Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (70 page)

At this point, Godard and Gorin began to call their circle the Dziga
Vertov Group, named for the Soviet filmmaker of
Man with a Movie Camera
. Gorin recalled, “The name of the group was originally a joke, but at the same time it was, of course, a political act in aesthetics.” He explained that they chose the name because Vertov’s aesthetics, they thought, were more revolutionary than Eisenstein’s: “Vertov—more explicitly than Eisenstein—was dissolving his individuality into the forces of the revolution.”
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According to Jean-Henri Roger, the group considered narrative, character development, and dramatic realism ideologically suspect: “We adopted the name of Vertov after careful thought. We didn’t want the vulgarity of narrative. If there are characters, it’s bourgeois.”
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Godard’s next project hardly ran the risk of identification with bourgeois narrative: it was a commission from the Arab League to make a film about the Palestinian struggle for independence, and would be called
Jusqu’
ô
la victoire
(
Until Victory
), from a Fatah slogan. (The Arab League put six thousand dollars into the project, the actor and producer Jacques Perrin added three thousand dollars.) Godard, Gorin, and the cameraman Armand Marco (who had been a camera assistant on Godard’s
L’Aller et retour
in 1967), traveled to Jordan, the West Bank, and Lebanon, making several trips throughout 1970. They were not there to make a documentary film but a doctrinal one. Marco recalled, with unintended irony, the trio’s working conditions: “There was a certain liberty, but it was totally controlled,” though, as he understood, “one does not drop three ‘tourists’ into situations of war—we weren’t there for that, we weren’t war reporters.” The cameraman also recalled the theoretical questions he and the filmmakers discussed as they worked:

What does it mean to film a literacy class for women, the assembly and disassembly of arms, to film a woman? How should we ask a woman to let us film her? Should we film her in close-up or not in close-up? We were trying at the same time to escape, to change, to try to understand a little bit better what was going on there—and how to film it.
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The filmmakers were submitting their assumptions about movie aesthetics to the challenge of political problems, or rather, rephrasing their cinematic questions in terms of political ones in the hope of finding new answers. Yet the theoretical discussions served a predetermined end. Before traveling to the Middle East, Godard had put together an elaborate storyboard of the action to be filmed. He and Gorin approached the project like advertising: they had a message that they wanted to expound, and they decided in advance what they wanted to show in order to exemplify it. “There were drawings and shots” already worked out, Marco recalled. “We went to verify that structure. We laid the structure on top of a situation that we did not know.”
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Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian activist who had been called from Paris by Fatah to serve as translator and guide, took note of Godard’s carefully constructed scenario: “Throughout the trip, Godard did not stop looking at his notes, adding remarks, crossing out passages with three markers of different colors… Godard wrote a lot, with a certain jubilation which seemed to leave him during the shoot, giving way to an apparent detachment.”
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This could have been foreseen: Godard’s commitment to shooting had always been correlated with its spontaneity, of which this project offered little. As Sanbar said, “The film was very prepared, very scripted. So when something was going on and we said, ‘Come film it,’ he said, ‘I don’t need it for the film.’”
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Between November 1969 and August 1970, Godard traveled to the Middle East six times, not always with Gorin and Marco.
¹⁴³
Though the project was shot on film, Godard also brought video equipment, which he used to make preliminary versions of the film. Much to the surprise of the Palestinian participants, Godard, after viewing his tapes, often rewrote scenes and asked for immediate reshoots. (He later left his video equipment behind for a Palestinian fighter who used home movies to restore his troops’ morale.)
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Much of the footage consisted of military parades, children reciting propaganda, and soldiers receiving instructions. One difficult shoot involved a group of Palestinian commandos returning from a night mission against Israel after having suffered losses. Godard, following his scenario, called one of the fighters forward and had him recite, in front of the others, a text about self-criticism. Godard also wanted to interview Yasser Arafat on-camera, and later described his meeting with the Fatah leader:

I prepared all the equipment, the camera, the Nagra, we started shooting, and I asked Arafat, “What is the future of the Palestinian revolution?” He said, “I have to think about it, come back tomorrow.” And he didn’t come back. At least he was honest.
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In his discussion with Arafat, Godard had also brought up a subject that seems so strange as to be unworthy of serious discussion, but which nonetheless informed his ideas on the subject of Israel to a surprisingly great extent. The notion would find its way into the film, as well as into his later works that refer to the Middle East. The idea, such as it is, was a metaphor drawn from historical sources, and one which, to Godard, seemed to exemplify the essence of the problem in a theoretically minimal schema, as if in a mathematical equation. He recalled his conversation with Arafat:

I told him that the origin of the Palestinian difficulties had to do with the concentration camps, and he said, “No, that’s their story, the Germans and the Jews,” and I said, “No, you know that in the camps, when a prisoner was very weak, close to death, they called him ‘Musulman’ [Muslim].” And he said, “So what?” And I said, “You see, they could have called him ‘black’ or any other name, but no, they said ‘Muslim.’ And that shows that there’s a relationship, it’s a direct relationship.”
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While working on the film back in Paris, Godard and Gorin began to fear that they would be targeted for assassination by Israel; they worked in an unmarked editing room and barricaded themselves in. Gorin later recalled that he and Godard knew “everyone”—all the Palestinian agents—“from
Munich
,” Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film about Israel’s attempts to kill the European-based Palestinian militants responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

The filming was interrupted by Black September, the Jordanian army’s attack in September 1970 on Palestinian fighters. For the next two years, Godard and Gorin spent endless hours in the editing room working on the footage. Gorin later announced their plan “to make four or five films, each lasting one and one-half hours, out of the ten hours of material [they] have.”
¹⁴⁷
But the project, like so many that they undertook, was never completed—at least not in that form.

B
LACK
S
EPTEMBER
was not the only reason for the project’s interruption. Godard did not have enough money to complete the film, or even to live. To generate income as well as funds to finish
On Victory
, he signed on for another university tour of the United States, in April and May 1970; this time, he traveled with Gorin and saw the monthlong trip through to the end. But by now, the magic of his celebrity had somewhat worn off. American students, who were more motivated by politics than by cinema, were far more confrontational than they had been; Godard was coming as a political figure, showing political films (
British Sounds
and
Pravda
), and he attracted political audiences. In Berkeley, where the films were denounced for their abstraction, he and Gorin were pelted with tomatoes. “Throwing tomatoes in Berkeley was absolutely normal because [the students] are more involved in the mass struggle than Harvard. So it was in the more progressive areas that we got a violent response,” Godard said.
¹⁴⁸
In Minnesota, the local organizers thought the pair looked so threadbare that they gave them an additional hundred dollars in cash.

While in New York, however, Godard and Gorin did important business. They went together to the Leacock-Pennebaker studio to watch the rushes of
One
A.M
.; Godard was welcomed despite his failure to deliver the film in April 1969, which had forced the company into bankruptcy. He now hoped
to be inspired to complete the film together with Gorin, but Gorin declared it a “corpse” and they did nothing more with it. (D. A. Pennebaker had already edited his own version of the footage and called it
One
P.M
.—One Pennebaker Movie
.)

During this tour, Godard also said of his own earlier political-themed movies, particularly
La Chinoise
, “They are just Hollywood films because I was a bourgeois artist. They are my dead corpses,”
¹⁴⁹
though Gorin reported that Godard “has been noting—putting in a notebook—every student insurrection just after a showing of
La Chinoise
, and coming to me and saying, ‘Look! You see, it works!”’
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In any case, Godard found a new American source of financing: in the summer of 1969, Grove Press and its publisher, Barney Rosset, had paid six thousand dollars for distribution rights to
Pravda
and
British Sounds
(retitled
See You at Mao
); now he gave Godard a five-picture deal for an investment of twenty-five thousand dollars per film. The first in the series, for which the publisher issued an advance in March 1970, was to be a film of
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
, by Karl Marx—an account of the restoration of imperial rule which followed the failed French revolution of 1848.
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Instead, Godard and Gorin performed a by-now-familiar bait-and-switch move, making
Vladimir and Rosa
, a film inspired by their American sojourn, which, despite its title’s allusion to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, was about the trial of the Chicago Eight, which had gotten under way in the spring. In New York, Godard told an interviewer, “With
Vladimir and Rosa
we’ll try to begin again with fiction, but it will be very difficult.”
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Godard and Gorin’s experiments aimed at a reconstruction of storytelling in an ideologically determined form.

The difficulty that Godard foresaw proved to be worth the struggle. A study in political psychology,
Vladimir and Rosa
is by far the most impressive of the projects that Godard and Gorin did together. Filmed mostly in the pair’s new editing room on the rue de Rennes, it features actors declaiming their texts against blank walls in a series of crudely Brechtian skits resembling the trial of the American radicals. (For instance, Bobby Seale, a Black Panther activist, is portrayed as being held in the courtroom with two guns pointed at his head.) The sound track features Godard and Gorin analyzing, in alternation, the behavior and motives of the “radical attorney” William Kunstler and his clients.

Despite framing devices that remove the characters from any realistic context and despite the actors’ antic recitation and gesticulation,
Vladimir and Rosa
represents a first step toward the depiction of people who are not mere ideological abstractions but bundles of complex and mixed motives. The “courtroom” images are crudely functional, but several scenes featuring
Godard and Gorin as performers suggest new forms of political cinema: the two men walk side by side on a tennis court, on opposite sides of the net, and talk to each other in a constant stammer. They are wearing headphones, which are connected to the tape recorder that Gorin is carrying as Godard points a microphone at whichever one is speaking: the momentary tape delay with which they hear themselves, a sort of feedback, impedes their ability to speak clearly. The image, along with the metaphor it conveys, is the most powerful moment of cinema that the pair produced.

Nonetheless, Barney Rosset was dismayed by the film, particularly by Godard and Gorin’s alternately satirical and critical views of the Chicago Eight defendants, whom he considered heroes. The publisher thought that the film’s young and politicized audience would be put off by the filmmakers’ judgments, and so he modified the film. He brought two of the real-life defendants, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, to the Grove Press screening room and filmed them watching and mocking the film, then cut that footage into
Vladimir and Rosa
. The movie’s coproducer, a Munich television station, refused to broadcast it.
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The film was unreleased in France; upon its brief American release, a year later,
Vladimir and Rosa
was poorly received.
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A
LTHOUGH GODARD
had reached new prominence in the United States following his tour in the spring of 1970, his recent films were almost impossible to see in France.
Pravda
was screened, unannounced except through word of mouth, three times in February at the Musée d’Art moderne, where, taking questions from the audience, Godard all but apologized—“The film is 99 percent a failure but I think that it’s going 1 percent in the right direction.” But then, slipping back into character, he added, “For me, this film is a minuscule, tiny turn of the screw in the vise that will crush the bourgeoisie and its culture.”
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