Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (4 page)

Godard was not a frequent moviegoer in childhood (except during his stay in Vichy, where, he remembered, he often attended popular movies of the day)
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nor was he particularly attracted to the medium, except as casual entertainment. He attributed his introduction to the cinema as an art form to
reading—first from André Malraux’s essay, “Outline of a Psychology of Cinema,” which was originally published in
Verve
magazine in 1940, a copy of which his mother had saved and which he found by chance; and then
La Revue du cinéma
, which (after its first run of publication from 1928 to 1931) was relaunched in 1946, and which Godard read avidly despite being unable to see most of the films it discussed.
¹⁶

In 1946, Godard went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris, where he intended to prepare for specialized mathematics exams to enter engineering school. Instead, he began to watch an endless number of movies, and several of his relatives recalled that he had already begun to write screenplays. His mother was able to arrange an introduction for young Godard to one of the editors of
La Revue du cinéma
, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, who was the son of one of her childhood friends, though at the time nothing practical came of it.

Family connections afforded him a view of the most rarefied strata of artistic achievement and cultural sophistication that Paris had to offer. Through his grandfather’s associations, Godard was lodged in Paris with the writer Jean Schlumberger, a friend of André Gide, who was a frequent visitor. The sixteen-year-old Godard also accompanied the two older men to a celebrated recitation by Antonin Artaud at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on January 13, 1947.
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However, Godard failed his baccalaureate exam in 1948, and returned to Switzerland, where he studied at a high school in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He was already interested in the movies, and frequented a café in Geneva, the Parador, with a group of bookish adolescents that included Roland Tolmatchoff, also a film fanatic, who later recalled: “I was encyclopedic, I could tell you who the set designer of a little American film from the’ 30s was, so we gravitated to each other because of the cinema.”
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(Another member of the circle was an extreme-rightist philosopher, Jean Parvulesco.)
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Meanwhile, Godard’s older sister, Rachel, who was a talented artist (and ultimately became an art teacher), introduced him to modern art, and he tried his hand at painting, in an abstract style that was reminiscent of early Abstract Expressionism or the works of Nicolas de Staël. (His mother arranged for his canvases to be put on display at his father’s mountain clinic.)

Godard went to a boarding school in Thonon, near Grenoble, to cram for the retest, which he passed. Returning to Paris in 1949, he enrolled in “propédeutique,” the first year of studies at the Sorbonne, though Tolmatchoff recalled that Godard, who was already fanatical about movies, went with the intention of finding his way into the cinema. In Paris, Godard took courses in ethnology (in which he was awarded a “certificate”) and in “filmology” (a sociological and linguistic approach to films, championed by the critic Henri Agel), but soon abandoned his studies (later explaining that he
preferred “[Juliette] Gréco to Greek”).
²⁰
His family was ready to pay for him to study art, but he decided against it; he applied for admission to the most prominent Paris film school, IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinétographiques), but was rejected.
²¹

He watched movies instead, and frequented the most important place to see them in postwar Paris, a museum-like facility called the Cinéthèque.

T
HE
C
INÉTHÈQUE HAD
been founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936. Langlois, born in 1914 in Ottoman Smyrna, was already a film buff at age four. Moving to Paris with his family in 1922, he haunted its numerous movie theaters, and when he was seventeen years old—in the early days of talking pictures, when old prints of silent films were being discarded as obsolete—he started to collect these relics and declared that he was founding a museum for their preservation and projection. (After the war, Franju became an important director, beginning with his 1949 documentary
Le Sang des bêtes
[Blood of the Beasts].)

Langlois’s taste was remarkably wide-ranging and prescient. Though, in the 1930s, there were other film curators, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who sought to preserve silent films, Langlois rapidly went further. In 1939, Langlois—already an acknowledged expert—astonished MOMA’s film staff by declaring that a new film which he had just seen at a nearby theater, the popular
Only Angels Have Wings
, was sure to be recognized eventually as an enduring work of art and should be acquired for the museum’s collection at once. Like so many other Hollywood studio films of the sound era, this film, directed by Howard Hawks, has indeed come to be acknowledged as an artistic classic—and this recognition is due largely to Langlois’s advocacy.

The process, however, was gradual, and was delayed by World War II, when Langlois saved prints, such as those belonging to Jewish producers, from confiscation and destruction (with the covert help of a German officer in Paris, Frank Hensel, who was also a film buff), and also held clandestine screenings of films which were forbidden by the German occupiers.

After the Liberation, Langlois’s public screenings quickly became a focal point for film enthusiasts and artistic luminaries, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Braque, and André Breton. At his screening room on the avenue de Messine, they rediscovered films that had been rendered invisible by the war’s restrictions, along with classics, familiar and hidden, old and new, from world cinema. In order to show the films while circumventing France’s regulations concerning taxation and censorship (then, as now, films released in France were submitted to a review board for a “visa de contrôle”), Langlois—who also collected diverse forms of movie memorabilia, from classic posters to famous costumes—declared his collection
the Musée du cinéma (Museum of Cinema), which offered its screenings to museum visitors for a trivial surcharge added to its admission fee.

As a collector, Langlois was an omnivore; as a curator, he was a critic of genius; as a film lover, he was a visionary. He was not at all modest about his intentions: he wanted his Cinéthèque to be “a sort of center where people come as they are and then leave different.”
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He offered his habitués a history of cinema based less on chronology than on thematic connections between films. For instance, from October 12 to 30, 1950, the Cinéthèque offered a series of rare silent classics, including Feuillade’s
Vendémiaire
(1917), D. W. Griffith’s
One Exciting Night
(1922), and
The Overcoat
(1926), by Kozintsev and Trauberg, along with two postwar films by Dovzhenko, science documentaries by Jean Painlevé, unreleased films by Joris Ivens, a wartime film by Leni Riefenstahl, an American independent film called
The Quiet One
, by Sidney Meyers, about a troubled child and the school that rescues him, and
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
.

The creation of a new cinema was an inseparable part of Langlois’s self-appointed mission, and, not content with the passive viewing of his literary habitués, he also saw to their cinematic efforts, providing Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, and others with film stock for their own films (the one that has survived is Genet’s
Un Chant d’amour
[A Song of Love], from 1950). Yet his screenings were Langlois’s most important contribution to the creation of a future cinema. They offered young people a comprehensive overview of the cinema to date and oriented that history in terms of his own refined aesthetic taste; and Godard was one of the assiduous young habitués of the Cinéthèque whose enthusiasms Langlois cultivated.

T
HE POSTWAR
P
ARIS
in which Godard came of intellectual age was dominated by the influence of one thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). During the war, Sartre had written a philosophical treatise,
L’Etre et le néant
(
Being and Nothingness
), published in 1943, in which he displayed his newfound absorption in the work of Martin Heidegger. There, Sartre sought to define human existence in terms of history—though not, as Heidegger did, abstractly, but in terms of the specifics of social life and the practicalities of political action. Though this massive tome brought Sartre a quiet renown in academic circles, his wartime experience as a playwright, a screenwriter, a journalist, and an organizer of a resistance group led him to consider how he, as a writer, could play a role in the history of his times.

Sartre later described his impression of the opportunity that the Liberation offered: “At that moment, as a way of adapting to what was taking place, I conceived the idea of a total public, something that no previous writer could ever have had. The writer could have a total public if he said to the total public
what the total public itself thought, albeit not so well.”
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Immediately after the war, Sartre sought to achieve this identification of himself with a public that went far beyond élite literary circles: in order to become the defining thinker of his era, Sartre knew that he would need to become famous—and he understood that, as a result of the politicization of life during wartime, his postwar fame would continue to depend upon politics.

Starting in 1945, Sartre flooded Paris with his work. He cofounded with the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty a monthly intellectual journal,
Les Temps modernes
—a reference to
Modern Times
, by Charlie Chaplin, who exemplified the artist who was simultaneously profound, original, emblematic of his times, a left-wing social critic, and undeniably, irresistibly popular. Sartre inaugurated the first issue with his “Présentation” (Introduction), in which he asserted the intrinsically political aspect of his own work, and of writing as such, in the ideal of “engaged literature”:

The writer is situated in his era: each word has reverberations. Each silence too. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they did not write a line to prevent it. Some will say that it wasn’t their business. But was the trial of Calas Voltaire’s business? Was the conviction of Dreyfus Zola’s business? Was the administration of the Congo Gide’s business? Each of these authors, at a particular circumstance in their lives, determined their responsibility as writers. The occupation taught us ours. Since we act upon our times by our very existence, we decide that this action shall be willed.

On October 29, 1945, Sartre gave a lecture sponsored by Club Maintenant (The Now Club) titled “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” The event had been widely advertised; the hall was filled to capacity with a clamorous, at times rowdy, crowd; the speech was a raucous, much-reported success, and the printed text became an instant bestseller. As if overnight, in a success that almost a decade of philosophical and literary effort had prepared, Sartre became a celebrity and then an icon.

In the four years that followed, Sartre published fourteen books—novels, literary criticism, political commentary, plays, philosophical treatises, essay collections, transcribed colloquia—and generated a vast number of articles, interviews, radio broadcasts, journalistic reports, and public appearances. A public figure, indeed a world-renowned figure, as famous in the United States as at home, Sartre soon became something more: he became a brand name, exactly as planned.

In “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre explained that his philosophy, which had been accused by Communists of subjectivism and by Christians
of pessimism, was in fact “optimistic” and “a doctrine of action”—of political action which was favorable to the left. The conception of existentialism as humanism was, at the time, far from obvious: the bilious literary misanthropy of Sartre’s prewar novels was familiar, as was the Nazi affiliation of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who inspired Sartre’s conjunction of philosophy and history. (Heidegger had briefly served as the rector of the University of Freiburg in 1934 and had publicly praised Hitler and the Third Reich.) But Sartre, during the war, had cast his lot with the left, and now was, in effect, reprocessing Heidegger’s ideas in order to claim them for the left—and, at the same time, offering a new generation of leftists an avant-garde philosophy that seemed more exciting than another gloss on Marx.

As Sartre acknowledged, his sense of collective political enterprise, distilled in the notion of “engagement”—with political action as the defining trait of self-definition, and political inaction as a sin of omission—was a vestige of France’s moral crises of World War II. His theory, a kind of metaphysical prolongation of the war and its occupation and resistance, was a rejection of modern liberal democracy (and its baseline ballot-box form of political participation), which had failed to recognize the German menace and to protect France from it. Sartre intended the “engagement” of a writer to signify the obligation to take sides, to convert writing into action—specifically, into a form of political action as defined by the one particular type of political commitment that was implied by Sartre’s philosophy—on the far left.

In order to posit a prolonged resistance, the engaged thinker would also need to define it in opposition to a surrogate prolonged occupation. And the new occupation that Sartre perceived, and challenged, was American.

T
HE INFLUX OF
American films quickly became a contested issue in postwar France. The “deserted and famished Paris” that Sartre described on August 20, 1945,
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turned its eyes beseechingly to the last best hope for economic relief, the United States. Charles de Gaulle, France’s postwar leader, sent former prime minister Léon Blum to negotiate a package of debt relief and other direct and indirect economic aid with James Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state.
²⁵
The so-called Blum-Byrnes Accords, announced on May 28, 1946 (after the resignation of de Gaulle as president on January 20, 1946), assured France of various forms of financial assistance from the United States. A sidebar agreement, announced two days later, concerned the cinema: it required each French movie house to show four weeks of French films per quarter. Though the measure seemed designed to protect the French film industry, its practical effect—as Byrnes and Blum knew—was that for nine out of every thirteen weeks, each screen would show American movies.
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