Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (63 page)

Imagining that the world as it was had to be destroyed, and knowing that his cinematic instincts and thought processes were a part of that world, Godard decided to leave both behind. Even before the last title cards reading “end of story” and “end of cinema,” it was apparent that a chapter in Godard’s films and life had come to an end. As it happened, a chapter in the life of France—of the world—was coming to an end as well.

Interviewed as the shoot of
Weekend
was getting under way, Godard expressed despair: “I know that my films don’t do well.
Made in USA
was a total flop.
Two or Three Things
isn’t doing well. If nobody goes to see my films, I’ll have to stop. Or to find another way of making them. Or do something else.”
⁴⁵
He told Charles Bitsch, “If only I knew a way to make as much money doing something else, I’d do it.”
⁴⁶
Bitsch thought the remark was just “a provocation,” and was shocked by what happened at the end of the shoot: Godard convened his crew, among them his regulars—Coutard, Schiffman, Guillemot
⁴⁷
—and told them they should look for other work, because he was going to stop making films for a while.

H
E DID, HOWEVER
, make a television program.

Years of negotiations and contacts had finally paid off: as early as 1964, Godard had sought commissions from French television to do a documentary on American women, an adaptation of Racine’s
Bérénice
, and even a multipart series on American mystery writers. Now, in mid-1967, he announced that his next project would be a television film, based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Emile
(published in 1762), which concerns a young man who finds his education outside the academy, in life itself. The film, Godard said, would deal with the same theme: “the story of a young boy who refuses to go to high school because his class is always full, and who starts to learn outside, who watches people, goes to the movies, listens to the radio or watches television.”
⁴⁸

The film, which Godard gave the Nietzschean title
Le Gai Savoir
(The
Joyful Wisdom), was conceived as a reprise of the central couple from
La Chinoise
, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky. She, however, was interested in working on still photography—she had shot stills for
Weekend
and appeared in the film only as an extra—and, having previously agreed to shoot stills on the set of critic Michel Cournot’s first feature film,
Les Gauloises bleues
, which coincided with Godard’s shoot of
Le Gai Savoir
, she turned down the part in her husband’s project.
⁴⁹

Léaud played Emile Rousseau, and the role of his friend, Patricia Lumumba, was played instead by Juliet Berto. The film concerns their meetings at a dark television studio, where they discuss the making and viewing of images and the political activities that they plan to undertake. The pair come up with a three-year program of study and action: in the first year, to make some basic images and sounds; in the second, to analyze those images and sounds; in the third year, to begin to recompose them into some more complex images and sounds. Patricia and Emile are filmed in a void, sitting on the floor, illuminated only in silhouette or in partial view: their images matter little and are expressive mainly in the absence of surroundings, the absence of context, the absence of visual reality, in favor of what they are saying, in favor of their voices.

Once again Godard makes use of his graphic skills, tearing still photographs from magazines and inscribing words and diagrams on them (as, for instance, a quote from Che Guevara, “At the risk of seeming absurd, I would like to say that the actions of a revolutionary are akin to the act of love”) as part of the process of analysis, and then editing these visual inserts as collage-like material that illustrates the ideas under discussion. The film was shot in December 1967 and January 1968, at a television studio near Paris, but he did not finish it until later in the year, after May 1968, by which time it was an artifact of a bygone day.

And yet the film was, in its way, even more prophetic than
La Chinoise
. The most painful aspect of
Le Gai Savoir
is the comparison of the natural education that Rousseau’s Emile receives and the one that Godard considers ideal for his own Emile. For Godard, experience was a dark room infused with images and sounds—an editing room—and the “joyful wisdom” was the leftist ideology that determined and overdetermined the interpretation of them. The reeducation that Léaud’s Emile undergoes is surprisingly close to what Godard would inflict upon himself, soon thereafter—and his editing room would offer him a similar self-imposed imprisonment in doctrinal orientation.

Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
(New Yorker Films / Photofest)

sixteen.

REVOLUTION (1968—1972)

“I stopped doing lots of things”

T
HE STORY OF
J
EAN-LUC
G
ODARD AND 1968 IS BOTH SIM
ple and painful. Godard had lost his moorings in the cinema before adopting a fidelity to a nominally Maoist ideology. The political events in France in May 1968 led him to associate with a new set of young activists and to adopt views and methods that were influenced by their activities. He made films in dogmatic service to his new politics, the best of them in close collaboration with an inspired and inspiring companion: Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their time together was full, energized, and turbulent; it was a time of breakups and couplings, of practical militancy and theoretical study, of constant work and shared purpose.

Yet the films that resulted, petrified by ideology, by doctrine, suggest hardly a glimmer of the brilliance and the vital energy that went into them. Despite Godard’s seeming withdrawal from the cinema after
Weekend
, he in fact went on making films, and at an even faster pace than before. Godard’s obsessive ideological devotion generated a remarkable yield of political rhetoric, a repetitive series of variations on the same theme, a language which filled sound track after sound track of films that served as relatively indifferent and interchangeable platforms from which to deliver it. Nonetheless, Godard’s own experience in those years, and in particular, the effort that went into the making of those films, can be understood as a set of counterscripts, of alternate scenarios for films that he did not make, that no one made—and this experience is of greater artistic importance than the films that derived from it.

T
HE PARADOX OF
Godard’s withdrawal from the cinema in late 1967 was that it coincided with the resuscitation of the New Wave, which came back stronger
than ever. Though the New Wave had come to seem like an obsolete concept, the filmmakers who launched it were only now coming into their own. François Truffaut, who had endured quiet years when he struggled with his own production company, with his Hitchcock book, and with his obsession to make
Fahrenheit 451
, again became prolific: in 1966 he signed a contract with United Artists to make
La Mariée était en noir
(
The Bride Wore Black
), with Jeanne Moreau, and signed again with them in mid-1967 for
Baisers volés
(
Stolen Kisses
), a new film in the Antoine Doinel series starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. He averaged a film a year for a long time to come. Claude Chabrol, who followed years of box office failures with some blatantly commercial projects, returned in 1967, with
Les Biches
(
The Does
), to the bilious bourgeois melodramas that he had set out to make and then directed a memorable series of noirish films, including
La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure
(
This Man Must Die
), and
Le Boucher
. Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, whose careers as film-makers seemed to have died a quiet death after the unsuccessful releases of their first features, were now working again. In the wake of the critical and commercial success of
La Religieuse
, Rivette was soon able to make another film, the epic psychodrama
L’Amour fou
. Rohmer made a low-budget feature in 1966,
La Collectionneuse
, with funding from Beauregard and the cinephile heiress Sylvina de Boissonas. Its acclaim enabled him to make
My Night at Maud’s
in 1967, followed soon thereafter by
Claire’s Knee
and
Chloé in the Afternoon
. In short, four of the five core figures of the New Wave were definitively launched between 1966 and 1968, at exactly the time that Godard left his orbit and, without ceasing to make films, dropped out of the cinema.

Godard’s relations with Truffaut had remained vigorous—he visited Truffaut in England on the first day of the shoot of
Fahrenheit 451
in January 1966 and received financial assistance from Truffaut’s company on
Two or Three Things
, and Anne Wiazemsky joined Truffaut on the set of
The Bride Wore Black
as an apprentice photographer.
¹
Godard continued to see Rivette regularly and, as Wiazemsky recalled, their meetings were a crucial part of her cinematic education: “Rivette is quite a scholar. They had great discussions about the cinema. Then Jean-Luc began to harden.”
²
The controversy over
La Religieuse
brought the group together to link arms in a public battle, reviving the spirit of
politique
that they had honed while asserting the
politique des auteurs
, but in 1967 Godard began to take his politics in the literal sense and they got in the way of his cinematic relationships.

Yet when practical politics once again intruded on the heritage of the New Wave, Godard was in the front lines of its defenders.

T
HE CENSORSHIP OF
such films as
La Religieuse
and
A Married Woman
suggested the distance between the government’s version of France and real
life. Then a decision made secretly by government representatives in late 1967 and put into effect the following February rallied the French cinema with a remarkable—and militant—unanimity. In a meeting held at 10:00
AM
on Friday, February 9, 1968, the executive council of the Cinémathèque Française, which had been packed with government appointees, voted to remove Henri Langlois as the head of the Cinémathèque.
³
The ostensible reason for Langlois’s ouster was his indifference to administrative norms, which, his detractors charged, resulted in deficits, unexplained expenses, and chaotic warehousing of films. The government’s real motives seemed to lie elsewhere. The Cinémathèque had become a world-renowned institution, a cinematic Louvre, but one which, despite his government subsidy, Langlois ran with utter disregard for the interests of the politicians he nominally served and their narrowly defined notions of the glory of France. Moreover, the government, which also controlled television, seemed eager to lay hold of Langlois’s collection in order to gain free and permanent access to a rich and ready source of programming.

Within hours of Langlois’s removal from office, the French film community mobilized, uniting the major New Wave and “Old Wave” directors, leftists and rightists, as signatories to an indignant petition “to forbid the screening of their films at the Cinémathèque Française, both at the screening room of the rue d’Ulm and that of the palais de Chaillot,” which had opened in 1963. The petitioners included Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and such elder luminaries as Jean Renoir and Abel Gance.
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In official circles, François Mitterrand, an opposition member in the National Assembly, demanded that the government explain the “particularly shocking circumstances” of its “eviction” of Langlois from the Cinémathèque, “to which the cinema owes, for a quarter-century, the safeguarding of its creations, and to which our country owes the possession of an artistic patrimony of an inestimable value.”
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Within days, foreign film directors, including Charlie Chaplin, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh, Vincente Minnelli, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, and Samuel Fuller, signed on to forbid screenings of their films at a Cinémathèque without Langlois. On Monday, February 12, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Jean Rouch led a demonstration outside the rue d’Ulm screening room. On February 14, at the palais de Chaillot, 2,500 people protested the removal of Langlois, with Godard, Wiazemsky, and Truffaut in the front lines. Baton-wielding police officers clubbed Truffaut on the head and, in a scuffle, broke Godard’s glasses. After forty-five minutes of confrontation, Godard himself gave the order to end the demonstration. “But now, there is only one
imperative: as soon as the Cinémathèque opens and is no longer protected by the police, each spectator must find his own means of sabotaging the screenings.”
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