Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (29 page)

G
ODARD’S NEW METHODS
are part of an esoteric debate between friends which took place in a public forum. In an interview that appeared in
France-Observateur
in October 1961, Truffaut attempted to place the current situation in French cinema within an ambitiously broad view of film history, based on his overall notion “that there are two kinds of cinema: the ‘Lumière branch’ and the ‘Delluc branch.’” Truffaut’s idea was that the brothers Lumière “invented the cinema to film the nature of actions” whereas Louis Delluc, “who was a novelist and a critic, thought that one could use this invention to film ideas.” Truffaut lined filmmakers up on one or the other side:

The result? It’s the History of Cinema, with the “Lumière branch”: Griffith, Chaplin, Stroheim, Flaherty, Gance, Vigo, Renoir, Rossellini (and closer to us, Godard), and on the other side, the “Delluc branch,” with Epstein, L’Herbier, Feyder, Grémillon, Huston, Bardem, Astruc, Antonioni (and closer to us, Alain Resnais). For the first group, the cinema is a
spectacle
, for the second, it is a
language
.

Truffaut explained that directors in the Delluc branch of ideas—from which he had excluded Godard—“film in a more concerted and more intellectual way, they film moral conflicts between characters who usually speak with their backs turned.”
²⁴

Though Truffaut had grouped Godard with filmmakers whom they both admired fiercely, he had nonetheless trapped Godard in an ill-fitting rubric. Calling him a nonintellectual was an obvious, if unintentional, slight, and it was apparently due to Godard’s one great failing: he had filmed his characters talking while they faced the camera. It was an error that Godard was determined to rectify: to get himself recategorized among the intellectuals, he would make a film of “moral conflicts between characters who speak usually with their backs turned.” The first shots of
Vivre sa vie
were Godard’s attempt to prove to Truffaut’s satisfaction that he was the intellectual equal of Resnais and Antonioni.

The subject of the film’s opening is derived with a self-punishing directness from Godard and Karina’s life, with Nana telling her abandoned husband, Paul, “I want to die.” She threatens him with further humiliation (“If we get back together, I’ll betray you again”), and she blames him for preventing her from fulfilling her ambitions as an actress (“In any case, if I do manage to find work in the theater, it won’t be thanks to you”). Paul is quietly aggressive, telling her that her work in the record store “suits [her] even less than the other stuff,” and accusing her again:

P
AUL
: Besides, finally, you’re leaving me because I don’t have money.
N
ANA
: Finally, yes, maybe…

The abandoned husband puts a new twist on the name games of Godard’s films; he is the first in a series of new Pauls. In
Vivre sa vie
he was played by a counterpart of Godard, a film critic (of
Cahiers du cinéma
as well as
France-Observateur
), André S. Labarthe, who hoped to make films but had not yet begun to do so—in effect, by an unfulfilled Godard.

The film is pervaded by such associations to aspects of Godard and Karina’s life and work together. Walking in a prostitute-filled street near the Porte Maillot, Nana is approached by a man, who asks her, “Will you take me along?” She says, “Yes,” and thus begins her initiation, as an amateur, into prostitution. Nana’s walk, a low-angle tracking shot facing her (the camera retreating as Nana advances), reveals over Nana’s head a sign of a business on the street: Lucas Service (probably an auto-repair shop). “Hans Lucas” (German for Jean-Luc) was, of course, the pseudonym Godard used during his years as a critic and as the director of his first fiction film,
Une Femme coquette
. Nana thus takes her first step as an amateur prostitute
under the sign of Lucas Service; Anna Karina puts herself in the service of Lucas, or Jean-Luc.

Vivre sa vie
suggests a disturbing analogy between Karina as an actress and Nana as a prostitute—between prostitution and acting, in general. The film is studded with references to Nana’s desire to pursue a career as an actress. She complains to her spurned husband, Paul, that he did not help her pursue her dream, and she mentions having appeared in a film with Eddie Constantine (as Karina had done in Varda’s
Cléo
). As if to reinforce the analogy, the role of Luigi, one of the pimps, is played by Eric Schlumberger, the producer of
Le Soleil dans l’oeil
, the film which brought Karina together with Jacques Perrin.

In the film’s eleventh, and penultimate, sequence, a young man whom Nana had met earlier has now become her lover. He sits on a bed, his face blocked by a book of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The couple’s dialogue of tender practicalities takes place entirely in subtitles, without spoken dialogue. (“What shall we do today?” “Let’s go to the museum.”… “Why don’t you come live with me?” “Yes, I’ll have to tell Raoul that it’s over.”) Then the lover’s voice is heard as he reads aloud from his book. The voice is not that of the actor, Peter Kassovitz, who plays the scene alongside Karina. Instead, Godard lends his own voice to the character, and recites on the sound track several passages from Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” interrupting it with a statement of its theme, a revealing comment which is not found in the text: “This is our story: a painter who does the portrait of his wife.” The passages he recites indeed concern a painting made by an artist whose wife sits as the model. The portrait has “a vital expression, absolutely equal to life itself”;
²⁵
however, when the painting was completed, the artist “trembled and was struck with fear. And crying with a shattering voice, ‘Indeed, it is life itself!’ he turned around suddenly to look at his beloved. She was dead.”

In short, Nana was doomed; and Godard’s prophecy for Nana was also Godard’s doom, his fate to lose the woman he loved through the shared project of artistic work. His revised ending of the film makes this point. Instead of having Nana escape Raoul and take up with her new lover while working successfully as a high-priced call girl, Godard has Raoul sell Nana to another pimp. In one long and mournful take, Nana is dragged from the car by Raoul and used by him as a human shield when he is threatened by the other pimp. In a moment derived directly from a scene of Samuel Fuller’s
Forty Guns
, the other pimp shoots Nana. Raoul himself shoots her again, to make sure that she cannot testify against him, and both pimps flee. Nana’s death is stunning both in its catastrophic swiftness and in its choreographed precision. The film ends with Nana’s body sprawled in a deserted street.

The ending is also stunning in its puritanical moralism, which would be a distinctive and seemingly incongruous aspect of many of Godard’s films to come. The first shot of
Vivre sa vie
shows Nana brazenly admitting her adultery; the last one shows her lying dead on the pavement. The film is constructed as a cautionary tale of the wages of infidelity, Nana’s fall being traceable directly to her betrayal of her husband.

Most of Godard’s films for the next five years would issue the same warning to Karina: they would allude to her unfaithfulness and suggest its moral price. Wounded by Karina, Godard would spend years filming, in the most varied of guises and through the most diverse of cinematic and intellectual frameworks, the drama of a woman’s faithlessness as a false step leading inescapably to disorder and tragedy, and presenting sincere monogamous love as inevitably redemptive. Godard, discussing the film shortly after completing it, judged Nana harshly: “She lets herself go: lack of character, mediocre intelligence, laziness.”
²⁶
Beneath the surface expansiveness of Godard’s films from the 1960s is an implication of the harsh condemnation of sin, and of one particular sin. Under his praise of freedom is an ode to self-restraint. Within a Sartrean emphasis on the immanence of and confrontation with death is a call to save one’s soul. Godard was making a case for himself as a conservative revolutionary.

N
OT ONLY IS
Vivre sa vie
Godard’s most classically tragic film; it is the one that has had the greatest practical influence on the subsequent history of cinema. The film defined and launched a new style that would be applied widely to productions of all sorts and from many countries. Whereas, in practical terms,
Breathless
encouraged young directors to infuse a Hollywood genre with their own self-conscious intellectualism,
Vivre sa vie
offered them a new paradigm altogether: it reoriented mise-en-scàne from space to time.
²⁷
Godard did not invent the long take, but in
Vivre sa vie
he invented the staging of lengthy dialogue scenes in artful framings. The films of Jean Eustache, the later films of Philippe Garrel, the films of Chantal Akerman, the subsequent films of Eric Rohmer, all of the modern verbal American cinema—Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Hal Hartley, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Spike Lee—and even the flowing dialogue shots of Abbas Kiarostami, are derived from the long and carefully patterned talk-takes of
Vivre sa vie
.

Godard told a critic of
Vivre sa vie
who wondered why the characters talk so much, “As in life, people talk a lot when they have a lot to say… What I have to say, I don’t say myself but I have my characters say it and that’s why they talk abundantly.”
²⁸
After
Vivre sa vie
, any director who had something to say did not hesitate to have his or her characters say it in his or her stead, to feature the actors saying it in a way that emphasizes the
taut string of their theatrical performance, and to use the frame of the image as an implicit proscenium arch to call attention to those performances.

V
IVRE SA VIE
was accepted by the Venice Film Festival, and Godard, Karina, and Braunberger introduced it there on August 28, after a conflict with Italian officials over several shots of nudity that Godard cut from the release print. The film was booed after the screening: the difference of tone from Godard’s previous works, with their Hollywood stylings, was disconcerting. Nonetheless, it was “the object, the whole day, of all conversations” at the festival,
²⁹
and the film was awarded two prizes: the Critics’ Prize and the Special Jury Prize.

French journalists in attendance received the film with icy condescension. Bernard Dort, reporting on the festival for
France-Observateur
, charged Godard with filming “with an offhandedness approaching mannerism” and called the film “a work of shameful romanticism, open to all the mirages of spirituality.”
³⁰
In
Candide
, Pierre Billard wrote, “Godard’s Nana astonished us for all of one morning.”
³¹
However, when the film was released, on September 19, other, more perceptive critics made up for the slight with reviews ranging from respectful to rapturously enthusiastic. Claude Mauriac, in
Le Figaro littéraire
, recognized that “of all the films made to date by Jean-Luc Godard,
Vivre sa vie
is the most minutely composed.”
³²
Georges Sadoul, in
Les Lettres françaises
, declared, “After having seen it again in Venice, I consider it better than
Breathless
. For the perfection of its mise-en-scàne, its classicism, the marvelous performance by Karina, yes, but above all for its emotion and for its message.”
³³
Jean Collet, of
Télérama
, called the film “a new masterpiece” and ranked it alongside the films of Rossellini and Bresson.
³⁴
In
Cahiers du cinéma
, Jean Douchet declared it to be “a pure masterpiece, the first absolutely flawless film by Godard.”
³⁵
The “existential” element was duly noted by critics, too: Henry Chapier of
Combat
called
Vivre sa vie
“a deliberately ‘Sartrean’ film.”
³⁶
François Truffaut, who wrote an introductory note for the publication of a transcript of the film’s dialogue and action in the October 1962 edition of
L’Avant-scène cinéma
, wrote discerningly of the film’s extraordinary significance:

There are films that one admires but which are discouraging: what is the point of continuing after them, etc. Those are not the best, because the best give the impression of opening doors and also of the cinema beginning, or beginning anew, with them.
Vivre sa vie
is among them.

The public responded favorably to the critical exhortations.
Vivre sa vie
attracted 148,010 spectators in its Parisian first run,
³⁷
a commercial success
(due in large part to the small budget) that Godard would rarely match with his subsequent films.

The film’s overtly intellectual tendencies, however, resulted in a painful personal break for Godard with a friend. Although Godard had, at the time of his first films, enjoyed a close relation with Jean-Pierre Melville, that friendship faltered as Melville blamed the New Wave and its intellectual tendencies for the industry’s problems. He called Godard’s films “anything at all, shot any old way.”
³⁸
Melville’s widow, Florence, recalled that the elder director told Godard at this time, “You are making a lazy man’s cinema, this no longer deserves the name of cinema, you put down the camera and you have people talk, nothing more. For me, this isn’t cinema.”
³⁹
Finally, in response to Melville’s harsh criticisms, Godard declared, “There can no longer be a friendship between us, if one doesn’t like one’s friend’s film, one can no longer be his friend.”
⁴⁰
And from that point on, Melville wasn’t.