), directed by Godard from Rohmer’s script.

The young man, Patrick, played by the actor Jean-Claude Brialy—who had become a friend of the
Cahiers
group—picks up two women in quick succession—one, Charlotte (played by Anne Colette, Godard’s girlfriend at the time) in the Jardin de Luxembourg, and the other, Véronique (played by Nicole Berger, the producer’s stepdaughter), just outside the gardens, moments after he says good-bye to Charlotte. Unbeknown to him, the two women are roommates. Back in their apartment, each admits to the other that she has fallen in love with a boy. They are amused by the coincidence that their new beaus are both named Patrick, and they compare notes. The next day, as they walk together near the park, they see Patrick and point him out to each other—just as he is picking up a third girl, whom he ushers into a taxi. Noticing them, he shrugs his shoulders as if to say, “Boys will be boys,” and joins his new conquest in the backseat of the cab as it pulls out.

Little in the film suggests that Godard had any particular devotion to the story, which, in its gleeful fixation on the effortless
dragueur
, or pick-up artist, mainly suggests the strong impression made by Paul Gégauff on the austere, conservative Rohmer and the romantic Godard. Instead, Godard’s directorial signature, his mark on the film, is its profusion of peripheral, almost encoded details: the film reads like a catalog of winks and nods to initiates, or rather, to his friends. From the dark glasses worn by all three characters as well as by a café patron who is a near-double for Godard himself, to the presence of books (Charlotte reads Hegel’s
Aesthetics
in the apartment and Véronique carries a copy of
Cahiers du cinéma
), to the close-ups of a Picasso poster in their room and a Matisse postcard at streetside, to Véronique’s question whether Char-lotte’s Patrick is Patrick “Valcroze” (as in Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, the coeditor of
Cahiers
), to the headline on the copy of
Arts
that Godard’s stand-in is reading at the café—“The French Cinema Is Dying Under False Legends,” a vituperative article from May 15, 1957, by Truffaut—to the “Japanese” phrase, “Mizoguchi Kurosawa,” that Patrick tries on Charlotte, the film’s principal mode of expression is in the collection of artistic and cinematic fetish objects it assembles.
Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
initiates the vast array of inside jokes, the personal museum of private associations, that would play a surprisingly large role in Godard’s major films to come.

Eric Rohmer was surprised and dismayed by the changes that Godard had wrought upon his script and ended their collaboration. Rohmer then made
Véronique et son cancre
(Véronique and Her Dunce) without Godard, who, in turn, made another film in the series,
Charlotte et son Jules
(Charlotte and Her Lover), without a script by Rohmer—and virtually without money, décor, or action.

Anne Colette, who played Charlotte, had recently had a small role in a commercial film,
Sois belle et tais-toi
(Be Beautiful and Keep Quiet); Godard, unshaven and in sunglasses, had visited her on the set, where she introduced him to an actor playing a supporting role, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had little experience in film but a burgeoning career in theater. Not long thereafter, Belmondo met Godard in the Brasserie Lipp, was put off by Godard’s refusal to remove his dark glasses, and responded to Godard’s suggestion that they work together with a casual “Yes”: the actor assumed that this peculiar man would never get to make a film. Before long, Godard ran into the actor by chance and offered him 50,000 francs ($100) to appear in a film that Godard would shoot in his own apartment. Belmondo hesitated: he wondered whether the “film” was a pretext for a disagreeable proposition.

Charlotte et son Jules
was shot in Godard’s small hotel room, on the rue de Rennes. In a brief credit sequence, Anne Colette, eating an ice-cream cone, gets out of a sports car and signals to the young man behind the wheel
to wait for her. Then, Jean-Paul Belmondo, alone in his room, responds to a knock at the door. Anne Colette enters (with her ice-cream cone), announcing, “It’s me!” upon which Belmondo harshly responds, “I knew that it’s you. I knew you’d come back. I told you so. You can’t do without me. You’re an idiot! You never listen.” Thus begins his torrential, angry, reproachful, insult-filled, and crudely comical monologue, which runs the entire twenty minutes of the film.

Whenever Charlotte attempts to respond to what seem to be his questions, the young man, Jean, demands that she not interrupt him while he berates her for betraying him (“running off with a guy who charmed you for three minutes although you were in love with me for three years”).

She intermittently looks out the window at the man in the sports car below, as Jean’s monologue becomes increasingly wild and desperate and reaches a dramatic climax:

I beg you, Charlotte, don’t leave me! Besides, if you leave, I’ll break your face! I’ve got connections too! I got a telegram from Hollywood. Yeah, for my novel. Stay with me, Charlotte. As soon as my book comes out, I’ll buy you an Alfa-Romeo.

The clincher of the exchange and the resolution of the story is when he asks, “You can’t do without me either. That’s why you came back?” and she answers, “No, Jean, I came back to get my toothbrush!” and, taking it, leaves.

The film, an homage to Jean Cocteau, on whose
Le Bel indifférent
it was modeled, was an elaborate gag. The “indifference” it displays is Godard’s own—indifference to cinematography and to story in favor of spoken text, as if the entire film were just a cartoon frame with a dialogue bubble that Godard filled to bursting. The image itself is conceptual placefiller, suggesting that the will to make a film could suffice as the matter for the film itself.

Charlotte et son Jules
sat unfinished for months, until director Jacques Becker (a
Cahiers
favorite, best known for
Casque d’or
and
Touchez pas au grisbi
and whose
Montparnasse 19
Godard had fervently praised in the May 1958 issue) agreed to show it with his own next film.
³³
The producer Pierre Braunberger then financed its completion, permitting Godard to proceed with the film’s dubbing. However, by this time, Belmondo was doing his military service in Algeria; Godard had the idea to do the dubbing himself, and wrote to Belmondo to ask his permission to do so, promising him the lead role in his first feature film. Belmondo gave his consent, and indeed the voice with which the character Jean speaks in the film is Godard’s own.

The madly romantic austerity of Jean’s life resembled Godard’s own. Roland Tolmatchoff described the circumstances in which he found his friend
when he came from Switzerland to pay him a visit: “In Paris he had a big Bogart poster on the wall and nothing else.”
³⁴
(At times, Godard could not even afford a poor hotel room like the one in the film, and slept in the offices of
Cahiers
or other publications he freelanced for .) Moreover, Tolmatchoff recalled that the same hectically romantic pursuit of a woman was also part of Godard’s store of experience: “In’ 57 or’ 58 he was in love with a girl who lived in Madrid. He went there with nothing but flowers. He came back. He told me, ‘I called her, she said that she didn’t want to see me anymore; I threw out the flowers and I came back.’”
³⁵
Godard’s friends in Paris recalled that he threw himself into sudden romantic pursuits that often ended badly; Truffaut recalled that Godard “would meet a girl, and the next day he would be at her front door with a bunch of flowers and a marriage proposal. It was always too serious and too absolute; it never worked. He proposed forty times.”
³⁶
Gégauff bluntly described Godard in love: “He was always madly in love with the stupidest shopgirls and went broke buying bouquets of roses and chocolates.”
³⁷

The self-important dreamer and his romantic humiliation depicted in
Charlotte et son Jules
comprised a self-deprecating self-portrait by Godard, but, like the dramatics of
Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
, the film’s personal and narrative aspects were subordinated to the proliferating allusions in the torrential dialogue. Godard’s next short film proved to be even less dramatically viable and even more voluble than his previous efforts.

In February 1958, Truffaut persuaded Braunberger to produce, on short notice, an improvised comedy in and around floodwaters that were at that moment rendering the suburbs of Paris impassable. The story concerned a young woman who needs a lift (the actress Caroline Dim) and her passing liaison with the young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who provides it. While shooting the film, however, Truffaut felt embarrassed to be making a light comedy in the presence of people who were struggling to save their homes, and as a result, he shot it hastily and unenthusiastically and then decided not to finish it. But Godard, upon seeing the rushes, thought that he could do something with them, and later in the year edited them into a relatively smooth continuity and wrote dialogue and a voice-over that would be dubbed.

The text that Godard and Anne Colette recorded on December 17, 1958, displayed a verbal extravagance that outdid even
Charlotte et son Jules
in the coherence of its apparent randomness. His title alone,
Une Histoire d’eau
(A Story of Water), was a pun on the title of the erotic bestseller
Histoire d’O, The Story of O
. Godard’s text, an arch and antic narration of the couple’s comic encounter, is a pastiche of references and quotations, of jokes and asides: Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe, Georges Franju; Aragon, Petrarch, and Matisse; “the Germans” (“I love the Germans—Max and Moritz, Goethe,
Wagner…”); five lines of Baudelaire; Degas and the Impressionists; Homer, Rasputin, a passage from Balzac (“That sentence isn’t mine; it’s from Balzac, in
La Duchesse de Langeais
”); a reference to one “Blondin” (a pun linking the famous acrobat of that name to the novelist and sportswriter Antoine Blondin); Valéry Larbaud, Paul Eluard, Jean Giraudoux in one sentence; patter and comedy from the music hall and the café, a brew of popular language and literary artifice reminiscent of Raymond Queneau, whose name is the text’s first gag—“Que d’eau! Que d’eau!” (nothing but water)—and inside-film jokes.

In the texts of his short films as in his film reviews, Godard exhibited a prodigious recombinative intelligence, as in his extravagant and far-reaching wordplay, especially his puns, which made connections between similar-sounding signifiers in order to suggest comic relations between unrelated signifieds. It was a fitting linguistic habit for a critic who, from his first youthful efforts, wrote in praise of montage.

With their ornamental and digressive dialogue,
Une Histoire d’eau, Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
, and
Charlotte et son Jules
prove successively and increasingly the distinction between script and dialogue (or, for that matter, monologue). They reveal an increasing trend on Godard’s part toward indolence and indifference, as if the richness of a film’s text could take precedence over its casual production. He was using film merely as a set-up to express ideas directly: his three short films of 1957–58 were in effect blank panels of images on which Godard could all but inscribe his florid text.

Though Godard had long celebrated the artistic specificity of the cinema, literature still tempted him. If, in his abortive student days, he had dreamed and even boasted of writing a novel, he had abandoned that hope in favor of the cinema, but without abandoning writing—as his massive script based on
Elective Affinities
attested. His three short films of 1957–58 are not cinema but a substitute for cinema. In effect, they are conceptual gags that allowed Godard to exercise his powers of verbal invention. Godard had not yet mastered film technique well enough to wield its equipment pliably and spontaneously; it was only in his writing and in the theatrical delivery of his profuse verbosity that he was able to provide a simulacrum of the live event, of a creation on the fly and in real time, of a sheet torn from his notebook and passed along to the viewer with intimacy and a feigned offhandedness. Only the writing of his films’ texts was able to provide him with proof that, for the brief duration of his slight creation, he existed.

Godard made short films but considered the genre inferior. Though he reported rhapsodically, from the Festival of Short Films in the French town of
Tours in December 1958, on a handful of films, and though he became fast friends with their directors—Jacques Rozier, Jacques Demy, and Agnès Varda (he already knew Alain Resnais, whose entry he also praised)—he nonetheless wrote demeaningly of short films as such. He granted their usefulness for directors “to prove their talent,” but considered them, in comparison to feature films, to be “anti-cinema.” The reviews were also a confession: Godard was desperate to make a feature film, because at the moment, he was mired in anti-cinema.