Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (31 page)

In the fall of 1962, Jean Gruault brought Rossellini to a screening of
Vivre sa vie
. Not only did Rossellini privately reproach Gruault for having “made him waste his time,” but the next day, when Godard drove Rossellini back to Orly Airport together with Gruault, the elder director did not hide his displeasure. As Gruault later recalled:

On the road to the airport, [Rossellini] maintained a silence that was heavy with danger. Suddenly he proclaimed, in a deep, prophetic voice, like that of Cassandra announcing the fall of Troy or Isaiah threatening an impious people with the gravest harm: “Jean-Luc, you are on the verge of Antonionism!” The insult was such that the unfortunate Godard lost control of the car for an instant and almost sent us into the landscape.
⁶¹

For Rossellini, the formal stylization of
Vivre sa vie
was Godard’s admission that Nana’s travails were inevitable, and her unwillingness, or inability, to explain her choices signified his rejection of reason and communication. Godard did indeed see more merit in Antonioni’s films and their ideas than Rossellini did, and would in fact later attempt—avowedly—his own version of “Antonionism,” though not yet;
Vivre sa vie
was not it.

Nonetheless, this shadow debate between Rossellini and Antonioni oddly dominated the three films that Godard made in late 1962 and early 1963. Godard called his extraordinary short film
Le Nouveau Monde
“antiRossellini.” The medium-length film
Le Grand Escroc
, which is based on a Rossellinian idea, is a remarkably indifferent film emotionally. The feature
Les Carabiniers
, in which Godard adapts a work of Rossellini’s, was as out of step with the moment as were Rossellini’s own recent films.

I
N
M
AY 1962
, Godard had returned to Paris from the Cannes Film Festival with plenty of projects in mind and none in the offing, and rapidly sought to
do something about it. He had heard from Gruault about a play that Rossellini was about to stage at the Spoleto festival—Beniamino Joppolo’s
I carabinieri
, a biliously satirical view of war and its instigation—and decided to get hold of it. He dispatched Gruault to ask Rossellini for a tape-recorded description of the play’s action, and he got Beauregard interested in producing it.

Godard used a typed transcript of Rossellini’s narration as the basis for his first scenario, cutting and pasting parts of it into a notebook and adding his own handwritten annotations and interpolations. The story was a fable-like depiction of an isolated peasant family (a mother, her two sons, and her daughter) visited by two “carabiniers,” who conscript the sons for war and entice them to go by dangling visions of wealth through plunder and happiness through cruelty. This version,
⁶²
the notebook itself and its fifteen pages of text, was rejected by the precensorship board. Godard soon thereafter revised the story to emphasize what he called its fairy-tale nature.

The several characters are situated neither psychologically, nor morally, and even less so sociologically. It all takes place at the level of the animal, and, moreover, this animal is filmed from a point of view that is vegetal, unless it is mineral, which is to say, Brechtian.
⁶³

This overtly theatrical version passed precensorship. But with its war machinery and its broader landscape,
Les Carabiniers
would be budgeted too high for Beauregard’s modest means; as a result, the project was delayed.

A
T
T
HE
V
ENICE
Film Festival in September 1962, Godard received an offer from the Italian producer Alfredo Bini to make a short film that would be a part of a compilation feature on the theme of “the happy beginnings of the end of the world.”
⁶⁴
Three other directors also received such an offer, and the producer proposed to combine the last names of the four filmmakers—Rossellini, Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti—to make the film’s senseless but distinctive title,
RoGoPaG
. In the fall of 1962, after Rossellini had derisively dismissed
Vivre sa vie
, Godard described for interviewers from
Cahiers du cinéma
his plans for his contribution,
Le Nouveau Monde
.

A man goes out in the street, everything seems normal, but two or three little details reveal to him that people, that his fiancée, are no longer reasoning normally. He discovers for example that a café is no longer called a café. And if his fiancée doesn’t come to their rendezvous, it isn’t because she no longer loves him, it’s simply because she is reasoning in a different way. Their logic is no longer the same. One day he picks up a newspaper and sees that there was an atomic explosion somewhere, so he says to himself that he is undoubtedly the only person left on earth who can reason normally. Things are the same, while being completely different.
⁶⁵

To this practical declaration, Godard added a barb: “It’s anti-Rossellini, but that’s how it is.” Godard was clear on what he was doing: his project was indeed “anti-Rossellini” because it called into doubt (by way of an extreme allegory) the possibility of communication. Instead of making a film that verged on Antonionism, Godard made one that directly assumed Antonioni’s themes, but raised their gravity to the level of a cosmic joke. Though the film is only a sketch, it is one of farsighted implications.

Godard got the idea for the film from a science-fiction story by Richard Matheson,
I Am Legend
, in which, after horrific wars, a man discovers himself to be the last human in a world filled with vampires.
⁶⁶
At the very start of
Le Nouveau Monde
, the protagonist, upon awakening from a two-day sleep, learns from a newspaper of an atomic explosion over Paris and then begins to notice the changes that result from it. In lieu of a surprise ending, the film has a surprise beginning—the old world has already ended—from which derives a cinematic master stroke: every shot that follows is presumed to be postapocalyptic. Although filmed on location in Paris, the most ordinary elements—a windblown city square, a subway train, a traffic jam—are made to feel forbiddingly strange and altered.

This cinematic sleight-of-hand was amplified by a few choice pieces of stage business. Several younger critics from
Cahiers
show up in crowd scenes and publicly pop pills, as does Godard himself in one brief shot, in the middle of the Champs-Elysées. This plot turn allows for some crude but jolting optical effects that lop off the top of the Arc de Triomphe and the upper half of the Eiffel Tower.

In the film, a dark-haired man (unnamed throughout the film and played by Jean-Marc Bory) searches for his lover, Alexandra (Alexandra Stewart), after she fails to show up at their meeting in a café. He calls around and finds out that she had gone to a swimming pool. Tracking her down there, he sees her from afar and finds her kissing another man. “Little by little I became jealous,” he admits. “Only now do I see how that stopped me from reasoning clearly. I ought to have understood that all this was only because of the end of the world.”

Back at home together, he drinks a cup of coffee and awaits her explanation; she offers him a Coca-Cola.

“You didn’t show up,” he challenges.

“Yes, I did,” she claims.

She pops a pill, then again offers him a Coca-Cola. They have an absurd dialogue of contradictions worthy of Ionesco or of Abbott and Costello, in
which she says that she never saw the other guy before in her life; when he challenges her to be logical, she claims not to know what the word means. Taking stock of the changes that Alexandra and the city have undergone, the nameless man concludes:

It was obvious that some obscure and terrible ill was slowly corrupting the human mind, even if everything seemed to be the same. The person I loved had suddenly lost every moral sense, or worse, lacked that sense of freedom which yesterday every last man still had.

The next day, at home again, the man reads another newspaper head-line—“No Danger After the Atomic Super-Explosion, the Experts Declare”—and on the back of the paper is the headline, “The Paris of Tomorrow,” over a scale model of an ultramodern city with glass arches, sleek bridges, and boxy International Style towers. After another spat of verbal illogic, Alexandra goes out and leaves the man behind. Looking mournfully out the window at a forbiddingly uniform group of modern apartments, he says in voice-over:

The new world has begun, and a miracle has saved me. But I too may be contaminated by the ghastly mechanicalness, the death of logic. That’s why I’ve written these words in this notebook. One day they’ll be read with curiosity as the last testimony of the world of freedom.

As he speaks, a hand is shown writing these words in an extreme closeup of the notebook itself, in Godard’s own distinctive handwriting.

The film is precisely situated in time: the headline declaring nuclear apocalypse over Paris is printed on a copy of
L’Humanité
dated November 24—one year to the day of Godard’s showdown with Anna Karina and, in particular, of her release from the hospital after her suicide attempt.
⁶⁴
Thus the man’s opening monologue—“The city hadn’t changed, but Alexandra had, and I didn’t know it yet. It had been a year of fear, or rather, of feelings more intense than fear, for which there is no name on earth”—bears witness to Godard’s own year of domestic anxiety.

The intensely personal and the cosmic are, from the outset, unified with an offhanded wink: nothing less, indeed, than “the end of the world” could have endangered their love. If Karina chose infidelity, it was proof that she had definitively lost her “sense of freedom,” meaning her ability to reason and think logically; and such a thing would only be possible, let alone normal, in a world that had “suddenly lost every moral sense.” Godard himself, “the only person left on earth who is able to reason normally,” is also therefore
the last free person on earth—and the proof of his wife’s loss of freedom is her infidelity (because if she had been free, she would freely have chosen him over his rivals).

Under the guise of a gag, the film is a cry of pain, despair, and incomprehension, aroused by the fear and misunderstanding that had come to mark Godard’s relationship with Karina. His uncertainty at home was a calamity so great that he could attribute it only to a world-historical catastrophe.

L
E
N
OUVEAU
M
ONDE
introduces two elements into Godard’s films that remained tenaciously present in the decades to come: the Beethoven string quartets and his own handwriting. Instead of commissioning music for the film, Godard used excerpts from Beethoven’s late string quartets—in particular, the Grosse Fuge and his final quartet, opus 135. It was music that he put forth as a lasting challenge to the moral compromises and empty banalities of the moment.
Le Nouveau Monde
was the first film of Godard’s twenty-five-year devotion to the Beethoven quartets as an element, even a building block, of his films. The other element, the image of Godard’s own handwriting on-screen, also served a fundamental purpose: it was his way of recording his presence and his thoughts on-screen without appearing as an actor. Since the time of the unrealized reformulation of
Eva
, Godard had wanted to film a writer writing, on-camera. Here, he found a way to do so.

Le Nouveau Monde
has never received the recognition it deserves because it remains largely unseen.
RoGoPaG
, the compilation of four short films in which it was included,
⁶⁸
was completed in 1963, but was never released theatrically in France, where Godard’s segment was first viewed on television in 1980.
RoGoPaG
was shown in its entirety at the first New York Film Festival in September 1963; it was received indifferently by critics and Godard’s sequence was booed by the audience, perhaps because of its apparent trivializing of nuclear apocalypse.

G
ODARD’S
C
OSTLY ABANDONMENT
of
Pour Lucràce
in September 1962 had a paradoxical benefit. After his return from Karina’s
Scheherazade
shoot in Spain, Godard approached Cocinor-Marceau, the distributor who had paid an advance on that project, and proposed, as compensation, a new and more conventional project: it would have a screenplay—and by Rossellini.
⁶⁹
In this way Godard was able to resurrect his plan to make
Les Carabiniers
. With advances from the distributor and its Italian partner supplementing funds from Beauregard and Ponti’s Rome-Paris Films, the project came back to life in mid-September, and the shoot was scheduled for the end of the year.

The pedigree of
Les Carabiniers
was exactly to Godard’s taste of the moment: it derived from the Brechtian theater but, with Rossellini’s association,
had the imprimatur of the cinema. It was precisely the peculiarity of that double heritage that made the film an awkward exception among Godard’s works.

As the project was advancing toward production, Godard spoke with interviewers from
Cahiers du cinéma
and told them the story of the film. It concerned two peasants who receive a draft notice from the carabiniers, the state police, who explain to them that in war, all is permitted—from stealing to killing, from petty thuggery to massacre. The peasants are suddenly enthusiastic and joyfully go to war in quest of booty. Then the war ends, and, as Godard said: