Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (52 page)

When I think… that he also intends to ask me questions before the camera, without any preparation, live, my armpits start to sweat…

   “It’s very simple,” he says, “I’ll ask you a question through an actor and you respond very naturally. Birth control, for instance, what do you think about birth control? If you don’t know what it is, say so, ask for an explanation. Really, it’s very simple.”
¹⁸

Godard constructed the story to allow for such on-screen conversations. He broke the action down into fifteen discrete sequences, which he called “precise facts.” The scenes were planned around simple locations (cafés, an apartment in the Grenelle neighborhood, an elevated métro line, the offices of Filipacchi’s
Pariscope
)
¹⁹
with a minimum of characters, extras, and props. Each sequence was structured around simple activities—entrances and exits to and from cafés, laundromats, offices, apartments—and left ample leeway for discussions and digressions. There was little in the way of preparation or rehearsal to distract the actors from the task at hand, which was, above all, to be themselves.

On Monday, November 22, Chantal Goya came to the first day’s location, a café at the Porte des Lilas: “I tried to find out where the makeup woman was: there wasn’t one. I was stupefied to find neither spotlights nor floodlights. They were filming with natural light: just the light of the café.”
²⁰

The next day, the crew moved to another café on the periphery of Paris to film the movie’s first scene, which efficiently and movingly set up the fault lines of the drama: Léaud is seen sitting by himself at a table and writing a poetic and paradoxical rumination on his solitude and on “talking for twenty-four straight hours,” which he slowly recites aloud as he composes it. The moment, of an intense bohemian romanticism, is first undercut by Paul’s comical flip of a cigarette through the air to his lips, and then shifts when Madeleine, crisply dressed and coiffed, enters the café. Paul, who recognizes her as a friend of a friend, starts a conversation in which he admits his unemployment and asks whether she might help him find work at her magazine. (He also reads to her from his philosophical critique of his military service, a text that Godard took from a recent issue of
Les Temps Modernes
.)
²¹
Thus the ruminative, passionate intellectual and the practical, guarded career girl meet; the scene initiates Godard’s critical view of the world of modern youth as well as his poetic rhapsody on the dreams and fears of all youth.

T
HE LONG DIALOGUE
scenes around which Godard built
Masculine Feminine
were filmed (like those of
Vivre sa vie
) in extremely long takes. Most of the “interview” shots run over a minute or two, and one bravura shot, of an actual interview by Paul of a young woman crowned “Miss 19” for the eponymous magazine, ran more than six minutes.

Unlike
Vivre sa vie, Masculine Feminine
was filmed with an unadorned directness that looked the performers in the face as if in discussion with them; Godard no longer felt the need to prove his intellectual bona fides by filming the speakers from behind. Where the camera moves in
Vivre sa vie
called attention to themselves, now the style of filming emphasized the performers. If
Vivre sa vie
, with its elaborate text, was something of an oratorio,
Masculine Feminine
, with its largely improvised dialogue, was more of a work of journalism.

The film was made with an openness to chance and circumstance; Godard intended the production of
Masculine Feminine
to be both efficient and close to the reality he was filming. When an assistant suggested that the café telephone be disconnected during the shots, Godard replied that if the phone rang, the woman tending the counter should simply answer it (as indeed happened during a take that remains in the film). Godard filmed in Filipacchi’s
offices the same way, during business hours, with employees as extras, their telephone conversations preserved on the sound track.

T
HE FILM’S
highly charged mood of longing and intimate engagement with daily life, its blend of realism and romanticism, are due as much to the way it looks as to what it depicts. Respect for available light was among Godard’s and Raoul Coutard’s standard working methods, but
Masculine Feminine
was not shot by Coutard—who, after
Pierrot le fou
, took a break from Godard and was working with Tony Richardson on
The Sailor from Gibraltar
—but by Willy Kurant.

Born in 1934, Kurant was ten years younger than Coutard. Like Coutard, Kurant was primarily a documentary cinematographer, with almost a decade of experience on newsreels and documentaries in Africa and Vietnam; unlike Coutard, Kurant had done an apprenticeship with established movie cameramen as well, and despite the extraordinary quality and inventiveness of Kurant’s work, the vestiges of this apprenticeship spoiled his working relations with Godard.

The film was made with a heavy Mitchell camera, which, as in
Vivre sa vie
, enabled, indeed forced, Godard to compose his images with care. The camera was mounted on a rolling dolly, and Kurant would turn and tilt it by means of wheel-like cranks. He had never worked with such a device, but Godard told him not to worry: “We’ll start slowly.” Then, on the first day of the shoot, Kurant learned that he was to do what Vianey described as “a five-minute-long traveling shot with no other lighting beside the faded light of troubled waters that the steamy café windows dispense.”
²²
Kurant and the actors nailed the shot—in which Paul proposes marriage to Madeleine, and she defers answering—on the second take, and the day’s work ended at noon, but Godard rapidly turned on him.

Kurant was more risk-averse than Coutard. Working in the mainstream industry, he was accustomed to having more time to prepare shots. When he asked for details of a scene being set up, Godard answered, “Stop whining, for God’s sake, you’ll find out.”
²³
Kurant wanted the actors to rehearse for the camera, which Godard was disinclined to do. When a question of image quality caused him to interrupt a spontaneous interview shot, Godard exploded with anger.

Godard complained to Vianey, “Willy is very good, but too fearful and that annoys me. I’d like him to be more precise in his thoughts than in his technique….”
²⁴
As the shoot went on, Godard stopped speaking to Ku-rant altogether, instead passing his instructions to Kurant’s assistant, William Lubtchansky. The freeze-out ended, however, after Godard and
Kurant went to Stockholm together to work on the film-within-a-film based on “The Signal.” Upon their return to Paris, Godard became solicitous, meeting Kurant at the airport, taking him out to dinner, extending to him all sorts of courtesies on location. Yet the damage had been done: Kurant did not have as thick a skin as Coutard (who took pride in giving as good as he got in his fights with Godard), and despite his superlative work, he and Godard never teamed up again.

As it happens, Kurant’s methods were considered to be, in their way, as innovative as those of Coutard: for the little bit of lighting Godard allowed, Kurant placed lightbulbs behind tracing paper, under white umbrellas, or in front of white plastic reflectors, to raise the ambient light without harshening the shadows. The result was a muted winter effect that corresponded perfectly to the mood of the film and the days of the shoot. Kurant established a tonality of pale sun and softened shadows, a palette of grays evocative of the damp chill of the city’s glass and stone.

D
EVELOPING THE STORY
of romantic intimacy and wordly experience with close attention to his actors’ reality, Godard let them speak for themselves, except when he wanted them to get his own ideas across. In a long scene with Paul and Madeleine outside the bathroom of the magazine where they work (she succeeded in helping Paul find a job there), Godard filmed their responses to his questions and then had the actors, off-camera, repeat his questions, which were dubbed in. During their suddenly intimate talk about sex and romance, Madeleine asks Paul what he considers the center of the world; Paul (Léaud, unscripted) answers, “Love, I suppose,” while Madeleine (as prompted by Godard) says, “That’s funny, I would have said, ‘me.’”

The film drew on Chantal Goya’s pop-based rock music and the media scene surrounding it. Madeleine’s new single moves up the charts, and she is sought out by print and radio journalists. But Paul is a lover of classical music; he adores the Mozart Clarinet Concerto (which Godard had put in
Breathless
) and when Madeleine brings him a record signed by the pop star Sylvie Vartan, he responds, “I’d have preferred Bach.” With an antic, ridiculous rapidity, he reads aloud a breathlessly vapid piece of newspaper puffery written about Madeleine (leading her to believe that he’s mocking her and not the writing). Later, Madeleine, interviewed by a radio journalist, gladly declares herself a member of the “Pepsi generation.”

Saturating
Masculine Feminine
with the artifacts, trends, and moods of the moment, Godard made it both a kind of documentary on its actors and on the times in which it was made. Godard tied his characters to the concerns of the day, making current events the stuff of their private lives. He
did this with form as well as content: through the skillful use of dedramatization, of having his characters talk about events taking place off-screen, he was able to stay close to his characters while conjuring the world around them.

In fact, Godard reshaped the story to admit the documentary element: Paul changes jobs midway through the film and becomes an interviewer for a polling firm. (The idea was borrowed from a notable new first novel,
Les Choses
[Things], by the twenty-nine-year-old Georges Perec, who, with a documentary audacity akin to Godard’s own, subtitled his book
A Novel of the 1960s
.)
²⁵
As part of his new job, he interviews “Miss 19” with remarkable results: she resists talking about birth control, knows nothing about politics, and speaks freely about her materialistic hopes and dreams. Godard asserts his own view of the proceedings with a title card: “Dialogue with a Consumer Product.”

In filming young people, Godard was also filming representatives of a generation, and he constructed the film as a “sociological” attempt to define that generation, summing up his findings on-screen in a trio of title cards: “This film could be called / The children of Marx Coca-Cola / Understand who will.” The now-famous phrase
²⁶
is not as straightforward as it seems, because it leaves open the question whether these children are the product of Marx and Coca-Cola both, or whether there are two different groups—that is, the children of Marx and the children of Coca-Cola. Godard himself glossed it both ways:

I no longer have any connection to my elders, who are the children of the Liberation, nor to my juniors, who are the “children of Marx and of Coca-Cola.”

That’s the name I give them in the film. They are influenced by socialism—taken in a very modern economic sense—and by American life. The class struggle is no longer the same as we were taught in books. Formerly, “Mrs. Marx” could not be married to “Mr. Coca-Cola.” Today we see lots of households like that.

One can say that Jean-Pierre Léaud (the boy) and Chantal Goya (the little
yé-yé
[pop] singer) represent the left and the right, respectively.
²⁷

Masculine Feminine
was made under the express sign of contemporary politics, with its first title card declaring the film to be “one of the 121 French talking films of which only 3 or 4 are made” (the number 121 being instantly recognizable as an allusion to the “Manifesto of 121” of 1960, in which intellectuals called for resistance to the Algerian War). In one sense,
Masculine
Feminine
is even more political than
Le Petit Soldat
, in that it refers to the specific political events that took place while the film was being shot—mainly, the presidential election of December 5, 1965, the first direct vote for a French head of state since 1848.
²⁸

The French staked out a remarkably short electoral season: François Mitterrand was appointed the candidate of the “unified left” (including the Communist Party) only in October, and Charles de Gaulle himself, the incumbent, did not officially declare his candidacy until November 4, thirty-one days before the election.

“Times had changed,” Paul says in voice-over. “This was the era of James Bond and of Vietnam. A great wave of hope had arisen among the French left with the approach of the December elections.” Paul and his friend Robert express their own hope as they travel around Paris putting up posters for Mitterrand, yet, filming young people, Godard kept their activities in an exuberantly youthful vein, with the politics coming through as well in obscene pranks, adolescent humor, and shaggy-dog stories. In the young women’s apartment, Catherine and Paul play with a toy guillotine, which Godard photographs in close-up while the sound track resounds with the oratorical thunder of a speech by André Malraux at a rally for de Gaulle. Later, Paul spray-paints an election slogan in huge, slovenly letters on the blank wall behind a movie theater—“DE GAULLE = UBU” (the ludicrous despot of Alfred Jarry’s play
Ubu Roi
)—but French censorship required that the shot be trimmed before
UBU
could be completely spelled out.