Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (5 page)

The French film industry, and its unions, which were largely affiliated
with the Communist Party, protested vehemently that the accord would result in a drastic decrease in local film production. At an emergency meeting of industry notables, the actor Louis Jouvet warned, “The alteration in our public’s taste would be irremediable and mortal. Raised on wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux, our stomachs will have to become accustomed to Coca-Cola.”
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A headline in the Communist daily
L’Humanité
trumpeted, “The Franco-American Accords Condemn the French Cinema to Death.”
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According to
L’Humanité
’s (unsigned) report on the emergency meeting, “Evoking the struggle of the Resistance, the well-known artist André Luguet energetically called for unity against the Blum-Byrnes accords.”
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Communist opposition to the presence in France of American movies soon intensified, for reasons having little to do with the cinema. When de Gaulle resigned as head of the postwar government in January 1946, he precipitated the founding of the Fourth Republic, by referendum, on October 13, 1946.
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The new parliamentary system produced chronically unstable governments: in its twelve years of existence, it yielded twenty-two heads of state, only two of whom stayed in power for a year, and two of whom lasted as few as two days. Until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Communist Party was the leading vote-getter in France, receiving between 26 and 28 percent of the vote.

Yet, in the spring of 1947, under American pressure, the French government dismissed its Communist ministers (and was rewarded with the Marshall Plan). From that point on, the Communists resisted American films even more ferociously, as seen in
L’Humanité:

THE CAMPAIGN OF LIES AND OF DEMORALIZATION BY AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

As for American films, the invasion of which was facilitated by the accords signed by Blum in Washington at the sacrifice of the French film industry, they strive toward the same goal: depraving our children by the glorification of gangsterism or erotic images, propagating the spirit of submission to the great benefit of religiosity.
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Like many other movie enthusiasts in Paris, however, Jean George Auriol—founder and editor of
La Revue du cinéma
, the ambitious and sophisticated movie magazine that he had put out from 1928 to 1931 and that he brought back to life in 1946 under the aegis of France’s most renowned literary publisher, Gallimard—thought otherwise:

As for me, I’ve seen hundreds of American films, and everyone knows more or less what they represent in comparison to a French work: something lively, active, palpitating, diverting, often tonic, sometimes extravagant. A product that is exciting, like champagne, coffee, or tea, in short, one of the rare gifts that our civilization can still offer us.
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Of the American films that had been embargoed during the war, none aroused more eager anticipation in Paris than Orson Welles’s first feature,
Citizen Kane
. But when it was finally shown in Paris in 1946, Sartre took it upon himself to take the Wunderkind’s reputation down a notch. Writing in
L’Ecran français
(The French Screen) in 1946, Sartre praised Welles’s damning portrait of the plutocrat as an act of “anti-fascism,” but he blamed the director for abandoning the “realist naiveté” of prewar Hollywood, asking, “Doesn’t this film move us away from the cinema in general?” Though he recognized Welles’s innovations in cinematic composition (“découpage”) and technique, he nonetheless condemned them, declaring that Welles’s characters were “presented in an intellective order” and thus were “dead”: “The technical discoveries of the film are not designed to render life.” Sartre saw in the popular American cinema a model for an authentically popular socialist realism for left-wing artists to adopt, and blamed Welles for not advancing it: “Since he isn’t rooted in the masses and since he doesn’t share their concerns, he will make an abstract, intellectual, conceptual film.” Sartre’s criticism was summed up in his finger-wagging warning: “For us,
Citizen Kane
is not an example to follow.”
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At least, not for French filmmakers who would come up to Sartre’s standards for “engaged” artists.

The most significant response to Sartre came from a young critic, André Bazin, whose essay, “The Technique of
Citizen Kane
,” Sartre himself published in
Les Temps modernes
in 1947.
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Bazin praised the film for what he considered its singular artistic richness, and argued that Welles achieved this richness mainly by his use of the deep-focus technique. Bazin claimed that Welles, through this device, reinvented his art form “as Malraux, Hemingway, Dos Passos reinvented their own to their own ends.” Indeed, his defense of the film depends mainly on his interpretation of Welles’s reliance on this figure of style, which he described as “an endorsement of integral realism, a way of making reality homogeneous, of treating it as indivisible.” Thus Bazin argued, in exact contradiction to Sartre, that Welles’s methods were better suited to render life than any preceding ones, and that it was Welles’s ability to do so which comprised his, and the film’s, greatness.

Bazin, born in 1917, had planned a career as a teacher of literature but was kept from the classroom by his stuttering. Instead, he became an unofficial but enormously influential teacher of the cinema. A left-wing Catholic, he organized wartime film screenings and discussions for Work and Culture, a workers’ education group that was affiliated with a labor union but was nonetheless officially tolerated by the German occupiers. Bazin’s screenings
and his extraordinary post-screening discussions attracted crowds, and served as a model for the film clubs that sprang up throughout France after the Liberation. Meanwhile, during the war and the German occupation—under which, as a result of German policy, French filmmaking flourished—Bazin had begun to write film criticism,
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and after the war he published substantial and influential articles in
La Revue du cinéma
and
Les Temps modernes
.

Bazin’s theoretical writings, which were launched in 1945 with the essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” revolved around his conception of the relation of image to reality—as he conceived it. He argued that, in photography, “an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.” He claimed that photography “affects us like a phenomenon in nature”—and defined the cinema as “objectivity in time.”
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Before Bazin, leading film theorists (most crucially, Sergei Eisenstein) had argued that the essence of cinema was the editing of film, the sequential ordering of different images in order to generate mental effects in the viewer. Bazin, however, asserted that film editing techniques serve mainly to falsify reality by breaking up space and time. Instead, he advocated the use of long, continuous shots in order to preserve spatial and temporal continuity; thus he extolled
Citizen Kane
’s deep-focus technique, which permitted many planes of action to be seen clearly in a single frame and allowed them to unfold in a single uncut shot. Bazin evinced an extraordinary faith in the authenticity of the photographic and cinematic image, as well as an extraordinary humility before its power.

It is hard to imagine, however, that a critic who advocated the filmmaker’s nonintervention and the effacement of the filmmaker’s personality in favor of the “automatic” working of the camera could be much of an inspiration to fiery young aspiring artists. Indeed, another young critic, who, unlike Bazin, dreamed of making films, took up the charge of arousing a more inspiring and active view of the cinema—and this young critic’s work got the teenage Godard’s attention and aroused his interest.

M
AURICE
S
CHÉRER, BORN
in 1920, was a high school teacher, a novelist, and a film enthusiast who, in a trio of articles (one in
La Revue du cinéma
in 1948 and two in
Les Temps modernes
in 1948 and 1949), attempted to formulate an ambitious and comprehensive theoretical definition of the cinema that differed radically from Bazin’s. In the first article, “Cinema, the Art of Space,” Schérer rejected Bazin’s emphasis on the representation of three-dimensional space within an image. Instead, Schérer argued that objects
within that space, especially the “objects” known as actors, generated increased “meaning” from the way that a director placed them in space by means of film editing: “Movements and gestures whose meaning seemed contingent are in a sense—by their insertion into a certain spatial universe—grounded in necessity.”
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In the second article, “For a Talking Cinema,” Schérer called attention to a film’s dialogue as one of the crucial elements that actors bring to life in the film’s “spatial universe.”
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In the third, “We No Longer Love the Cinema,” Schérer prophesied a new generation of film artists that his principles would spawn:

We begin to envy the task that awaits the future filmmaker who…, in orienting our attention, as in the earliest days of the silent film but doubtless more subtly, toward the
acting
of the actor, will construct the basis of his new language out of the rich conjunction of their [
sic
] words, their expressions, their gestures and their movements.
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What was at stake was not merely theoretical or academic: Schérer was attempting to express his own experience of the cinema, his own ambitions, and his own tastes. He loved many films which are recognized to be classics but that Bazin, with his particularly literal concept of realism, dismissed. In his writings, Schérer explained the aesthetic virtues of a range of films neglected by Bazin, including those of Buster Keaton, many German “expressionist” films (especially F. W. Murnau’s), and such recent American productions as the films of Preston Sturges, Jean Renoir (who had been active in Hollywood during and after the war), and, especially, Alfred Hitchcock (who, Bazin wrote in 1950, had “taken us in”).

In practice, Schérer regularly put his enthusiasms on display at the Cinéma-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), founded in 1947–48 by one of his students, Frédéric Froeschel. Schérer was the club’s animating spirit and intellectual leader, and in practical terms, the moderator of its vigorous public debates after screenings. Having read Maurice Schérer’s essays, Jean-Luc Godard began to frequent the CCQL.

Schérer, whose family was unaware of his practical activity in the field of cinema, adopted a pseudonym on the masthead of the CCQL’s journal,
La Gazette du cinéma
. Indeed, Schérer’s writings, with their emphasis on the speech and gestures of actors, foretold the films that he would make under that pseudonym—Eric Rohmer. Because of his important subsequent career as a filmmaker, the pseudonym ultimately usurped his given name.

A
T THE
CCQL and the Cinémathèque, Godard met another young regular at the screenings, François Truffaut. Born in 1932, Truffaut had dropped out
of school at age fourteen, in 1946, in order to devote his time to watching films. In 1948, he attempted to found his own cinéma-club, the Cercle Cinéma-mane (The Cinemanic Circle), with little money and disastrous results. He proved unable to draw many cinémaphiles to his Sunday-morning screenings, because of competition at the same hour from the screenings of Bazin’s Work and Culture cinéma-club (which Godard, a member, frequented).
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The teenage Truffaut had the audacity to ask Bazin, a central figure in French film culture, to change his screening times. Though Bazin turned Truffaut down, he found the young enthusiast sympathetic and invited him to visit again.

This encounter would soon prove fortuitous for Truffaut. To keep his club afloat, Truffaut borrowed money from his father’s colleague, then stole and sold a typewriter from his father’s office—an incident later refashioned in his first feature film,
The 400 Blows
—to pay off his debt. Truffaut’s father forced him to confess to his misdeeds in writing, and then conveyed the young man, and the confession, to the nearest police station.

From January to March 1949, Truffaut was confined in a juvenile detention center; a psychologist’s consultation with André Bazin proved decisive in his release. Bazin vouched for Truffaut and, upon his release, hired him at Work and Culture as his personal secretary. Meanwhile, Truffaut kept up his moviegoing habits. At the Objectif 49 film festival held in Biarritz in July–August 1949, a kind of counter-Cannes begun by Bazin, Jean Cocteau, and others, Truffaut encountered Rohmer and, upon his return to Paris, began to attend the CCQL screenings and to partake vociferously in the post-screening discussions. His most vigorous debate partner, and soon his friend, was a young man three years his elder, Jacques Rivette.

Soon after arriving in Paris in late 1949 at age twenty-one, with years of cinéma-club experience from his native Rouen behind him and his 16mm film,
Aux Quatre Coins
(To the Four Corners) in hand, Rivette found his way to the CCQL to hear Rohmer, whose writings he knew and admired. Soon, Rivette too became a regular in the post-film debates and quiz-competitions, at which, according to Rohmer, he was “unbeatable.”
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