Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (66 page)

The festival administration decided that the 2:30 screening of Carlos Saura’s
Peppermint Frappé
would take place as scheduled: the public, largely Cannes locals, began to fill the hall, but the protesting filmmakers—including Godard, Truffaut, and Saura himself—kept to the stage and held on to the curtain to prevent it from opening. The lights went down and the screening began, but the loudspeakers had been cut off; as Truffaut later recalled, the beginning of the film was projected onto the bodies of the protesters standing in front of the screen. Finally the film stopped, and the house lights came back on. Viewers stormed the stage to force it clear and to continue the projection, and a brawl erupted.
⁵²
Freddy Buache of the Cinémathèque Suisse was at the festival; arriving at the hall for the screening, he found a demonstration in progress: “I climbed up on stage, and a guy said, ‘Who are all these people?’
and he spread his arms wide and knocked Jean-Luc Godard’s glasses to the floor. I picked them up for him. Godard said, ‘Oh, it’s you!’”
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The next day, the festival was canceled.

T
HAT SAME WEEKEND
of May 11–12, the country was nearly paralyzed: gasoline was not getting through to the capital; stores were closed; food was running short. Strikes multiplied throughout the country. In Paris, people walked from place to place in the absence of métro service. Godard recalled that his memory of May 1968 in Paris was “a moment where one heard the sound of pedestrians in the street simply because there was no more gasoline.”
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(Godard had lent his own sports car to militants who wanted to rally support in the provinces.)
⁵⁵

Many people remember that time as a moment when people were constantly talking to each other, trying to get a sense of what was happening, and more important, of what was yet to happen. The film industry had stopped working, but the need to make images of the surprising, spectacular events was irrepressible, as Claude Mauriac (the novelist’s son and Wiazemsky’s uncle), wrote:

Perhaps there has never been as much film shot in France as during these weeks of a total shutdown of the film industry. In 16mm or 35mm, in black and white or in color, with whatever film they could find, young cameramen undertook a collective anonymous work that the times have not yet managed to make use of and that will serve as a common fund for filmmakers of the future.
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Godard was among them. He joined Chris Marker in the production of a series of political films made on rolls of 16mm film, each of which cost a mere fifty francs (ten dollars). They were edited in-camera, done, at first, only with still images taken from photographs and from the press, and inter-cut with brief texts. They were called
Cinétracts
and were meant to serve as education and exhortation at political meetings. Those made by Godard are easily recognizable by the use of his own handwriting on and between images. He concludes his third
Cinétract
, number nine in the series overall, with a magazine clipping of an article called “Hollywood-on-the-Seine,” featuring a picture of Truffaut: the prior image read, “Obvious truths belong…”—and on the image of Truffaut, Godard inscribed, “to bourgeois philosophy.”

As it happened, while bourgeois philosophy yielded to the revolutionary spirit, bourgeois life proved more resilient and resistant, and the truths of the revolution seemed to be anything but obvious or enduring—even to
the instigators. Early in the morning of May 11, with the Latin Quarter barricaded and under police siege, Robert Linhart, the leader of the Maoists of the Ecole normale supérieure, had a crisis. He had stayed outside the fray even as his school served as a sanctuary for protesters fleeing the police, because he considered the May militancy to be an unguided, tactically dubious, and ideologically unprincipled free-for-all. Now he had come to believe that the lack of ideological guidance from above—his own guidance, that is—would result in catastrophe. He was in a state of delusion. As Jean-Pierre Gorin explained, “Linhart panicked—he thought that what he had created would lead to massive cruelty, to a massive repression. At 4:00
AM
, he banged on the door of Communist Party headquarters, crying and apologizing for what was about to take place.”
⁵⁷
Unable to find any officials to talk to, he took a train out of Paris and leaped from it, believing himself followed. He survived but was immediately hospitalized, given tranquilizers, and treated for mental illness.
⁵⁸

On May 23 and 24, there were two more nights of flaming barricades and police violence in the Latin Quarter. The second of those nights was the crisis point of the uprising, when the students set fire to the Paris stock market, and other students, blocking the streets, delayed the fire department’s response. “There was talk of occupying a ministry,” Gorin recalled, “which would have radicalized [the protests] because it would have required a response of maximal force.”
⁵⁹
But in the early hours of the morning, he said, the police began to take control of the area, and the students decided not to press the fight against the government but to return to the Latin Quarter.
⁶⁰

On May 29, Charles de Gaulle suddenly disappeared from Paris. He went in secret to a French military base in West Germany to consult with his trusted officer, General Jacques Massu. The next day, de Gaulle returned and made a speech. Yves Afonso, an actor from
Masculine Feminine
and
Made in USA
, was at the Etats généraux du cinéma that day: “We had transistor radios pressed up against our ears, we were all glued to our little radios. De Gaulle said, ‘I’m not resigning, I’m not changing prime ministers, I’m dissolving the National Assembly’—there was silence, then we left.”
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The speech was followed by a rally in defense of de Gaulle and the French government. Hundreds of thousands of marchers showed up in the Champs-Elysées. Though many of France’s businesses remained on strike (including French television, which functioned only minimally), the turning point had been reached because the students had refrained from intensifying their violent conflict with the government, and because an overwhelming number of workers did not stay on strike and did not rebel against de Gaulle’s presidency or the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle successfully negotiated with the large labor unions and, in exchange for raises and other legislated improvements in working conditions, gained their accord. As the journalist
Claude Roy noted in late May, when students were still parked behind burning barricades,

The students had managed to restore to the workers the forgotten idea of the recourse to force. But if they provided the idea, they also aroused distrust. To the workers’ leaders, they are anarchistic libertarians. To the mass of workers, they are the angry sons of the bourgeoisie. To militant workers, the “entrenched camp” of the Latin Quarter is a fight between the sons of the ruling class and their fathers, which is, in general, true.
⁶²

Indeed, one student occupier of the Sorbonne recalled, “On Sundays, nobody was there: everyone went home to lunch with their family; it was a bourgeois revolution. I proposed that since Lenin was born on a Tuesday, we take Tuesdays off.”
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By mid-June, the occupiers had faded away, abandoning their redoubt to the government authorities.

Over the next weeks in June, strikes continued, factories were occupied, protests ensued, and there was even another night of Latin Quarter barricades, but the numbers and the enthusiasm had diminished. The June elections that de Gaulle had called for turned out to be his trump card: choosing him over the perceived threat of anarchy, the voters overwhelmingly voted in his party’s favor and gave him, in the two rounds of voting (June 23 and 30), a vast majority (358 out of 465 seats) in the legislature.

The failure of the predominantly anarchist-led revolt to destroy the government, indeed its contribution to the government’s strengthened position, led to something of a revolution within the ranks of the revolution. The days of May had been wrought by the anarchists. The Maoists had stayed on the sidelines at first, deploring the ideological vagueness that motivated the festivities, or else they had merely gone along, followers more than leaders. As Gorin recalled, “The Maoists were involved on an individual basis in the streets, but not as an organization.”
⁶⁴
It was only at the moment that the revolution did not happen—when the workers by and large threw in their lot with reform of the existing order rather than with its overthrow, when strikes abated, when de Gaulle won an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly—that the Maoists, rejecting both the modest reforms that the government offered and the vast psychic, moral, and aesthetic change that had taken place in French society, continued down the road toward real political revolution.

The militants who created the days of May had the virtue of being one with their historical moment, and their leaders had exhibited spontaneous tactical genius; the Maoists’ coming journey toward cataclysm and utopia
was, by contrast, an act of faith. It was a faith that Godard shared, and to which he tied his fate.

O
NE SIGN OF
the hardening of positions and the deepening of differences was a painful scene witnessed by Wiazemsky:

In June’ 68, Jean-Luc had a fight with Truffaut, in front of me. Jean-Luc wanted to stop the Avignon festival… Truffaut took up the position of Pasolini, who had said, “I can’t be for the bourgeois students against the working-class National Guardsmen.” Truffaut said, “I will never be on the side of the sons of the bourgeoisie,” which is how he saw the students. This was in the offices of Les Films du Carrosse [Truffaut’s company]. Jean-Luc really got angry: “I thought you were a brother, you are a traitor.” That was their breakup.
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There had always been political differences at the heart of the Hitchcocko-Hawksian cabal. Rivette was never a rightist, and the younger members teased Rohmer for his support for de Gaulle, but at the time, the cinema was what counted, whereas now, for Godard, in the wake of what happened in May, politics took precedence over the cinema and personal relations.

Truffaut was not the only person with whom Godard broke up in June 1968. Antoine Bourseiller, whose theater Godard had financed and who had supplied the apartment for
La Chinoise
, recalled:

In June 1968, he saw my wife in the rue de Miromesnil and told her, “We will never see each other again. I am saying adieu to you, and to Antoine. I don’t want to see you anymore, because you are actually still in the capitalist system. I will not see you again.” When I got back to Paris, I met him and said, “You’re the one who made this decision, and I respect your decision. But I must tell you one thing: there will always be soup for you at my home; if ever you need something to eat, come to our house, you will always be welcome.”
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At that time, Suzanne Schiffman, who had worked closely with Godard for eight years, ran into him on the Champs-Elysées: “We saw each other, he smiled, then he turned his back.”
⁶⁷
The filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, who had known Godard since the mid-1950s, said, “In June 1968, we saw that Godard’s views were different than from before May.”
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Godard sought a cinematic outlet for these views. The kind of project he had in mind—and the extreme break that the days of May represented to him—were suggested by remarks he made at a press conference, which indicated what he owed, or thought he owed, to the militants and the effect they would have on his life and work. A questioner asked whether Godard’s
withdrawal from the film industry was part of an attempt to become “invisible”; Godard agreed, and explained that this impulse was the result of his inescapable sense of humility before the students:

A lot of people, younger than I, were discovering a lot of things I had maybe not yet discovered. Things I was discovering at the same time but which I had been working on for twenty years… they discovered it very easily and, I mean, the good in their movements was not coming from us, it was coming from them. So, we were speaking of culture, art, and a lot of things, and they, they found things apart from us. So we have to learn from them instead of pretending to teach them. That’s why we cannot speak of being… an artist or making a piece of art. This has to be completely destroyed.
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He also phrased the conflict in impersonal terms: “Culture is an alibi of imperialism, so we have to destroy culture.”
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Godard had long foreseen that a new left would be principally an aesthetic phenomenon. May 1968 did not achieve a real political revolution, but it did bring about what Gorin recalled as “the collapse of the pillars of the intellectual temples.”
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This created the impression of radical change having taken place, with little bloodshed and very little practical political change. Alain Jouffroy recalled the days of frenzied activity: “Everywhere, unreality seemed to take fictive revenge on reality.”
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The students stopped short of total revolution in part because they lacked a political program, and in part because the revolution of which they dreamed had, at a cultural level, already been achieved. The political program articulated most clearly by the students was one of intellectual and aesthetic politics. The revolution, according to Gorin, was effected by radicals who were “steeped in the classical tradition,” yet who experienced that tradition “as oppression.” The revolt was the work of “a generation of people who fantasized [the tradition] had a solidity that it didn’t have. They felt free to shake the edifice, and to their surprise, it collapsed.”
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