Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (40 page)

Godard had always integrated documentary into his fictions, but
The Married Woman
actually shows documents in the literal sense. Having first tried out this strategy in
Le Nouveau Monde
, he relies on it amply in
The Married Woman
to embody his main idea: that the image- and word-drone of advertising and media are in control of the modern mind—in particular, of the married woman’s mind—and that they insidiously plant in her and her peers a dangerous ideology, namely, the ideology of pleasure. Godard intersperses such documents throughout the film, mainly advertisements from magazines, but also ones from billboards, posters, neon signs, and other product logos—as well as related phenomena, such as characters speaking dialogue that Godard takes directly from advertising slogans or sales brochures, models cavorting salaciously for a fashion photographer, and sinuously alluring pop music.

These elements dominate a single bravura sequence in the middle of the film, in which Charlotte, during a visit to the swimming pool to meet colleagues involved in a photo shoot, sits at a table in a café and reads a copy of
Elle
. As two girls at a nearby table discuss their hesitant steps toward a sex life, Godard shows the magazine’s contents, in extreme close-up, as the pages slowly turn to reveal a plethora of gauzily seductive lingerie advertisements. Shortly thereafter, Godard pushes this method to its limits: the entire two-minute-and-forty-second duration of a pop song on the sound track—“Quand le film est triste” (When the Film Is Sad), sung by Sylvie Vartan—is accompanied on-screen by a montage of magazine advertising images choreographed in geometrically rigorous panning shots that move vertically and horizontally to show bulges in men’s bathing suits, women in corsets and brassieres, garter belts strapped over inner thighs, heads tilted back in delight to show well-formed cleavages, lips parted to receive lipstick, an endless procession of lace and gauze and curved and shaded flesh—and the eroticized and suggestive phrases printed to accompany them: “to please”; “beauty truth”; “scandal”; “youth”; “a love that…”

Godard described the point of this sequence:

If I have shown… the place that magazine advertisements occupy in the life of this woman, it’s because certain forms of advertising are going so far as to become people’s own thoughts. The models that are proposed to people are becoming identical with the people themselves. Even their sex life is not their own, it’s already displayed on the walls. People’s existence is no more than the reflection of what they see, their freedom is a prefabricated thought.
¹¹

The profusion of images from the popular press, set to the bouncy charm of light rock, and the comical liveliness of the advertising copy mouthed by Pierre and Robert (extolling a luxury housing development, praising an electronic posture belt, “a French invention, perfected by Swiss specialists” that Charlotte borrows to “develop the bust”) suggest, in their bubbly yet pathetic forms of popular expression, the enthusiastic playfulness of Pop Art. As such, Godard helped to inaugurate a poetry of the banal.

But unlike Pop artists, Godard did not revel in, or puckishly accept, the artifacts of mass culture or the impulses they expressed. Not only did he condemn the ideology of pleasure that he found celebrated in the popular media, but he offered as the explicit rebuttal to such blithe emptiness, the contemplative sobriety of high culture. Despite a rueful smile at the effluvia of popular culture, Godard held up Beethoven’s quartets and Racine’s dramas as models and guardians of aesthetic morality and moral aesthetics. As he told an interviewer:

The characters in
The Married Woman
are ordinary people who do traditional things in a world that has made them ordinary. But they are not unhappy. They have nothing but psychological reflexes. Something in them has disappeared. It’s a film in which something is missing. But this something is the subject of my film, the something that has been lost and must be found again… What they lack is conscience.
¹²

The underlying story of
The Married Woman
is the woman’s rise to conscience—and for Godard, the proof of its onset is her decision, after having learned of her pregnancy, to leave her lover and return to her husband. Charlotte’s decision is foreshadowed moments earlier as she reads aloud with her lover, the actor, lines from Racine’s
Bérénice
, a play in which Titus chooses his royal duty over his desire for Bérénice: “How will we bear it, my lord, that so many seas will keep me apart from you, that the day will begin and end without Titus being able to see Bérénice?” Charlotte’s decision—hinted at by her tears and deftly delivered with the movie’s last words, “C’est fini” (It’s over), followed by the resolute final phrase of the last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet—is her liberation, her ascendance to a self-awareness that she had lacked throughout the film.

O
N
D
ECEMBER
20, 1963, twenty-two officials and guards of the Auschwitz concentration camp went on trial in Frankfurt. The trial, which lasted until August 1965 and ended with eighteen convictions and four acquittals, featured a factually and emotionally overwhelming weight of evidence, provided by 359 witnesses, 211 of whom were survivors of Auschwitz. Despite the sharply detailed recollections of the witnesses, none of the accused admitted their crimes, and their defense attorneys attempted to shake the survivors’ testimony on cross-examination.

In France, the Frankfurt proceedings were widely, sometimes luridly, reported in the press and were featured on many television programs. Yet the prompting of memory was matched by an ongoing calculated forgetting: maintaining the official myth that liberated France was a nation of resisters, France had not officially acknowledged its national role in deporting Jews from its territory to German concentration camps during the Second World War. In 1956, French censors compelled Alain Resnais to alter a shot in his film
Night and Fog
that showed the cap of a French gendarme who was overseeing a group of deportees assembled at a concentration camp in France.
¹³
Maurice Papon, who, as the chief of police in Bordeaux during the war, had personally signed orders of deportation of Jews, was the chief of police in Paris in the 1960s.

Godard introduced the Auschwitz trial into
The Married Woman
as a way of inserting his view of another sort of forgetting that, he suggested, had taken hold in France—the conjoined failures of historical and personal
memory that resulted from the world of mass media and the ideology of gratification.

When Charlotte meets her husband, Pierre, and the film director Roger Leenhardt at the airport, the two men have just returned from Frankfurt, where they observed the trial. Leenhardt mentions it to Charlotte:

L
EENHARDT
: You’ve heard of Auschwitz?
C
HARLOTTE
: Oh, yes, thalidomide?
L
EENHARDT
: No, not exactly. You know… it’s that old story, Auschwitz.
C
HARLOTTE
: Oh, yes… Hitler, yes.
L
EENHARDT
: Today, in Germany, I said to someone: “How about if tomorrow, we kill all the Jews and the hairdressers?” He answered, “Why the hair-dressers?”
C
HARLOTTE
: Yes, why the hairdressers?

The subject of the threesome’s after-dinner discussion is the Holocaust, in particular the difficulty commemorating it. Godard has Pierre tell a strange anecdote about a group of former concentration camp inmates who marched a decade later in their prisoners’ garb and the absurdity of their making such a demonstration when they were obviously well-fed and comfortable. The tale suggests that Godard was making an uneasy distinction—which he would later reassert in other films and remarks—between the Holocaust as historical abstraction and the Jews who were its victims and survivors.

The subject of the conversation soon shifts to a theme that was then central to Godard: the question of memory in general, and in particular its implications for the betrayed husband and the unfaithful wife. Pierre tells Charlotte that he “remembers everything” about their life together, though, recalling her earlier infidelity, says: “Of course there are things that I’d like to forget, but…” Charlotte, by contrast, says that “memory is no fun, the present is more important,” and explains why she feels that way: “In the present, I don’t have the time to reflect, I can’t think.” She seeks sensation without reflection, and, in her affair with Robert, she gets it. By connecting the couple’s discussion of memory, conscience, and infidelity to the theme of Auschwitz, Godard likens Charlotte’s unreflective fealty to pleasure to complicity in crimes against humanity.

When Charlotte and her lover, Robert, join up at Orly Airport for their final tryst, they meet in the darkness of the movie theater there (to avoid the detectives she thinks her husband might have hired to follow her); the movie playing there is
Night and Fog
. The couple find each other in the dark and caress each other as Godard offers Resnais’s images of the camp’s towers and barbed wire and clips from the sound track featuring phrases from the writer
(and concentration camp survivor) Jean Cayrol’s commentary, which seem harshly apt for the lovers’ Faustian bargain.

Even a peaceful landscape, even a prairie with crows flying above, with harvests and hay fires, even a road with passing cars, peasants, couples, even a vacation village with a fair and a steeple, can lead very simply to a concentration camp.

For Godard, the lovers’ adulterous embrace in a dark theater suggests the banality of evil.

G
ODARD MADE
sure that the viewer knew that, like Charlotte’s husband, Pierre, he forgot nothing. Godard himself whispered on the sound track and interspersed throughout the film a series of phrases that hint at the married woman’s thoughts:

I hesitate. The following morning. He didn’t know. In the clouds. Getting undressed. In your place, I wouldn’t go. Tuesday afternoon. Very quickly. For several days. In January’ 64. And besides, it amuses me. It’s nerves. Free of that hope. Nothing had changed. One last time. The new apartment. The telephone rings. It was a nice day. Neither to him nor to anyone. What good would it do? We’ll go wherever you want. It had stopped raining. We heard nothing. One has to choose. At first, I said nothing.

These apparently haphazard gatherings of apposite phrases were Godard’s version of Charlotte’s stream of consciousness. It was as if he were sharing with an intimate stranger the self-lacerating confidences of what he had heard, seen, or imagined from his life together with Anna Karina.

Macha Méril noted Godard’s unrequited obsession with Karina and recalled that, throughout the shoot of the film, Godard’s secretary, Patricia Finaly, played the go-between.

Godard wrote [Karina] letters every day, and [Finaly] was supposed to bring back letters that Anna had written to him—but she never wrote him a single one. For Godard it was like a bone stuck in his throat. He never understood what had happened, it had come on him from the outside.
¹⁴

The Married Woman
puts on fulsome display that “outside,” namely, the world of exhortations and incitements to illicit pleasure conjured up by advertising. Godard could only assume that, were Karina authentically free, liberated from the false consciousness of media propaganda, she would discover within
herself her authentic nature, her true desire, her natural virtue, and would come back to him.

T
HE STRIKING NEW
aesthetic with which Godard renewed the personal aspect of his art was not lost on the sophisticated viewers in the front lines of advocacy for the film.

The generation that had recently come to the fore at
Cahiers du cinéma
during Rivette’s tenure was perched on the leading edge of Parisian cultural and cinematic thought. The cinema and the city’s intellectual life were more congruent than ever. By the early 1960s, the auteurist ardor of
Cahiers
’s former Young Turks had been validated by the artistic triumphs of their films (and despite box-office failures): the tastes and habits of the New Wave directors in their youth—extreme moviegoing, a love for classic American cinema, the high-toned discussion of ostensibly popular movies—were now common coin among serious young French people. Much of this had to do, again, with Henri Langlois.

In early 1955, Langlois had been informed that the Cinémathèque would have to leave its small quarters in the avenue de Messine, which was in an isolated residential part of Paris.
¹⁵
The new screening room, on the rue d’Ulm, was many times larger than the old one (with approximately 250 seats as opposed to nearly sixty) and was also in the middle of the Latin Quarter, a neighborhood crowded with schools and universities, cafés and nightlife, and, of course, young people.
¹⁶
The new space and setting encouraged Langlois to put on increasingly ambitious programs: his Ingmar Bergman retrospective in 1957 revealed the director to the French public, and his invitation to Louise Brooks to present a retrospective of her films in 1958 was, as she said, “the first time I had heard anything about myself in thirty years.”
¹⁷
Buster Keaton was similarly moved by the twenty-minute ovation he received at the Cinémathèque’s 1962 retrospective.
¹⁸
In the early 1960s, a ticket for any of the three nightly shows at the Cinémathèque was tough to get.