Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (17 page)

Godard’s film was recognized to be a part of the New Wave yet different from, and even opposed to, the work of his friends. In
Radio-Cinéma-Télévision
, Gilbert Salachas wrote, “What distinguishes
Breathless
… is a spectacular anarchy in the tone, the images, the language. This extremism in its originality is presented almost as a manifesto.”
⁵²
Critic and film historian Jacques Siclier declared, “In the light of
Breathless, The 400 Blows
looks like an obedient schoolboy’s homework, Chabrol’s films the product of a perfect academicism.”
⁵³

Simone Dubreuilh of
Libération
⁵⁴
hailed Godard as “a young man who writes authentically everything that he is thinking directly in images.”
⁵⁵
Others, like Pierre Marcabru in
Combat
, recognized the correspondence between the film’s substance and its director, and called attention to the implied continuity between the world off-camera and the one filmed:

It seems that, if we had footage of Godard shooting his film, we would discover a sort of accord between the dramatized world in front of the camera (Belmondo and Seberg playing a scene) and the working world behind it (Godard and Raoul Coutard shooting the scene), as if the wall between the real and projected worlds had been torn down.
⁵⁶

The film was also recognized as the signal accomplishment of the New Wave: “Godard goes further than Resnais with
Hiroshima
and Bresson with
Pikpokett
[
sic
].”
⁵⁷
“The terms ‘old cinema’ and ‘new cinema’ now have meaning.… With
Breathless
, the generation gap can suddenly be felt.”
⁵⁸
With
Breathless, Cahiers du cinéma
immediately became, in effect, the most important film school in France: the technical training formerly considered indispensable was now, virtually overnight, displaced by the wisdom offered by Langlois at his unofficial conservatory.

T
HOUGH FEW YOUNG
filmmakers would imitate
Breathless
, many would imitate Godard himself, such as
Breathless
revealed him to be: an artistically voracious autodidact devoted fanatically to the history of cinema.

Godard had been a critic for ten years before getting the chance to make
Breathless
. By the time he made his first full-length film, he was intensely aware of the role of the press in creating an idea of a film prior to its existence. As the director of a film born of a unique mode of production and philosophical orientation, he also required the appropriate conditions for a correct appreciation of his unusual work. He needed, in other words, to generate—and to induce critics to employ—a method of criticism that was apt for his own film. This was his self-appointed task as an interviewee. He needed to speak directly to his viewers in order to orient their viewing, and he made sure to become enough of a celebrity to get his voice quickly heard. Michel Dorsday, of
Cahiers
, recalled that Godard “grafted” onto the film “the fame of Jean-Luc Godard.”
⁵⁹

The popular and commercial recognition of
Breathless
, and the intriguing stories surrounding its production, created a demand for Godard’s presence in interviews. He was interviewed in
Le Monde
and in
Arts
at the time of the film’s release, as well as in Swiss journals shortly thereafter. These interviews were themselves a sort of virtuoso performance in which the director both illustrated and extended the methods of his film into the press. In
Le Monde
, Godard explained how he had worked:

Based on this theme by Truffaut, I told the story of an American woman and a Frenchman. Things can’t work out between them because he thinks about death and she doesn’t. I said to myself that if I didn’t add this idea to the screenplay the film would not be interesting. For a long time the boy has been obsessed by death, he has forebodings. That’s the reason why I shot that scene of the accident where he sees a guy die in the street. I quoted that sentence from Lenin, “We are all dead people on leave,” and I chose the Clarinet Concerto that Mozart wrote shortly before dying.
⁶⁰

In fact, Michel sees a “guy” (played by Jacques Rivette) lying dead in the street after a motor scooter accident (reminiscent of Godard’s mother’s
death) and walks on impassively, but remarks to Patricia later that day, “I saw a guy die.” The next day, in bed with Patricia, he tells her: “Do you think of death sometimes? I think about it endlessly.” Thus the “subject” of the film is indeed stated as baldly as possible—a boy who thinks about death—but the cultural artifacts that reinforce the subject and weave it into the fabric of the film are present as a sort of code, and Godard made use of the press to publish the decoder.

Godard’s proposed interpretive method—and its difficult subtleties—did not go unnoticed. After seeing the film and reading the interviews, André Bessèges wrote in
France Catholique:

They are shown a “guy dying in the street,” they are made to hear the clarinet concerto that Mozart wrote just before dying. The auteur assures us that it is to make us understand that his hero is obsessed with death. But one must have, to say the least, an acute sense of symbols, and also be an alert connoisseur of music, to catch onto those intentions.
⁶¹

“To catch onto those intentions” required an initiation, an engagement on the part of the viewer. It also required the active role of the press in transmitting Godard’s remarks in the context of reports on the celebrity’s life. In a revealing moment in the film’s long central scene in Patricia’s tiny hotel room, Michel delivers a monologue on the women of different cities (a riff that Godard’s voluble and opinionated friend Roland Tolmatchoff recognizes as his own) that concludes by praising the women of Lausanne and Geneva above all. At the sound of the word “Lausanne,” the wail of an ambulance siren is heard sharply on the sound track. This sonic coincidence is no accident: the ambulance siren at that moment was added by Godard as a deliberate choice in the sound editing process (inasmuch as
Breathless
was shot silent and the sound track dubbed, all of the film’s sounds were intentionally applied) and its presence is a reference to the death of Godard’s mother in a motorcycle accident. Godard left the reference apparent to those who might perceive it but hidden from those who would not—yet given his sudden great celebrity, it was inevitable that the underlying facts would come out, and would render the passage explicable.

Godard slips into the film, and into the character of Michel Poiccard, such items of personal reminiscence as: the use of the Swiss numbers
septante
and
huitante
instead of the French
soixante-dix
and
quatre-vingts
for seventy and eighty, an ashtray that prompts mention of his grandfather’s Rolls-Royce, a comment by Poiccard regarding the luxurious Parisian building where he was born (evoking Patricia’s surprise at his déclassé status), numerous references to Godard’s own Left Bank nightspots and Right Bank
landmarks, a mention of a name (Zumbach) from a recent Swiss murder case, the names of Godard’s Swiss friends.
⁶²

In a February 3
Tribune de Genève
article, Godard, responding to a journalist’s question about those names in the film which “come from the Geneva phone book,” explained the story:

Yes, those are old acquaintances. I thought those fellows would be happy I remembered them. And why make the effort to invent names? Besides, Tomatchov [
sic
] is unknown in Paris or Berlin. Only the initiated will smile at this sort of connection. Just like when I have my hero say that on average the girls of Geneva and Lausanne are better than those of other European cities.
⁶³

Journalists were part of Godard’s system, providing skeleton keys to the work as they created the phenomenon on which they were reporting. Viewers and readers, upon their initiation into the film’s esoterica, themselves popularized the advanced cinematic philosophy that
Breathless
represented, becoming the first citizens of the new republic the film heralded: the republic of media self-consciousness, of the fusion of communication with theories of communication, of criticism with art.

Having joined his critical theories to his work of art, Godard was aware of the conflict between symbolic expression in a heavily layered and ironic work of fiction, and direct, sincere communication. His next work, which he had announced while
Breathless
was still in progress, would be constructed around a first-person monologue, and was calculated to allay any doubts (including his own) on the subject of his sincerity.

Speaking during the shoot of
Breathless
with Marc Pierret, the journalist from
France-Observateur
who was planted in the crew, Godard announced, “I’ll shoot my next film in Switzerland. With three times less money: an assistant, a cameraman, that’s all. It will be something about torture.” After the shoot ended, he told Michèle Manceaux of
L’Express
that it would be called
Le Petit Soldat
. But it was not the only new project with which Godard had gone public. Although
Le Petit Soldat
, the story about torture, would indeed become Godard’s second film, it would, in a way, be his second second film.

His first second film had already been publicized, in August 1959, in the pages of
Cahiers du cinéma
. It was called
Une Femme est une femme
(
A Woman Is a Woman
), and was the story of a woman who tells her boyfriend that she wants to have a baby with him despite not being married. It was based on a story outline by the actress Geneviève Cluny, who had passed it along to the actress Michèle Meritz, who brought it to the attention of Claude Chabrol in 1957 while playing a small role in his
Le Beau Serge
. Chabrol showed the story to his assistant director, Philippe de Broca, and to
Godard, who decided to join forces to turn it into a full-length script. In the course of what de Broca recalled as their “fifteen abominable days” of work together, Godard took him to “disgusting cafeterias at impossible hours,” and then announced that he—Godard—would write the story himself.
⁶⁴
Cluny, however, decided to give her story to de Broca, who made it into his first film,
Les Jeux de l’amour
(
The Games of Love
), in the summer of 1959 (it was released in June 1960).

Godard, however, gave
Cahiers
an acerbic six-page divertissement called
A Woman Is a Woman
, which is a comic love triangle between a woman and two men but with the added fillip of a pregnancy by the wrong one of the two men. It ended with a pun, in which Josette’s steady boyfriend calls her “infâme” (horrid), to which she replies that she is “
une
femme” (a woman). Godard’s publication of his story in advance of the release of de Broca’s film was a defensive maneuver to stake his claim to the story, which he would hold for the future; he would instead make
Le Petit Soldat
as soon as possible.

Starting another film as soon as possible was both to Godard’s and Beauregard’s advantage. Godard had wanted to sign for a second film before
Breathless
was released because he feared that, if
Breathless
failed, he might never get to make a second film. He was also jealous of Chabrol’s output (three films since 1958) and wanted to catch up. As for Beauregard, signing on to another project at once would allow him to collect funds from automatic aid to producers, with which he could pay current expenses and debts.

By the end of 1959, with the reputation of
Breathless
growing, Beauregard took advantage of the moment to announce, in a gag of a two-page display ad in the trade journal
La Cinématographie française
, his forthcoming production of
Le Petit Soldat
.

The ad was a singular stunt—a text, written in the style of a classified ad, appearing in Godard’s own distinctive handwriting, which read: “Jean-Luc Godard, who has completed ‘Breathless’ and is preparing ‘Le Petit Soldat,’ seeks young woman between 18 and 27 to make her both his actress and his friend,” with Beauregard’s company and telephone number listed at the bottom of the page. The prank seemed to be a smarmy attempt to use his growing fame to seek young women in the guise of an open casting call. In fact, Godard already had an actress in mind for the role in the film, a young woman who had rejected a role in
Breathless
—Anna Karina.

It is a story the actress has told often, each time a little differently, to
Cahiers du cinéma
, to journalists and interviewers (including to this author), to audiences in New York and in London, and most thoroughly, to Beauregard’s daughter, Chantal, for her biography of her father.
⁶⁵
For a small role in
Breathless
, Godard had been looking for a model, a cover girl for
Elle
magazine whom he had seen in commercials (shown not on television but in movie
theaters). He made contact and asked her to come to Beauregard’s office, where he offered her the role of the woman in St.-Germain-des-Prés from whom Belmondo steals money when he arrives in Paris. It required her to bare her breasts as she pulled her dressing gown over her head (giving Belmondo the moment to take cash from her wallet). For this reason, the actress refused the role (which Godard gave to Liliane David, Truffaut’s mistress).