Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (35 page)

Godard’s relations with his producers were hardly better. Prior to the
shoot, Carlo Ponti had sought to replace Godard with Truffaut—as the latter recalled, because his recent
Jules and Jim
had done better than
Vivre sa vie
—but Truffaut refused.
³³
As for Joseph E. Levine, he later complained that throughout the shoot, Godard did not respond to his telegrams, which were mainly exhortations to Godard to make the film more erotic.

I
N THE FILM
, Godard has Paul express a desire to “return to the cinema of Griffith and Chaplin… at the time of United Artists.” According to Godard, this invocation meant two things: first, the union of “the industrial and aesthetic aspects of the cinema,”
³⁴
which foreshadowed his own venture into the business side (which he had tested out during
Vivre sa vie
). Second, the idea of “auteurs and actors who joined together to produce films”
³⁵
recalled the passionate partnerships he had formerly enjoyed as a young cinephile and critic.

Godard was now alone and suffered from his solitude. He missed the companionship, the constant discussion, and the common purpose he had known in the 1950s. During the making of
Contempt
, Godard spent lots of evenings in the offices of
Cahiers du cinéma
“to stay on top of things,” even though it seemed to Karina that he went there “as other men went to the café or to the pool hall.”
³⁶
Yet even there the sense of fellowship was mitigated: it was where he went in the hours when he was
not
shooting a film. Godard also keenly felt his solitude in the marriage: despite the appearance of working with his wife, he later claimed that he had grown apart from Karina because he “couldn’t talk about films with her.”
³⁷
On the set of
Contempt
in Capri, lonely and lashing out in frustration amid the organized chaos of a grand production, Godard sought to ease his solitude in the company of a visitor.

A young journalist from
L’Express
, Michel Vianey, who wanted to meet Brigitte Bardot, asked his editors to send him to Capri to report on the shoot. Vianey was no ordinary journalist, having had three novels published while still in his twenties. Godard welcomed him with unusual openness, as Vianey later recalled: “When I arrived, he came over, he said, ‘I need to talk to someone.’” One of the things Godard talked about was the “great solitude of the director,” because of the personal preoccupations of the cast and crew with such ancillaries as lunchtime and days off.
³⁸

Godard granted Vianey extraordinary access to the set. The resulting report, a cover story published in
L’Express
on May 30, 1963, featured long and revealing conversations with Godard, Lang, Palance, Bardot, and Piccoli, along with Vianey’s keen observations of life on a film set. Godard sent Vianey a telegram to compliment him on the article, and upon returning to Paris, invited him to lunch. Their connection proved inspiring: several years later, it contributed greatly to one of Godard’s projects. If the cinema did not
provide Godard with people who shared his interests, he would go outside the cinema to find them.

I
N ROME, GODARD’S
editor, Agnès Guillemot, began work while the shooting was still taking place.
³⁹
Godard had hoped to present the film at the Venice Film Festival in late August, where the previous year
Vivre sa vie
had won a prize. A cut was shown in midsummer 1963 to the festival’s new director, the critic and filmmaker Luigi Chiarini, as well as to several friends and journalists. The response was favorable: the film was invited to the festival, and several critics spread advance word of a noteworthy achievement.

The same cut was shown to the producers, and their response was quite different.
⁴⁰
Ponti and Levine complained that the film as edited seemed different to them from what they had seen during the shoot. In particular, Levine and his American colleagues were disappointed that Bardot was not shown in the nude often enough (in that cut, twice: sunbathing prone on the roof of the villa in Capri, with only a book covering her buttocks,
⁴¹
and again, from afar, swimming in the Mediterranean). The producers rejected the cut, and they also refused to allow it to be screened in Venice. Moreover, Bardot, who had until now been very supportive of Godard in his dealings with the producers, agreed with them that the film was not really finished and should not yet be shown.

Godard took his case to the industry, buying a two-page spread in the trade publication
Le Film français
to publish an open letter to Luigi Chiarini (“I apologize twenty-four times a second for the behavior of these people who saw fit to refuse your kind invitation”),
⁴²
and further took matters into his own hands, confiscating the edited work print (the spliced copy which would be the template for the finished film) and stapling the splices together, rendering it unprojectable. The producers threatened to reedit the film to their own satisfaction (which Ponti later actually did for the Italian release). Godard sent telegrams of protest to the producers, addressing them as “King Kong Levine” and “Mussolini Ponti,” and he threatened to take his name off the film (which he did for the Italian release). Bardot also threatened to take her name off the credits if they recut the film (a gesture that won her Godard’s lasting gratitude), but the producers refused to release Godard’s version, and the standoff frustrated them, because they were eager to begin to recoup their investment.

On October 8, on a sidewalk near the Champs-Elysées, Godard had a heated discussion with Ponti’s Paris representative, the sixty-nine-year-old Simon Schiffrin. Godard was arguing that the credits should appear in the film’s four languages. Schiffrin (who six months later won an Oscar as producer of the best documentary short, a film on Marc Chagall) agreed with
Ponti that Godard should be banned from the editing room. Godard slapped him twice in the face, and the elderly man fell backward. Schiffrin filed suit against Godard, and won: on February 12, 1966, Godard was sentenced to pay a fine of five hundred francs (one hundred dollars).
⁴³

Though the film was not yet finished, a lascivious advertising campaign featuring Bardot went up on the walls of the Paris métro on October 23. The producers were getting impatient, and soon Levine’s associates (or, as Godard said, his “yes-men”) approached the director in an attempt to reach an agreement on the editing of the film. Godard recalled:

“At the beginning of the film,” they said, “we want a scene with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, in bed, in the act of love. In the middle of the film, we want a scene with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, in bed, in the act of love. At the end of the film, we want a scene with Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot, in bed, in the act of love. That’s all.”

I began by refusing to show Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot making love.
⁴⁴
As for the Piccoli-Bardot scene in the middle of the film, it appeared to me almost impossibly absurd, because
Contempt
is precisely the story of a woman who detaches herself from her husband and refuses to sleep with him in the conjugal bed! So I refused to do this scene, but I said to them: “You’ve given me an idea; I’m going to do something the opposite of what you want, which will please you nonetheless.” The first scene they proposed, however, was quite in keeping with the spirit of the script, and I agreed.
⁴⁵

Godard’s agreement, however, came with a poison pill: an additional budget of 100,000 francs (twenty thousand dollars), which covered an exact studio replica of the apartment in Rome where he had filmed and which he was sure the producers would reject. To his surprise, they accepted; for her part, Bardot went along too, but with a caveat: that she have a body double for some shots. An eighteen-year-old cabaret dancer was paid six hundred francs for the job. The supplementary shoot took five days, and each day of shooting required the producers’ approval of the previous day’s rushes.

To conceal the sleight-of-camera, Godard coiffed the model in a blond Bardot-like “sauerkraut” wig the tousle of which nearly covers her face. (Discussing the film soon thereafter, Godard came close to admitting the presence of a body double for some shots when he claimed to have filmed Bardot at “her real age, 29 years old,” when “suddenly something happens and her face changes, you see a very young woman emerge, one of, I don’t know, 20 or maybe 22.”)
⁴⁶
For the first scene, Godard filmed a single long take of Bardot from the side, nude and supine on the bed, in dim light except for the highlights on her buttocks. Talking with Piccoli (who is dressed and wearing a hat),
she enumerates the parts of her body and asks him whether he loves all of them. He answers “yes” to each item on the list; she asks, “So you love me totally?” His answer: “Yes. Totally, tenderly, tragically.” In the editing room, Godard tinted the first third of the shot in blue, left the next part in white light, then tinted the last third red (the blue-white-red of the French flag, as if advertising Bardot’s rear end as a French national treasure).

The ribald scene is quite distinct from the rest of the film. Godard understood that “it doesn’t explain anything special and doesn’t change the meaning of the film.”
⁴⁷
Many critics who had little use for the rest of
Contempt
at least found this one scene to praise.
⁴⁸

The second nude scene, however—the one which Godard derived from the “idea” the producers gave him—is an extraordinary aesthetic conceit: at the moment that Camille flings herself on a sofa and disrobes (at a great distance) to let Paul make love to her, “but quickly,” Godard shows Bardot (or her double) again posed nude and face-down, on a sofa and on a bearskin rug, and intercuts these shots with flash-images of Camille and Paul from other parts of the film, as the characters, in overlapping voice-overs, recite passages from the novel as a sonic montage of interior monologues and erotic fantasies. This subjective collage—which was different from anything that Godard had done to date—is so well integrated into the couple’s long apartment scene that critics aware of Godard’s dispute with his producers were unable to identify a second supplementary nude scene.
⁴⁹

It is impossible to judge the box-office effect of the added scenes, but even critics who had privately viewed the first, unaugmented cut at a screening for the Venice festival officials sensed that
Contempt
was aimed at a wide audience.
⁵⁰
Godard acknowledged that the film was “a little more normal” than his others.
Contempt
was the closest thing to a conventional movie that Godard had made, and he knew it. Whatever his producers may have thought of
Contempt
, Godard had fulfilled their commission; it is a far less radical work of art than
Breathless or Vivre sa vie
. In 1985, Godard commented that it was “the only ‘classical’ film that [he] had the chance to make, within the system,” and he called it “a somewhat Hollywood-ish film.”
⁵¹
In 2000, he expressed his bewilderment that Contempt remains as popular as it does. (It was successfully re-released in France in 1981 and the United States in 1997, and was called by the critic Colin MacCabe in 1996 “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe”.)
⁵²
Godard suggested that the film’s lasting renown is due precisely to its conventionality: “It’s because it’s a twopenny novel, it has a ‘cheap novel’ side.”
⁵³

Nonetheless, Contempt is a significant achievement, primarily as a reflexive commentary, as an expression of Godard’s own view of the cinema. Set in the ruins of two classical eras, the age of Homer and the age of the Hollywood
studios,
Contempt
is Godard’s first film of cultural nostalgia. Expanding on the sense of a culture threatened with imminent disappearance, a theme first exposed in
Le Nouveau Monde
, Godard dramatizes that possibility in action in Contempt. The film begins in the desolate wreckage of Prokosch’s studio in Cinecittà, where the producer laments that the property has been sold and a department store will be built there. When he declares, “It is my last kingdom,” his secretary’s “translation” is, “C’est la fin du cinéma” (it’s the end of the cinema).

This remark is not too different from what Godard told an interviewer in 1961: “Chabrol, I know, would like to make a picture in the Hollywood way, and so would I, because everything runs smoothly… except the producer. I’m sorry that Hollywood is dead now.”
⁵⁴
As Godard explained at the time of the release of Contempt, “The dream of the New Wave when we were film critics, when we started to make films, and my own dream, personally, was to shoot—and it’s my dream to this day—was to shoot a five-million-dollar film on the big stage at MGM, in Hollywood. But it’s a dream that I will never realize… because the big stage no longer exists.”
⁵⁵

The Young Turks of
Cahiers
had come to know the American cinema in its postwar years of independent production, when many directors enjoyed a freer hand than in the prewar studio productions. It rightly seemed to them a sort of new Golden Age. That age, however, was short-lived. “Our tragedy,” Godard said, “was thinking that we were coming in the middle of something when in fact we were coming at the end of it.”
⁵⁶
Godard accurately understood that the rise of the New Wave coincided with the demise of the studio system. The year 1960 seems to have been something of a divide,
⁵⁷
after which the careers of many of the most important Hollywood directors, including those “discovered” and celebrated by the critics at
Cahiers
—Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Joseph Mankiewicz, Budd Boetticher, Fritz Lang—went into decline or ended altogether.
Contempt
is an elegy for the classical heights, in which the ancient Greek era appears like a palimpsest through the vanished age of Hollywood.
⁵⁸