Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (69 page)

It was the sound, not the image, that mattered, because the sound carried the lecture, the doctrine, or rather, the indoctrination. Godard’s own doctrine, as concerned himself and his world, had become rather chilling. In London, he told the journalist Jonathan Cott:

You have to burn the opera. Not British Motor Corporation or General Motors, because that’s not so clear. You do have to build some cars. But Covent Garden, Lincoln Center, the San Francisco Opera House, yes, we can burn them… We’ve tried other ways, but it’s no use. If we don’t burn them we’ll always be absorbed by going into them.
¹¹⁷

He then corrected himself, suggesting, “No, not burn them, just forget about them a bit. As Mao said, if we burn books, we would not know how to criticize them.” But when the interviewer praised Bresson’s film
Au Hasard Balthazar
as an “extraordinary emotional spiritual height,” Godard responded, “Then it has to be destroyed. Catholic! It’s disgusting.” He defined the cinema as being not a gun but “a light which helps you check your gun.”
¹¹⁸

As for the film
British Sounds
, it was rejected by British television, as
Le Gai Savoir
had been rejected by French television.

I
N THE MEANTIME
, Claude Nedjar’s production company was able to secure agreement from a documentary film unit in Czechoslovakia to finance a shoot by Godard. In August 1968, Czechoslovakia had endured the Soviet invasion which crushed the relatively liberal government of Alexander Dubček and reimposed Soviet orthodoxy. Godard, Jean-Henri Roger, and the cameraman Paul Burron went to Prague in April 1969. They filmed trucks and trains, the inside of factories and the outside of government buildings; they tried to speak with people, but as Roger later recalled, nobody was willing to speak with them and they were quickly expelled from the country.

Once again, the voice-over text was revolutionary boilerplate, though this time it had a particular edge of acerbity. Although Czechoslovakia was suffering through a murderous and repressive Soviet occupation, Godard was obsessed with what he considered the “revisionism” corrupting communism there; he took pictures there of logos for Western products (there were not many), and commented in voice-over, “Yes, we’re in the Occident: in the fields, there are billboards for the big American trusts. The young workers like the Beatles and the government lets them wear their hair long: we must be in Yugoslavia. No, we’re in Czechoslovakia.”

Speaking of the film the following year to Andrew Sarris of the
Village Voice
, Godard let loose a sordid remark that revealed how dogmatic blinkers had left him oblivious of the reality of Czech life (and also betrayed his lack of personal experience of an actual occupying army): “Anyway, Czechoslovakia had been invaded by American tanks from United Artists long before the Russians came in.”
¹¹⁹

Godard’s increasing ideological rigidity isolated him even from political comrades. Soon after the Prague adventure, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had moved to Germany after having been expelled from France, offered Godard an idea for a film: he proposed that they go to Italy and make a leftist spaghetti western. Cohn-Bendit, it turned out, had an ulterior motive: wanting to see his old colleagues from the March 22 group, he knew that the project would deliver him and his friends to Italy in style.
¹²⁰
Godard and Wiazemsky went to Frankfurt to meet with Cohn-Bendit and to discuss the film. “It was all very vague,” Wiazemsky recalled, adding that Cohn-Bendit “was too joyful for Jean-Luc.”
¹²¹

Nonetheless, Godard worked out a story about the kidnapping of the head of Alcoa Aluminum by striking workers in the American West. He found funding from the film production arm of the Rizzoli publishing house, Cineriz, and recruited the mainstream actor (and leftist activist) Gian Maria Volonte to play the lead role (Wiazemsky would also appear in the film). Godard expected to work with Cohn-Bendit to turn the nominal leftist spaghetti western into doctrinaire hardtack; however, when he met the exuberant militant and other members of the March 22 group on location near Rome, he rapidly discovered that Cohn-Bendit, though a political revolutionary, really meant to convey his message by means of a traditional movie. As Cohn-Bendit admitted, “We were a group who had nothing to say about the cinema. We wanted to have fun. It was a little unfair to Godard. He really expected us to have a discussion, an exchange; we were incapable of it.”
¹²²
Godard, who wanted to make a film that bore no resemblance to the commercial cinema, became desperate.

At the time, his political interlocutor, Gorin, was in the hospital, recuperating from a motorcycle accident. Godard contacted him. “I’ve got a ticket for you. Either you come or I stop the film,” he said.
¹²³
Gorin lifted himself from his sickbed and went to Rome. The ongoing conversations between the two had to that point only begun to inform Godard’s work; now Gorin was going to become a co-filmmaker with Godard, exactly as he had long hoped.

When Gorin arrived in Rome, he found a shambles. Godard and Wiazemsky were not getting along. Production money that Godard was channeling to local revolutionaries had been used to open a transvestite bar. During the production, Godard and Gorin called a meeting with the crew
and the political activists to debate the underlying problem of the project. This general assembly was filmed and footage of it is included in the finished product. Gorin walks about with his cane, Cohn-Bendit lounges serenely in the grass, smiling and waving impishly at the camera, and Godard, in a sharp and hectoring tone of voice, denounces the way the shoot was going: “There is, in the film, something that dates from Stalin and which we are in up to our necks, the—what’s it called—Socialist Realism.”

According to Wiazemsky, Gorin’s arrival was taken by others working on the film as something of “a putsch”; soon after, “there were no more assemblies, there were just two people who gave orders.” Cohn-Bendit left, saying, as Wiazemsky recalled, “I’m ready to work as two, as three I’m off.”
¹²⁴

Gorin had been waiting for just this chance, and he had come with a clear idea of what to do with
Wind from the East
, as the film had come to be called: to pit the sound track against the image, revolutionary verbiage against the visual beauty of nature. Gorin considered the film a work of citation: while the outdoor images referred to D. W. Griffith’s films, the fulsomely doctrinaire dialogue on the sound track replicated the rhetoric heard throughout Paris at the time. W
ind from the East
may well have been a film of citation for Gorin and Godard; but, unlike the intertextual webs in Godard’s earlier films—which were cued both by journalistic remarks and by specific, pointed, and aesthetically highlighted allusions—the references here were general and vague. With no guidance to tie the images and texts to their sources, the film is an unmediated experience; its images lack the dramatic logic and emotional power of Griffith’s work and the sound track simply sounds numbingly, un-ironically dogmatic.

Godard and Gorin returned to Paris and edited
Wind from the East
. As Gorin recalled, “We did nothing but work. We were 24/7 in the editing room. That’s what we thought about.”
¹²⁵
Through the discussions in the editing room, Gorin reoriented the film—and, in the process, reoriented Godard. First, instead of assembling the film as a narrative, or for that matter, as a fractured narrative, Gorin structured it on the basis of political doctrine. He divided the film into a series of practical sections labeled “The Strike,” “The Delegate,” “The Mobilizing Minority,” “The General Assembly,” “Repression,” “The Active Strike,” and “The Police State,” followed by analytical sections called “Theory,” “Self-Management,” “Armed Struggle,” and “Civil Violence.” Godard praised Gorin’s conceptual contribution to
Wind from the East
as “work that consists in overturning the traditional notion of editing, of no longer making a simple assemblage or collage of shots but an
organization
of shots.”
¹²⁶
Godard was right. His last great advance in film form was the associative blend of fiction and documentary of
A Married Woman
. By contrast, he edited
Two or Three Things, Le Gai Savoir
, and
One Plus One
by simply alternating
their two categories of footage, and
Made in USA
and
La Chinoise
were free collages of fragmented elements. Godard’s work in the editing room with Gorin was his first step toward a great and distant goal of new cinematic composition—which would take him a decade of work to realize.

Wind from the East
, however, in Gorin’s “organization,” was raised from fiction to manifesto, laying all the more bare his and Godard’s doctrinal presumptions, which ranged from catechistic to repugnant. The film’s culminating section, labeled “Civil Violence,” features additional footage that Godard and Gorin shot in Paris, which teaches militants how to buy weapons and assemble the materials needed to make homemade bombs. In footage of shoppers in an outdoor market and of children congregating after school, voice-over commentators repudiate “bourgeois humanism” and redefine terrorism as the moment “when the exploited provides itself with the means to grab the exploiter by the throat.”

Then, after joining Godard in the editing room, Gorin also applied his new ideas to the footage from Czechoslovakia, which Godard had put aside . Like Godard’s other recent films, these two were not released in France;
Wind from the East
was screened at Cannes in 1970 but received little notice.

A
BOVE ALL, GORIN
brought Godard a new philosophical perspective. Through their discussions, Godard was prompted to reconsider the cinema from a historical point of view. Prior to his partnership with Gorin, Godard’s historicism was aestheticized: drawing on Langlois’s synoptic approach at the Cinémathèque, Godard drew freely on moments from films he loved to make his current preoccupations converge with his cinematic passions. Gorin, however, brought theoretical rigor to Godard’s absorption in the history of cinema, working with him to correlate aesthetics with politics. Thus, not long after their collaboration had begun, Godard explained that “producing films at this moment means nothing else than studying the changes undergone by the cinema from Lumière and Eisenstein to the present, and studying them in practice; that is to say, by making films about the world of today.”
¹²⁷

In keeping with this idea, Godard and Gorin engaged in a series of experiments. The first concerned Eisenstein’s unfinished 1937
Bezhin Meadow
. The film displeased Soviet officials, who forced Eisenstein to make a horrific public self-criticism for having made it, and destroyed the film. However, at the time of Godard and Gorin’s collaboration, still photographs of the film had recently resurfaced. As Gorin later recalled, they filmed every still image and re-edited the resulting footage in two different versions.
¹²⁸

Godard and Gorin also joined with Gorin’s friend Raphaël Sorin, an editor, to create a book,
À Bas le cinéma
(Down with the Cinema), a collage of images and texts, to which Godard wrote the introduction. (It remains unpublished.)
¹²⁹

Another project that Godard and Gorin worked on together was what Gorin called “the daily news in video,” in which the two of them played the role of news anchormen, videotaping themselves as they sat behind a table in Godard and Wiazemsky’s apartment and discussed the day’s events. The work was “shown in the radical bookstore of François Maspero. We did it for a few weeks or months. The bookstore was completely packed,” Gorin said. Their performances included what Gorin termed “skits” and “so-called secret messages.”
¹³⁰
Despite the interest they aroused, these exploits brought in no money. Godard needed to make films with real producers.

One possibility that presented itself was a film based on the play
Little Murders
, by Jules Feiffer. Elliott Gould had bought film rights to the play and Feiffer, after seeing
Weekend
, suggested to Gould that Godard was the right person to direct a film version.
¹³¹
Gould then sent Godard a copy of the play. While filming in California in late 1968, Godard met Gould—and demanded fifteen thousand dollars just to consider the project, which Gould’s production company paid.
¹³²
Godard had insisted that if he were to direct, the script be written by Robert Benton and David Newman, who had written
Bonnie and Clyde
. Gould agreed. Their script was completed in May 1969. However, Godard never planned to use it: “My intention was not to shoot that picture, but to take the money and make a picture on a subject I chose.”
¹³³
As Benton remembered, “Godard told us that what he wanted to do was a film about a French director coming to New York to do a film of
Little Murders
and who is unable to make it.”
¹³⁴
But United Artists, which financed the film, would not accept Godard as director and the job was ultimately given to Alan Arkin.

Finally, in December 1969, Godard and Gorin received financing from Italian television for a film called
Luttes en Italie
(
Struggles in Italy
), which they filmed almost entirely in Godard and Wiazemsky’s apartment (and one day in Milan).
¹³⁵
“There was a pizzaiolo downstairs,” Gorin recalled, “We were ordering a lot of pizza because we called him up every time we needed a shot of him.”
¹³⁶
(The young woman is played by Christiana Tullio Altan; Wiazemsky has a small role, as a saleswoman in a clothing store.) The film, based on a text by Louis Althusser, concerns a young woman’s realization that her political commitment is less revolutionary than she had believed. The film is in three parts, with each part almost identical, while the sound track in each differs, though less than the filmmakers seemed to think. The images, of the young woman at home, are of a crushing banality: she eats soup, reads a book, makes love, tries on clothing. An occasional angle suggests a sad vestige of aesthetic inspiration. Once again, the theoretical justifications that Godard and Gorin elaborated for the film are far more substantial than the film itself, which is stultifyingly dull. It was not broadcast on Italian television.