Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (59 page)

fifteen.

LA CHINOISE, WEEKEND

“You need only become Marxist-Leninist”

A
NNE
W
IAZEMSKY HAD PASSED THE WRITTEN PART OF
her baccalaureat exam in June 1966, but had failed the oral section. She asked the philosophy professor Francis Jeanson (France’s leading activist for the FLN during the Algerian war) for private tutoring, which he gave her that summer—with Godard in attendance.
¹
Since his proposal of marriage had been rejected by Marina Vlady, Godard started spending more time with Wiazemsky. Passing the makeup exam in September, Wiazemsky enrolled at the university at Nanterre, a working-class suburb of Paris.

The university, which had been constructed to ease overcrowding at the Sorbonne and other Paris faculties, had opened its doors in 1964. The professors who were willing to move to a new school in a poor neighborhood tended to be leftists, as were many of its students. The predominant strain of politics among students was left-wing anarchist; their ideological demands rose to open conflict over local and intimate issues. Students who lived in the dormitories were frustrated by the lack of nightlife in Nanterre and the lack of community in the university’s modern, boxy dormitories and open concrete plazas. Parietal rules (which barred women from sleeping over in men’s dormitories and prevented men from setting foot in women’s dormitories) were viewed as anachronistic and repressive. Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse were more common intellectual references at Nanterre than Marx and Lenin.
²
Although the sociopolitical ferment was an expression of sexual tension and a rejection of sexual hypocrisy, it was expressed in more grandiose and classically political terms. Vehement meetings, protests, and fistfights between leftist and rightist students were normal
occurrences, and these clashes rapidly resonated throughout French society.

Wiazemsky and Godard became a couple. When he dropped her off and picked her up at Nanterre, he met some of her left-wing activist friends and witnessed the rise of political dissent among French youth. In late 1966, Godard offered a very public yet deeply veiled tribute to her that reflected the conjunction of romance, cinema, and politics. Earlier in the year,
Cahiers du cinéma
had published François Truffaut’s diary from the shoot of
Fahrenheit 451
(which, after long delays, was filmed at the beginning of 1966). This journal offered engaging anecdotes from the set but revealed nothing of his private life. Godard’s response, indirect but unmistakable, appeared in the November
Cahiers:
“Three Thousand Hours of Cinema,” an undated diary in which Wiazemsky is concealed under four literary names (Albertine, Gilberte, Alissa, and Chantal) but recognizable through his mention of such details as her study at Nanterre and her tutorials with Francis Jeanson—and recognizable, most importantly, to Wiazemsky herself. In this text, Godard wondered why
Cahiers
had delayed publishing long-awaited excerpts from Sergei Eisenstein’s writings. Was it, he asked, due to “an echo of the Sino-Soviet conflict, and the rise to power of the [Chinese] Red Guards in the heart of those who to me were Camille Desmoulins and Saint-Just?”
³
The allusion was to the young editors of
Cahiers
, who had begun to express left-wing partisanship along with their cinephilic enthusiasm. His suspicion pointed to a political phenomenon of a growing force on the French left: Maoism, which had begun to hold sway over the foremost intellectual youth of France.

In the early 1960s, China took a strong stand in favor of third-world revolution. As the French left concerned itself increasingly with the struggle for Algerian independence and opposed the war in Vietnam, a small but growing number of local Communists realigned themselves from the French party’s pro-Soviet orientation toward China and the doctrine and persona of Mao, whom they accepted as the authentic guarantor of “Marxism-Leninism.”
⁴
In the mid-1960s, a detachment of French Communists declared themselves Maoist, founded the “Mouvement communiste français (marxiste-léniniste),” and launched a newspaper,
Humanité nouvelle
. The most dynamic of French Maoists, however, were from the student milieu. Godard was interested in meeting them. Their circles were different from Wiazemsky’s at Nanterre, however, and he needed an introduction.

Godard’s connection was arranged by Yvonne Baby, a young film critic at
Le Monde
. Her father, Jean Baby, a former high official in the French Communist Party, was one of the first elder French Communists to have declared himself a Maoist, for which he had been expelled from the party. Her
mother, divorced from Jean Baby, had married Georges Sadoul, the film critic for
Les Lettres françaises
and also a longtime Communist. Yvonne Baby invited Godard to dinner along with her father, her mother, Sadoul, her own boyfriend (who happened to be the son of the late French actor Gérard Philipe), and one of her youngest colleagues at
Le Monde
, a literary critic named Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had gone to school with France’s leading student Maoists.

Godard told the assembled company that he wanted to make a film about the young Maoists, to be called
La Chinoise
(The Chinese Woman, a familiar nickname for Maoism). As Gorin later remembered, “Jean Baby seemed to have a precise idea of what a film called
La Chinoise
should be. It was classic socialist realism.” Gorin had other thoughts and, “talking about what political cinema could be or might be,” he “stole the show,” as he recalled—at least as far as Godard was concerned. “Afterward, on the way out, Godard said, ‘It would be great to see each other again,’ and we started to meet on an increasingly regular basis.”
⁵

F
RANCE’S MOST INTELLECTUALLY
vibrant group of Maoists attended the Ecole normale supérieure. The Ecole normale, founded in 1794, is, even now, France’s most prestigious liberal-arts educational institution. Until recently, admission required thorough mastery of Greek and Latin, and most applicants spent one or more years of study in a specialized lycée, or
khâgne
, to prepare for the entrance exam. In the 1960s, only forty students were admitted per year, and they—the presumptive future professors of France—received a stipend as civil servants as well as a dormitory room in the school’s building, on the rue d’Ulm, in the Latin Quarter.

A group of Gorin’s friends from his
khâgne
, having entered the Ecole normale (Gorin did not), had come under the influence and personal tutelage of one of the school’s best-known professors of political theory, Louis Althusser. Living in the school as a sort of house master, Althusser had an unusual amount of contact with the students. Althusser was a Marxist who had the idea, surprisingly original at the time, of reading Marx closely and freeing his texts from a century of traditional interpretations. His approach to Marx was similar to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s work on Freud. In effect, Althusser and Lacan set in motion a pair of intellectual Reformations, complete with a return to the orders’ founding texts and a quest for doctrinal purity. Both of these masters founded groups that functioned with the intensity and the exclusiveness of cults, of substitute religions.

Althusser’s leading disciple was a “normalien” named Robert Linhart, a friend of Gorin’s. In 1964, Linhart, joining a group of students in a left-wing summer program in Algeria, was influenced by a Spanish emigrant who had
taken up Maoism in the name of third-world Marxism. Upon his return to Paris, Linhart began to proselytize in favor of Maoist thought as the authentic modern application of Marx and extension of Lenin.

In 1965, Althusser published two books of political theory that would inspire the new radical left:
Pour Marx
(
For Marx
) and
Lire le Capital
(
Reading Capital
). That year, Linhart and the others in his Althusserian circle at the Ecole normale (who had followed him in adopting Maoism) founded an austere intellectual journal called the
Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes
. The title, of course, recalls the other influential
Cahiers
that had launched a small band of enthusiasts on a mercurial path from theory to practice. Linhart’s doctrinal rigor had an enormous appeal for his cohorts. His approach to Mao, taking even further Althusser’s stringent fidelity to the texts of Marx, exemplified the intellectual perfection of France’s most perfect students: they no longer consumed ideas, they were consumed by them. They were in effect France’s political New Wave.

In the summer of 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, ostensibly to extirpate the vestiges of feudal and bourgeois culture and to reinfuse the country with revolutionary zeal. But the young shock troops mobilized on behalf of Mao and his allies in the government, the Red Guard, were also deployed as part of an internal power struggle. The violence of the Red Guard was reminiscent of that of Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s Nazis, as hundreds of thousands, or even millions, were killed in public attacks or in government custody. In the eyes of their foreign admirers, the Red Guard had the idealism of youth without American hedonism or European aestheticism, a Marxism cleansed of heterogeneous notions and put immediately into practice. The Althusserian Maoists of the Ecole normale revered the Red Guard: these highly theoretical French youths similarly dreamed of converting their intellectual authority into actual authority, of incarnating their force of mind in the actual use of force, of confirming their physical and social existence in flesh and blood—the blood of others. According to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was then a high school student preparing for his own entry into the Ecole normale, the leading Maoists there were “the secret kings of France at that time”;
⁶
their charismatic fervor was matched by their desire to rule.

Gorin introduced Godard to the Maoist group at the Ecole normale, which had now formally constituted itself as the “Union des jeunesses communistes (marxistes-léninistes)” (Communist [Marxist-Leninist] Youth League). Gorin understood that for the Maoists, he served as “a conduit to a certain press” and afforded them “the possibility of being talked about.”
⁷
Gorin himself was not an active Maoist—
Le Monde
discouraged its writers from political activity—but his friendship with the movement’s leaders
marked him as a fellow traveler. His influence on Godard was evident in the concrete form that the film
La Chinoise
began to take: Godard now planned to do a “reportage akin to a television news documentary,” bringing editors from the orthodox French Communist Party publications,
Humanité-Dimanche
and
L’Humanité
, together with those from the Maoist
Humanité nouvelle
and the
Cahiers marxistes-léninistes
and filming their discussions. Godard claimed to have one motive in making the film: “to reunite Moscow and Peking against the common enemy: the Americans.”
⁸
All of the groups he approached, however, refused to participate.
⁹

Nonetheless, Gorin, as Godard’s connection to the intellectual Maoists, remained crucial to his thoughts on a new film. It was of no small importance that Gorin was also an informed and engaged cinephile. He had been the sole person to show up at a screening of
Les Carabiniers
shortly after the film opened disastrously in 1963.
¹⁰
Gorin considered Godard’s films to be the only modern aesthetically revolutionary cinema, and the two talked about films endlessly. “We started to discuss movies,” Gorin recalled, “which is also to discuss all sorts of problems about movies and which, in turn, produce the kind of movies we have. And we started to discuss politics and aesthetics and aesthetics as a kind of politics.”
¹¹
Godard had long considered his cinematic aesthetic to be a touchstone of the new left, but in its ideological orientation and zealotry the new left had been redefined in a few short years, and now Godard, in the company of Gorin, similarly introduced a new ideological element to his aesthetic. Gorin had become, for Godard, not merely a collaborator but the embodiment of a new idea of filmmaking. Godard explained to an interviewer the nature of his involvement with Gorin: “I don’t have a screenwriter, but I have perhaps an extra guy, who Preminger doesn’t have, and who I need. A kind of assistant with whom I can speak, who is at the same time my friend, who doesn’t help me with the film, but simply helps me because I have someone to live the film with me while I am creating it.”
¹²
Ultimately, the mere fact of their collaboration proved to be of a more enduring importance to Godard’s career than the ideology they shared. But at the time, Godard’s work and thought were more overtly marked by a radical ideological turn, a leftism dominated by his opposition to the Vietnam War, to American influence in politics, economics, and culture, and, above all, to the Hollywood cinema.

In late January and early February 1967, Godard visited Algiers and presented his films at the Cinémathèque algérienne. On Sunday, February 5, 1967, after a screening of
Le Grand Escroc
, he answered questions from the audience for two hours. Asked about his view of the American cinema, Godard responded:

It wouldn’t be bad to ban the American cinema for a while. Three-quarters of the planet considers cinema from the angle and according to the criteria of the American cinema… People must become aware that there are other ways to make films than the American way. Moreover this would force filmmakers of the United States to revise their conceptions. It would be a good thing.
¹³