Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (6 page)

As Rivette later recalled, the eighty seats of the Cinémathèque’s small screening room, on the avenue de Messine (a quiet neighborhood in the eighth arrondissement), “were full only for
L’Age d’or, The Blue Angel
, or
Potemkin
, but were practically empty for the films of Griffith, Stiller, and Murnau.”
⁴²
Truffaut said that only “five or six” people showed up for a screening of the 1932
Kühle Wampe
(by Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow). When Langlois’s screening room was full, the young men watched the films lying flat on their backs on the floor in front of the first row.
⁴³

Like Rivette and Truffaut, Godard virtually lived at the movies, though usually did not participate in the public discussions. He met Rivette in the
front row of the Cinémathèque, where they sat, side by side, night after night, for several months, until Godard broke the shy silence by declaring (with the formal
vous
), “It seems to me that I recognize you.”
⁴⁴
The Cinémathèque, the CCQL, Work and Culture, and other film clubs and movie theaters were Godard’s constant haunts, and Truffaut and Rivette became his constant companions there. It was standard practice for them to see three or four films per day, or to spend the entire day in a single theater. For instance, when Godard and Rivette went to see Orson Welles’s
Macbeth
(which opened in Paris in June 1950), they entered the theater at 2 pm and stayed for repeated showings, until Godard left at 10 pm; Rivette, who was more enthusiastic about the film, stayed put until midnight.
⁴⁵
Because films at the Cinémathèque often finished very late, after the métro’s service ended for the night—according to Truffaut, Langlois was simply indifferent to such practicalities—the young enthusiasts, who could not afford a taxi, walked together through the night, talking about what they had seen.

Their obsession, in terms of quantity of knowledge and depth of understanding of the cinema, would leave its mark in the criticism, and ultimately the films, of these young enthusiasts. But Godard was the first to write about this obsession as the end in itself. He did so in
La Gazette du cinéma
, the monthly newspaper-style magazine that Rohmer had developed from the in-house “Bulletin” of the CCQL. Its archly lowbrow title disguised its intellectual ambitions. The prestigious
La Revue du cinéma
had been discontinued in 1948 (when Gallimard editor Albert Camus persuaded his bosses that the cinema was not a topic worthy of the publisher’s ongoing subsidy) and
L’Ecran français
had become, in the wake of the controversies regarding the Blum-Byrnes agreements, closely aligned with the Communist Party and its doctrinaire anti-Hollywood line.
La Gazette
was an outlet for Rohmer’s own writings (the first issue featured his “Technical Study of ‘Rope,’” the film by Alfred Hitchcock, on the front page), and also featured the work of his young acolytes; the second issue, of June 1950, featured Godard’s notes on Joseph Mankiewicz, as well as an essay by Rivette about Jean Renoir’s
The Southerner
.

Yet Godard and his friends were not planning to be professional film critics; they planned to make films, and they were not alone in their desire to do so. Literary Paris had a passion for the cinema. During the war, Sartre had written the screenplay for a film called
Typhus
, Jean Giraudoux co-scripted Robert Bresson’s 1943
Les Anges du Péché
, and Jean Cocteau wrote dialogue for Bresson’s 1945
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
(based on a text by Diderot). In 1946, Cocteau directed
Beauty and the Beast
, and his diary of the shoot, published the same year, was read with fascination by Godard, Rivette, and the others of the CCQL.
⁴⁶

For the intellectual bohemians who flocked around the underground nightclubs, or “caves,” of St.-Germaindes-Prés to revel in the aura of (the largely absent) Sartre and de Beauvoir, the 16mm (amateur-format) film was “the medium of choice,” according to Anne-Marie Cazalis (whom Jean Cocteau had dubbed one of the two “princesses of Existentialism” alongside her friend Juliette Gréco). She said that for the young people in her circle, the 16mm film had taken the place of the novel as a means of artistic expression.
⁴⁷
In “Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” published in
L’Ecran français
of March 30, 1948, the novelist and journalist Alexandre Astruc, who also made 16mm films, prophesied the era of the “Caméra stylo,” the “camera-pen” with which “an artist can express his thought, as abstract as it may be, or can translate his obsessions exactly as is done today with the essay or the novel.” Astruc, who had a hand in planning
La Gazette du cinéma
(his “Notes on Film Direction” appeared on the front page of the first issue), argued that the cinema had already revolutionized intellectual history: “Today a Descartes would lock himself in his room with a 16mm camera and film and would write on film the discourse on method [
sic
].”

Godard exemplified the philosophical filmmaker of Astruc’s fantasy. Astruc later wrote of finding the teenage Godard sitting at the Café de Flore (Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s wartime base of literary operations) with a rose in his hand and declaring that he would be “the Cocteau for the next generation.”
⁴⁸
Godard’s father, Paul, later recalled, “He liked Sartre enormously, he more or less lived in St.-Germaindes-Prés,”
⁴⁹
the neighborhood of the Café de Flore and other cafés and clubs favored by Sartre’s followers. Godard himself later recalled, “I had encyclopedic tendencies. I wanted to read everything. I wanted to know everything. Existentialism was at its peak at that time. Through Sartre I discovered literature, and he led me to everything else.”
⁵⁰

Jean Douchet remembered him reading two books a day, but Truffaut described Godard’s literary bulimia differently: “He would go to people’s apartments and look at the first and last page of every book on the shelf.”
⁵¹
Godard’s approach to literature was perfect for a future filmmaker, inasmuch as it extracted from books the broadest story outlines and grandly aphoristic phrases, but, in its indifference to the intricacies of plot and fine points of character, it was antithetical to literary craftsmanship—as Godard quickly discovered.

Suzanne Schiffman,
⁵²
Godard’s classmate in “filmology” and a member of the Cinémathèque circle, recalled that Godard not only planned to become a writer (his dream was to have a novel published by Gallimard)
⁵³
but declared himself to be one: “He claimed that he wrote thirty pages every morning.”
⁵⁴
But Godard saw something in the cinema that he found redemptive, namely, its mechanical, automatic quality. “When we saw some movies,” he recalled, “we were finally delivered from the terror of writing. We were no
longer crushed by the spectre of the great writers.”
⁵⁵
In thrall to the cinema, and unquestioningly accepting the reality that it presented, Godard saw his attempts at literary representation trumped definitively by the power of the camera—and yet, his primordial dreams would ultimately reveal themselves in a cinema haunted by the primal, originary force of literature.

Like his friends from the CCQL and the Cinémathèque, Godard planned to follow the example of Orson Welles and make his first feature film by age twenty-five. But the deep-rooted philosophical elements at the basis of his thoughts about the cinema required a slow and gradual growth. Where his friends, especially Rivette and Rohmer, quickly acted on the impulse to begin making films, Godard, for whom watching films was already being part of the cinema, waited, and instead helped his friends as best he could.

T
HE
L
EFT
B
ANK
bohemian ferment of the Latin Quarter and St.-Germaindes-Prés yielded strange artistic and political byways, and Godard, from his involvement in cinémaphile circles, found himself in their bewildering midst. In 1949, Rohmer took up a collection at the CCQL for the benefit of an English filmmaker of his putative acquaintance named Anthony Barrier. This starving artist was, however, none other than Rohmer himself, who used the money to make a 16mm film,
Sexual Rhapsody
(the title in English), with assistance from Godard and Rivette.

In the summer of 1950, Truffaut made plans to shoot a 16mm film, but the project was unrealized. At the same time, however, Rivette tried his hand at another 16mm project with a title reminiscent of that of his earlier
Aux Quatre Coins
. “Godard saw to the production of my film,
Quadrille
,”Rivette later recalled. “He was also the producer: he put up the money for the 16mm black and white reversible
⁵⁶
film.” Explaining Godard’s ability to do so, Rivette added: “Nobody had any money; he had a little bit more.”
⁵⁷
Though Godard got a little money from his family, he admitted that the money that went into Rivette’s film came from stealing and selling books from his grandfather Monod’s “Valérianum,” his collection of first, private, and rare editions by Paul Valéry.
⁵⁸
The film featured four actors: two women, Liliane Litvin and Anne-Marie Cazalis; one of the two men was Godard. According to Rivette, “It ran forty minutes and absolutely nothing happens. It’s just four people sitting around a table, looking at each other.” Suzanne Schiffman recalled, “At a given moment a guy slapped a girl and he walked out.”
⁵⁹
The film was shown at the CCQL, where, according to Rivette, “After ten minutes, people started to leave, and at the end, the only ones who stayed were Jean-Luc and a girl.”

In a “16mm Chronicle,” published in the November 1950 issue of
La Gazette du cinéma
—the last before the publication folded due to poor sales—Godard reproached Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque for failing
to program Rivette’s film. He praised the film as “an homage to the Lubitsch of
Lady Windermere’s Fan
,” but did not mention his own participation in the film, behind and before the camera, or his friendship with its director.

The avant-gardism of Rivette’s work arose from the Latin Quarter milieu that he frequented along with Godard. Asked whether the film was a surrealist provocation, Rivette later said, “No, Lettrist.” As he explained, “The Lettrists were the successors to the surrealists and the precursors of the Situationists,” and he added that the leader of the Lettrists, Isidore Isou, told him that the film was “ingenious.”
⁶⁰

Isou (born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein in Romania in 1925) had emigrated to France after the war; a brilliant talker, he talked himself into a contract with Gallimard for his poetry; and he rendered himself famous, or infamous, in 1946 by gathering a claque of friends to disrupt a production of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s play
La Fuite
(Tzara too was a Romanian Jewish immigrant, born Sami Rosenstock).
⁶¹
Isou (who died in 2007) thought that his movement, Lettrism, went further into authentic avant-gardism than did Dadaism or surrealism, inasmuch as he sought not merely to break up the meaning of sentences, but to break up words into letters, mere phonic elements, preferably of a primal violence: his performances and writings consisted of atavistic onomatopoieic eructations.

Isou and the Lettrists were denizens of down-at-the-heels cafés on the peripheries of St.-Germaindes-Prés and the Latin Quarter. His group of followers included members of the willfully abject “Club of Losers.” One of them, Michel Mourre, a refugee from seminary, a teenage collaborationist in wartime, and a former right-wing strong-arm of the Latin Quarter, had come under the influence of the writings of Heidegger and concluded that the theological life had lost its meaning, and with it, life itself. Mourre recruited three other “Losers” to join him in disrupting High Mass at Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, 1950. As they intruded on the service, Mourre shouted a speech that began, “God is dead!” but the organist played loudly to drown out the rest of it. The Swiss Guards on duty sprang into action and detained the four, who were arrested and remanded for psychiatric evaluation.

François Truffaut, who, while working with André Bazin, had parlayed his own gift of gab into journalistic connections, was assigned to cover the story for
Elle
, and sympathized with Mourre, who justified the demonstration in the name of an austere, arch-conservative moralism.
⁶²
Truffaut brought the young firebrand into his own social circle; Mourre was present, along with Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Astruc—“the cream of 16mm and journalistic Paris,” Truffaut wrote—at a birthday party that Liliane Litvin (one of the two actresses in Rivette’s
Quadrille
) gave for herself on July 4, 1950.
⁶³
It turned into a wild night: Godard left the party with Suzanne
Schiffman and, after wandering through Paris (leaving their friends to wonder what became of them), they turned up again the next morning.

Mourre’s radical rightism responded to a crucial strain of thought in the CCQL circle. The young film-lovers’ right-wing airs were due in part to the influence of Rohmer, who was himself a practicing Catholic and a conservative, but were also derived from their role in the artistic battles of the day. Since the main French adversaries of the American cinema were the Communist Party, and since the CP and the unions it dominated made it difficult for young people like those of the CCQL and the Cinémathèque to enter the film business, the young cinephiles who adored American movies and dreamed of making movies were necessarily anti-Communist. Nonetheless, their openly aggressive displays of newly resurgent right-wing sympathies, so soon after the far right had been tarnished by its wartime collaboration, revealed a pose of radical reaction that went far beyond the cinematic points of contention into outright provocation, outrage, and scandal.