Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (67 page)

In practical terms, countercultures high and low came to the fore: whether through the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the anti-psychology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or Nietzschean analyses of power by Michel Foucault, or through rock music, urban communes, and psychotropic drugs, the young people of France were clearing the ground of traditional thought and morality. As old and artificial distinctions were swept away by new modes of cultural critique, a more inclusive, more tolerant, and freer society would result—in the long run. However, in the short term, there was no shortage of utopian dreaming that found its way into practice, often with disturbing results, whether in the emotional
burnout of communal or libertine living, mental damage due to drug use, or the delusions of violent political confrontation.

Godard knew that he was now living in a changed world. One of the changes that had taken place had to do with his own reduced status among the would-be revolutionaries. With his high-culture and Hollywood references, Godard had long been a target of the Situationists, the anticultural anarchists whose provocations had inspired student revolt (notably at the University of Strasbourg). Now that the student rebellion had broadly rejected official culture, Godard, despite his engagement alongside the students, came in for insult (as seen on the slogans in the Sorbonne and on the walls of Paris, many of Situationist inspiration.) Later recalling the insults, he also cited their effect on him: “I felt myself to be opposed; it did me good. I felt… concerning myself, I was also a little afraid; I said to myself, ‘Look, maybe it’s the end.’”
⁷⁴
Godard was not the only recognized intellectual hero to cast his lot with the revolutionary students. Intellectual France was largely in thrall to its youthful rebels, whose expression of total discontent seemed to embody its own efforts at radical social critique. Sartre joined Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, and others in signing a joint manifesto in support of the students, published on May 9, in the heat of the action.
⁷⁵
He spoke in praise of the movement in
Le Nouvel Observateur
and then, still in May, published a dialogue there with Cohn-Bendit.

In the wake of the rebellion, Godard sought to make films differently, and in the summer of 1968, he told interviewers from a German film cooperative what this would mean: “One must give everything up. One must change one’s life… One must completely change oneself, and that is very difficult.”
⁷⁶
The specific change that Godard had in mind: “For someone who is known to quickly become unknown, which is much better anyway.”
⁷⁷
Godard told Wiazemsky that he wanted them to leave Paris and move to the provinces. “I said that I absolutely didn’t want to leave Paris,” she recalled. “I think he sensed that he had gotten to the end of a certain cinema and that he had to go away in order to find another one.”
⁷⁸
They stayed in Paris, but Godard and his cinema changed nonetheless.

G
ODARD INDEED RESUMED WORK
. Earlier in 1968, he had abandoned
Le Gai Savoir
, the collage-like film based on Rousseau’s
Emile
, but now, in the summer, he finished editing it (adding several images of the combat in the streets). French television, which had commissioned it, refused to broadcast the film, so Godard sought authorization for its release as a feature film. On January 2, 1969, Wiazemsky (whom Godard had installed, for financial reasons, as the chief executive of Anouchka Films, the production company he had started in 1964) wrote to the CNC—under the name “Anne Godard”—to
request a visa to permit the film’s distribution. The commission took exception to several insults aimed at de Gaulle and Pompidou and another aimed at French television itself, and demanded that various shots—including ones showing how to make a Molotov cocktail—be cut. The film was authorized for export for noncommercial, that is, festival, screenings and, in May 1969, by which time Godard had made the required cuts, it received a “green light without restriction” for theatrical release.
⁷⁹
Nonetheless, though it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in July of that year and the New York Film Festival in September, and was released theatrically in New York in May 1970, it was not released theatrically in France until 1977. (In 1969, in the absence of the film’s availability in France, Godard arranged for a small press to publish a transcript of the film’s sound track as a book).
⁸⁰

Le Gai Savoir
, a film of intricate analysis and sophisticated montage, had been made prior to the May protests, and was completely different from what Godard sought to do in their wake. His film of the Rolling Stones—a mix of documentary footage and staged agitprop—demonstrated what he had in mind. He told the
Sunday Times
of London, “I’m trying to make it as simple as possible, almost like an amateur film.” He repudiated editing, declaring, “The length of the takes are decided by Kodak—I’ve four or five choices of lengths of film available from them and I’m quite happy with that.”
⁸¹
He arrived in London on May 30
⁸²
and filmed the Rolling Stones at the Olympic Studio in London on the first four nights of June 1968. He was reluctant to do the film, Wiazemsky recalled, because he did not want to leave Paris just at that time, but the English producers insisted that he fulfill his contract.
⁸³
According to Mick Jagger, it was “very fortuitous” that the song on which the group was working should be “Sympathy for the Devil,” a song which revealed the secrets of its composition on-camera.
⁸⁴

Godard had the crew lay down tracking rails that ran in a figure-eight throughout the studio. The 35mm movie camera was outfitted with a special film magazine that could take exceptionally long loads of film. In ten-minute takes, Godard followed the song’s metamorphosis from a straight-ahead rocker to a pantheistic samba. Drummer Charlie Watts put down his drum-sticks in favor of Algerian hand drums, and the four backup singers (including Marianne Faithfull) congregated around a microphone for gospel exhortations. The last night of the shoot ended prematurely as the studio caught fire when a gel filter on an overhead light ignited. Godard returned to Paris with the intention of adding to the film later; he disclosed to a London journalist his plan to intercut the footage of the Rolling Stones with a drama, described as “a tragic triangle: a French girl in London is picked up by a Right-wing Texan but then falls for a Left-wing Negro militant.”
⁸⁵
Godard explained that the black man leaves the white woman (who would be played by Wiazemsky) for the
Black Power movement, and she commits suicide. But in the end he filmed something else altogether to intercut with the Rolling Stones footage.

First, however, in Paris, in July and August, Godard made
Un Film comme les autres
(
A Film Like the Others
), a rapid-response reflection on the May events, which consists largely of a discussion on a lawn among three students from Nanterre and two workers at the Renault factory in Flins. Godard had wanted Wiazemsky to appear in it as a radical student, but she had refused, because, as she recalled, “I did not share the ideology.”
⁸⁶

However,
A Film Like the Others
also revealed Godard’s own divergence from the student revolutionaries. The discussions that comprised the film, as its cameraman, William Lubtchansky, later recalled, were shot with direct sound, in a single day. The participants are seen from the neck down, their heads outside the frame. Color images—from one fixed angle—are intercut with hallucinatory images, in black and white, shot by the Etats généraux of events from the streets during May: cars burning, barricades, students armed with metal gratings, tear gas attacks, blocked-off factories. These images are accompanied by a sound track of practical discussions about revolutionary tactics and how to unite students and workers. Over the live discussion, Godard recites political texts derived from Mao and French militants, literary citations, and his own reflections.

The differences between the students and Godard emerge when he attempts to instruct them in revolutionary methods: “If cars interest you,” he tells them, “you can go to work at Renault; if airplanes interest you, you can go to work” at an airplane factory. But the students do not agree; they do not see how anything might interest them within a big company; it was one thing to take a job in a factory to endure the workers’ misery and perhaps imbue them with Marxist theory, another to take an interest in the work being done there.
A Film Like the Others
is in two parts, each a fifty-four-minute reel of 16mm film in which the images are identical and only the narration is different. When it was shown on December 29, 1969, in a special screening at Lincoln Center, Godard requested that the order in which the reels were shown be determined by a coin toss. Many of the approximately 1,000 viewers loudly complained that the sound track, which featured a dubbed English commentary over the French dialogue, was incomprehensible, and they not only demanded their money back but, as D. A. Pennebaker, whose company distributed the film, recalled, “they began to tear up the seats.”
⁸⁷
The few viewers who remained in the hall frequently booed (though, notably, they kept quiet during the clips of documentary footage from May).
⁸⁸

R
ETURNING TO LONDON
in August 1968, Godard shot another series of ten-minute takes for his film with the Rolling Stones, which he now called
One Plus One;
the title was derived from a May 1968 graffito and suggested the simple alternation of the film’s two disparate elements: the Rolling Stones plus the new footage, a series of political masques. One sequence in a junk-yard featured the English militant Frankie Dymon Jr. as the leader of a group of black revolutionaries who declaimed texts by Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones as well as the Black Panther manifesto, while receiving captive white women wearing white shrouds.
⁸⁹
A scene in a pornography-filled bookstore featured long recitations from
Mein Kampf
.

But the movie’s most important footage are the scenes featuring Wiazemsky, and the personal significance of those sequences is as telling as her rejection of the doctrinaire premise of
A Film Like the Others
. Godard had changed her role in
One Plus One:
no longer a “French girl in London,” she now played Eve Democracy, who wandered through fields and forests in a delicate gown, taking elaborate political questions (in English) from a television journalist while being filmed by a documentary news crew. Being the personal representative of democracy, she could only answer “Yes” or “No” to the ever more complex questions—many of which Godard took from an interview with Norman Mailer in the January 1968 issue of
Playboy
.
⁹⁰
(Wiazemsky spoke no English, so Godard cued her when to say “Yes” by waving his hat at her from offscreen.)
⁹¹
In bringing Wiazemsky to London and casting her as the absurd and naive Eve Democracy, he mocked not only democracy but Wiazemsky’s nonrevolutionary commitment to it.

These hectoring, bewildering sequences were crowned by a closing shot, which, almost against Godard’s will, turned out to be majestic. Eve Democracy is led to a camera crane while acting a scene in a movie about guerrilla warfare that is being filmed at a beach. She is positioned on the crane, where her body is splayed out on the seat, alongside a large studio camera. The crane, with the actress’s limbs dangling from it, glides aloft with two flags waving from it: the black flag of anarchism and the red flag of communism. Wiazemsky’s character meets an untimely end. In this bloody ending, Godard suggested not only that democracy was doomed in an age of armed conflict, but that Wiazemsky’s political views, which he characterized visually as a sort of oblivious docility, would prove calamitous. Seek as he might an unremittingly political subject, a neutral camera style, and a thought-free method of editing that was determined by Kodak, Godard was nonetheless unable to avoid filming an allegory of his days and his life: Wiazemsky’s non-revolutionary sympathies, he charged, would be her downfall.

Godard introduced
One Plus One
at the London Film Festival. The premiere, which was scheduled for November 29, proved complicated. Michael Pearson and Iain Quarrier, the producers, were displeased that Godard had included in the final cut neither the finished version of “Sympathy for the
Devil” nor the song in its entirety. In his absence, they reedited the ending to include the whole song over the closing shot of the Stones in the studio and the sequence of the body of Eve Democracy on the camera crane (which they held in a freeze-frame to let the song play out). They called Godard in Paris to tell him so,
⁹²
and he was very unhappy, telling a journalist that the change “would alter the whole spirit of the thing.” The producers responded, “We have to consider ten million teeny boppers in the United States alone. The film cost us £250,000.” A long day of negotiations mediated by the London festival director, Richard Roud, yielded a compromise: the producer’s cut would be shown, followed by Godard’s original ending, and then Godard and Quarrier would debate the two versions’ merits onstage. However, before his film was screened, Godard urged the audience to refuse to watch it, demand their money back with an additional ten shillings, and send the money to “black power” leaders; then he punched Quarrier in the face and stomach and was physically ejected from the hall.
⁹³