Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (22 page)

Godard did indeed make a gesture in that direction: although in
Le Petit Soldat
he equated left and right and evenhandedly damned the moral compromises of both sides, he gave an interview in which he expressed a clear preference for one side over the other: “I think that people on the left
are sentimental. Those on the right have formal ideas. Since I am sentimental, I am rather on the left. Especially in relation to my best friends, who are clearly on the right.”
⁵⁶
But even if Godard also sought to appease the French government in advance, in the hope of avoiding censorship, by declaring
Le Petit Soldat
“a Gaullist film because it objectively takes stock of things,”
⁵⁷
the film was nonetheless a provocation aimed principally at the French government: by implicating France in a dirty war to which it had never admitted,
Le Petit Soldat
was an act of defiance that belonged naturally to the left. It was a singular rejection of the Gaullist regime’s censorship, an attempt to break the silence about the war.

T
HE PRODUCTION OF
Le Petit Soldat
stopped for several weeks in order for Godard to attend the Cannes Film Festival.
Breathless
had been nominated as one of the three films to represent France at the festival; the ultimate decision, however, lay with the newly appointed minister of culture, André Malraux, who, without explanation, substituted
Moderato Cantabile
, adapted by the English theater director Peter Brook from the novel by Marguerite Duras. Godard’s friends at
Cahiers
railed in print at such a historically shortsighted decision, but the decision stood;
Breathless
would be shown at Cannes, but out of competition.

Nonetheless, the screening of the film on May 9 was important for the world market. Godard attended, in the company of Anna Karina and Michel Subor.
Breathless
was shown several times, and was a very hot ticket for the gathered film professionals from around the world; it was also sold for distribution to many other countries, which proved more profitable for Beauregard than its first run in France.

After the screening, Godard, Karina, and Subor left Cannes to return to Geneva and finish shooting
Le Petit Soldat
. Godard and Karina were now a couple. At the end of the shoot, Godard drove back to Paris with her. Upon their arrival in the city, he asked Karina where he should drop her off. She responded, “You can’t leave me, I’ve left everything for you, now I’m staying with you.” But Godard did not have a regular apartment; he lived in a furnished hotel room, and he put her in the room next door. Karina later recalled, “There were two adjoining small rooms and… I felt from time to time someone in the night, slipping into my bed. It was Jean-Luc.”
⁵⁸
By day, he left her there while he went off to the editing room, and he asked her to find them an apartment.

W
HILE AT
C
ANNES
, Godard was interviewed for French television by François Chalais, a journalist who had been Beauregard’s friend since the early 1940s (when they both had low-level posts in the Vichy government),
and who had written for
Cahiers
starting with its first issue in April 1951. Godard’s talk with Chalais was shockingly unguarded:

I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago—simply because I have made a film, and the film was well-received, and so forth. So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.
⁵⁹

Godard was now to get his wish, although not in the way he might have imagined.

Despite his claim that he didn’t take sides on Algeria, many viewers felt that Godard was not at all evenhanded in his depiction of the conflict, and that, in showing the FLN committing torture, he favored the French. A journalist who spoke with industry insiders invited to private screenings of the film in the summer of 1960 reported that the adjectives he heard most often were
fascist, insolent, reckless
.
⁶⁰
Godard later responded:

Why did I show a scene of torture by the FLN? Because at that time, the opposite would have been too easy: at that moment, the FLN was more sympathetic and it was more meaningful for my treatment of torture to show them using torture and to leave only the suggestion that the French do the same.
⁶¹

Of course, it was also inconceivable at the time that a film showing the French using torture would pass French censorship, whereas it seemed plausible that a film showing the FLN torturing would prove acceptable.

In 1916, France established a “Commission de contrôle,” governed by the Ministry of the Interior and the police, which screened all films proposed for distribution and issued a “visa” to those judged appropriate for release. In 1960, that system was still in operation, under the aegis of the CNC, where films that failed viewing by a handful of the preliminary twenty-one members of the commission were then screened for the entire board.
⁶²
The commission’s judgment was remarkably politicized and censorious: for instance, in 1955, Alain Resnais was compelled to suppress in
Night and Fog
a documentary image of a French gendarme supervising deportees.
⁶³
Some films were banned outright; for instance, in March 1960,
Morambong
, a French feature film shot in North Korea, was banned because the censors thought that it reflected negatively on UN troops.
⁶⁴

Godard and others who had seen the film privately knew that
Le Petit Soldat
would come under close scrutiny by the commission, and had sought to position the film favorably in the press. His repeated insistence that he did not take sides, and that his film was really “a Western with kidnappings
and stuff like that,”
⁶⁵
was an attempt to protect it from censorship. According to Michel Subor, Godard anticipated that the censors would require cuts but would permit the film’s release.
⁶⁶
As Godard told an interviewer: “Will my film be banned? I don’t think so. It’s an adventure film.”
⁶⁷

But on September 7, 1960, the commission voted to deny the film a visa and banned its release both in France and abroad. The commission’s vote, however, ultimately required the ratification of the minister of information, Louis Terrenoire. On September 12, Terrenoire announced his agreement with the commission’s vote, for three reasons. First, because the film showed torture (“The fact that these tortures are carried out by the FLN in no way affects the judgments that must be applied against these practices and their representation on the screen”)—meaning that the French government, which tortured but would not permit it to be said that it tortured, also required that torture be publicly condemned. Second, because the film’s hero is a deserter from the French army. And, finally, because of “the words given to a protagonist of the film and by which the action of France in Algeria is presented as devoid of any ideal, whereas that of the rebellion is defended and exalted.”
⁶⁸

The film was thus denied both the “visa d’exploitation” and the “visa d’exportation,” which meant that it could not be shown anywhere in the world.

Beauregard and Godard attempted to defend the film in a joint communiqué. They stated that the torture scenes were only three and a half minutes long and were no more horrible than scenes in war or horror films, and that the film did not advocate desertion or insubordination. They also called attention to the fact that, in the scene where Anna Karina declares the French to be without an ideal in Algeria, Bruno contradicts her and declares himself “very proud to be French.”
⁶⁹
Elsewhere, Godard said that he would in any case willingly cut Karina’s offending line.
⁷⁰
Beauregard considered presenting the commission with a new version of the film,“with all references to the war in Algeria and to the FLN effaced,”
⁷¹
and even with a new title.

However, Beauregard and Godard had also foreseen the possibility of a total ban and had taken measures to protect against it. Several months earlier, Beauregard had sold foreign distribution rights in
Le Petit Soldat
to a Swiss company, which in turn had already made deals in foreign countries, including the United States. Godard, speaking with journalists, made the case that, since the movie had been shot in Switzerland by a director who was a Swiss citizen, on film stock that was bought in Switzerland, and since the film had indeed required an import visa to be brought into France for editing and dubbing, it was actually not French but was “Swiss merchandise” and thus was subject to French restrictions solely on its release in French territory.

Godard’s strategic sense and legalistic argumentation were subtle and sharp, but they were trumped by main force. The response of the French government and its dubious defenders was swift. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had not yet founded his far-rightist Front National party but who was a representative in the National Assembly, immediately wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Michel Debré requesting that Godard be expelled from France if the film were exported from Switzerland. He also recommended that France dissuade the Swiss government from authorizing such an export. In fact, Debré and his government threatened Beauregard with even more exquisite financial punishment, including refusal of authorization to produce other films.

Beauregard could not afford the risk: he had recently entered a coproduction agreement with a major Italian producer, Carlo Ponti, in a company called Rome-Paris Films, which put ample funds at his disposal for big-budget films. Beauregard backed down. Godard, for his part, feared other, less official, sanctions: as he admitted years later, “Since I had received death threats in my mailbox, I was pleased that it was banned.”
⁷²

The film industry did not ignore the affront: articles challenging the ban appeared in leading journals, including
L’Express, France-Observateur
, and
L’Humanité
. Several film clubs organized a day of protest in Le Havre; and most significantly,
Cahiers du cinéma
(which had promoted the film with a still of Subor, handcuffed and attempting to slit his wrists with a razor blade held between his teeth, on the cover of its July 1960 issue) published the script of the film, in May and June 1961.

And yet, as outrageous as was the ban on
Le Petit Soldat
, it was far from the most contentious or aggressive act by the French government against those of its own citizens who opposed the ongoing colonization of Algeria. In the spring of 1960, many of the
porteurs de valises
, who worked with the network led by the activist (and philosopher) Francis Jeanson to harbor and transport members of the FLN, were arrested. In the wake of these arrests, the critic and novelist Maurice Blanchot, with the support and editorial contribution of a small group of like-minded intellectuals (notably, Claude Lanzmann), wrote a manifesto, intended as a petition, to support the right of French citizens to aid the cause of Algerian independence. The list of its first 121 signatories included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Boulez, André Breton, Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Simone Signoret, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant.
⁷³
Resnais’s wife—Florence Malraux, daughter of André Malraux, the minister of culture—audaciously added her name. Shortly after the publication on September 6, 1960, of the list—now known as the Manifesto of 121—forty
others publicly added their names, among them François Truffaut,
⁷⁴
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast; then nineteen more, including producer Anatole Dauman, mathematician Laurent Schwartz, and Malraux’s ex-wife, Clara.

The government responded with the strongest possible sanctions, threatening to fire any civil servant—teacher, professor, or employee of television and radio (which were still fully owned by the French government)—who signed. Furthermore, all signatories were banned from television and radio appearances, state-subsidized theaters, and government-aided films—which meant, for all practical purposes, all films. As one journalist, Madeleine Chapsal, noted in
L’Express
, “If the government really means to withdraw aid from all enterprises which employ a single signatory of the Manifesto of 121, the New Wave and its promise are finished.”
⁷⁵
After an international outcry against such restrictions—and offers from foreign countries to employ French artists denied the right to work at home, with the implication of a French McCarthyism—the government eventually backed down.

Godard refused to sign the manifesto. As Truffaut’s wife at the time, Madeleine Morgenstern, later recalled, “He still hoped to have a visa de contrôle for
Le Petit Soldat
, and on top of that, he was a foreigner.”
⁷⁶
His signature could have resulted in expulsion from France; he also planned to make another film in several months—the comedy
Une Femme est une femme
(
A Woman Is a Woman
), the script outline of which had been published in
Cahiers
in 1959—and had reason to expect that, were he to sign, his authorization to direct would be denied. When asked in 1964 about his refusal, Godard explained it on purely temperamental grounds: “I didn’t feel like it. I did what concerned me personally”
⁷⁷
—apparently an unprincipled, adolescent stubbornness not unlike that of the little soldier himself—but his temperament clearly coincided with prudence and self-interest.