Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (28 page)

Once I asked Rossellini: “When you get money to make a film, do you have to spend it all?”… And Roberto told me: “The best way is to make films that take place in the Middle Ages. During the week, everyone dressed only in potato sacks with two holes for the arms and a hole for the head. Above all, don’t make films that take place on Sunday, because that’s when they wore nice clothing. The rest you keep for yourself and your family.”
⁶

On the one hand, Anna Karina was the “family” who would enjoy the savings from Godard’s frugal exertions; on the other, she would also, in effect, be wearing the potato sacks. Although the film would fulfill Godard’s intentions of calling attention to her talents as a serious actress, Karina soon recognized its cost to her glamour and would resent it. A film that was intended to save the marriage proved to be a new source of conflict.

A fuller story outline—in effect, the script—that Godard elaborated on the basis of his original sketch concerns Nana, a young immigrant from Germany and an aspiring actress. She has left her husband, a struggling journalist, for a photographer who may help her break into acting. She has left her baby in the care of a nursemaid and is working as a sales clerk in a record store. She cannot earn or borrow enough to pay her rent; she fails at theft and, walking a street that prostitutes work, accepts a client. She then accepts others. She is introduced to a pimp, Raoul, who takes her on. She meets a young man, an artist, and wants to quit prostitution and to live with him. Raoul refuses to let her go; he punishes her for a minor “infraction” and sells her to another pimp, who shoots Raoul and is then shot by Nana. She takes up with another man and lives with him in a semblance of domestic happiness, prospering as a high-class call girl.

The most striking aspect of the outline is not the story but its construction, which Godard would reproduce in the film itself: it is broken down into thirteen discrete sequences, which Godard called “tableaux vivants,” literally, living paintings. As he later explained, his idea with
Vivre sa vie
was “to also play on the word ‘tableau’ in theater and in painting. Since it’s a ‘tableau’ [picture] of somebody, I had to do it with [theatrical] ‘tableaux.’”
⁷
Godard had chosen
Vivre sa vie
to exalt the talent and the character of Anna Karina; as such, it was both a showcase for the actress and a portrait of the woman.

Godard got the idea for dividing the film into discrete sequences, or theatrical tableaux, from
The Threepenny Opera
. He had even planned to include a character taken directly from the film of that play, “a master of ceremonies who would say, ‘Here is the sad story of Nana… Here is what happened to her one day,’ etc.”
⁸
Brecht was in the air, and in particular, in the air that Godard was breathing. The December 1960 issue of
Cahiers du cinéma
was entirely devoted to Brecht, in open acknowledgment of the potential cinematic application of his ideas. Shortly before making
Vivre sa vie
, Godard had seen a production of
Arturo Ui
at the Théâtre Nationale Populaire, and his outline for the film explicitly notes the influence of Brecht. The brief text ends with Nana as a “respectable” and prosperous prostitute crossing herself as she drives past Notre-Dame in her American car: “Nana, whom we saw with her real hair in the first
sequences, then blonde in some of the following ones, now has a short coiffure in the style of 1925. Music à la Kurt Weil [
sic
] emphasizes her Brechtian appearance.”

Before shooting started, however, Godard purged the project of its plethora of Brechtian influences: though the film was indeed made in tableaux, the master of ceremonies making announcements between them was replaced by a black screen with white titles stating, like chapter headings, the actions and motifs in the sequence to follow. No Weill-like music is ever heard, and during the shoot (and to Anna Karina’s great dismay), Godard cut the thirteenth tableau of a prosperous Nana, the “Brechtian” one, specifically to avoid the sort of political comment, or “social assertion,”
⁹
that he thought it suggested, and that was at the core of Brecht’s theater. Instead, he would film an ending that he considered “typically theatrical,”
¹⁰
more in accord with the melodramatic conventions of the naturalistic theater. In place of social satire, Godard wanted pathos, and he achieved it with an alternate ending: Nana’s death, at the hands of pimps.

The main beneficiary of Godard’s suppression of the Brechtian influence was Anna Karina. The expressionistic, demonstrative, savagely parodistic and yet detached acting style of the Brechtian theater would have worked at cross-purposes with Godard’s intention of displaying Karina’s gravitas in performance. It would have imposed on the actors an exaggerated and artificial manner. For
Vivre sa vie
, Godard sought his actors’ fully engaged emotional sincerity, and he made the film with a concentrated naturalism similar to that of
Le Petit Soldat
.

W
HERE
B
REATHLESS
AND
Le Petit Soldat
were stories about a man in love with a woman and
A Woman Is a Woman
was about the triangle of two men and a woman,
Vivre sa vie
was simply the story of a woman—it was Anna Karina’s star turn, the movie in which she would occupy the center of a tragedy. No other role in the film approached hers in significance, and none of the other actors was familiar or charismatic enough to outshine her.

The week before the shoot began, Godard told an interviewer, “I will shoot on location, in natural settings, but without making a film of re-portage. It will rather be a work in the theatrical spirit.”
¹¹
Godard sought to capture realistic theater in its principal form: an interpretive performance sustained over time. To achieve this, Godard conceived scenes that could be shot in long takes, and he needed to film with direct sound. He used heavier equipment under more traditional conditions—precisely the equipment of mainstream filmmaking described in the books that he borrowed from Marin Karmitz. In
Vivre sa vie
, the camera was not waved around casually. Godard filmed
Vivre sa vie
entirely on location, but used unwieldy studio
equipment to do so—the seventy-pound Mitchell camera; relatively slow black-and-white Kodak film, which required rigging movie lights; a sound truck—and the added personnel to handle it all. This more cumbersome apparatus and crew made their presence felt. Because it was now more arduous and time-consuming to set up shots, Godard could not easily change his mind about them and had to work more deliberately; because each setup took a long time to prepare, Godard saved time, and thus money, by shooting longer takes. Godard’s attempt to join the laborious methods of studio film-making to the rapid exigencies of low-budget filmmaking and his own inclination for short work days—Braunberger recalled that the average day of shooting was three hours long—resulted in a film made up mostly of carefully composed and very long takes, many lasting more than three minutes. Rather than composing Karina’s performance from moments edited together, from the “exchange of glances” that Godard had extolled in 1956, he would let her stage a sustained performance, which his camera would simply frame and allow to unfold in its own time.

Godard claimed that the emotional essence of the film was the equivalent of portraiture in painting: “I was thinking—like a painter, in a way—of confronting my characters head-on, as in the paintings of Matisse or Braque.”
¹²

The greatest paintings are portraits. Look at Velasquez. The painter who wants to show a face shows only the exterior of people; and yet, there is something else going on. It’s very mysterious. It’s an adventure. The film was an intellectual adventure, I wanted to try to film a thought in action, but how to manage it?
¹³

The different techniques demanded by
Vivre sa vie
, so unlike the scattershot methods that Godard had employed in his first three films, required a more composed, deliberate approach—which converted the mood of his images from something like jazz to something like classical music.

It’s as if I had somehow to extract the shots from the night, as if the shots were at the bottom of a well and I had to bring them up to the light. When I brought out the shot, I said to myself: everything is there, nothing to retouch, but there can be no mistakes about what has been brought out, about what has to emerge at the first stroke… It’s a little bit like theater-vérité.
¹⁴

Because Godard’s first two films were shot largely with handheld cameras, he could not often look through the eyepiece. In
A Woman Is a Woman
,
the choice of shots, made under studio time pressure, was often loose and haphazard. Now, for
Vivre sa vie
, Godard worked with Raoul Coutard to compose shots. The image-making of
Vivre sa vie
was imbued with the collective daring of the performer, director, camera operator, and the rest of the cast and crew, who maintained, together, the requisite perfection for long takes which often involved elaborate camera moves (on tracking rails) and choreographed action. The audacity and the tension on the set were essential elements of the film and Godard knew it: “For me, the ideal is to obtain at once what has to work, and without retouching. If it needs any retouching, it’s a failure. The ‘at once’ element, that’s chance. At the same time, it’s definitive. What I want is the definitive by chance.”
¹⁵

Elia Kazan came to watch Godard shoot a scene of prostitutes and clients in a hotel, and spoke with Suzanne Schiffman between takes.

It was a very long take, a fixed-focus shot. The camera didn’t move, the actors entered and left the frame, they continued acting and talking outside the frame. Kazan asked me, “Which angle will he shoot the action from next?” “No, he never shoots a scene from more than one angle.” Kazan didn’t understand.
¹⁶

To heighten the demands placed on the performers, Godard shot the entire film with synchronized sound recorded on location. Although several sequences were dubbed (very conspicuously, with the addition of voice-overs and, remarkably, in one scene, subtitles), most of the film used a single track of production sound, with its rich sonic environment of streets, stores, cafés, and the incidental clatter of daily life, with quietly melodramatic music (by Paul Misraki) occasionally added. The microphones available to Godard picked up a great deal of ambient sound, and thus their placement was crucial. The actors had to stay still in order not to leave the microphone’s range. Anna Karina remarked on their effect on her performance: “In
Vivre sa vie
, I’m like a statue! Completely stationary!… In real life, I never stop moving.”
¹⁷
The sonic effect was distinctive: the foreground voices, and particularly that of Karina, were endowed with a striking dramatic urgency, while the dense and lively background ambience seemed invested with the randomness of documentary reality. Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM Records, said, “My greatest influence with regard to the work of sound was
Vivre sa vie
by Godard.”
¹⁸

Godard considered
Le Petit Soldat
to be like a “notebook” of visual jottings, whereas in
Vivre sa vie
, he said, “the camera is a witness.”
¹⁹
Here, Godard signed his shots, in the way that a painter signs his pictures. The camera’s weight, as Godard recognized, made itself felt in the film: the images seemed to have been composed with heavy dark frames around them.
Though many shots remained static, Godard achieved visual variety with a daring range of camera moves—traveling shots, sometimes lateral, sometimes plunging into the décor, sometimes moving with a pendular arbitrariness around stationary characters—and when the camera moved, it did so with a glacial, graphic precision. The singular visual construction of the world as seen by Jean-Luc Godard, the announcement of intellectual intent and content in the film’s visual style, is on display in the film’s first shot,
²⁰
which runs one and a half minutes: Nana (Anna Karina) is seen from behind, at the bar of a café, as she talks with her husband, whom, it is soon understood, she has left for another man.

P
AUL
: This guy, are you really interested in him?
N
ANA
: You know… I don’t know, I wonder what I’m thinking of.
P
AUL
: Does he have more money than me?

This shot, which Godard likened to “a musical score that begins very quietly, instead of starting with big chords,”
²¹
was his “first idea for the film.” Indeed, he admitted, “I knew that
Vivre sa vie
was to start with a girl seen from behind—I did not know why. It was the only idea I had.”
²²
Although he offered specific justifications for this choice—“In my film one has to listen to people speaking, all the more so since they are often seen from behind and one is not distracted by the faces”
²³
—there was another important motive: a cinematic response to and refutation of a remark made in the press by Truffaut about him and his way of filming.