Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (71 page)

He was essentially off the French map, both cinematically and journalistically. Interviews appeared in such small-circulation journals as
Cinéthique
, an expressly far-left alternative to
Cahiers du cinéma
(which quickly caught up and politicized to the extreme), and in other radical journals. In the mainstream press, occasional reports detailed Godard’s activities, generally with the sort of ironic yet incredulous admiration inspired by a rich man who joins a religious order and fulfills a vow of poverty. In June 1970, Michel Cournot wrote with pathos in
Le Nouvel Observateur
about “Jean-Luc ex-Godard,”
¹⁵⁶
and the next month, Claude Mauriac wrote that Godard’s “body and effects disappeared” into the Dziga Vertov Group.
¹⁵⁷

While Godard had done a good job of disappearing in France, he was
uninterruptedly visible in the United States. Indeed, from an American perspective, he hadn’t really left, in part, as a result of the vagaries of American film distribution, which kept his earlier work in the limelight.
Weekend
, shown at the New York Film Festival in September 1968, was released immediately thereafter, and the short film
Anticipation
(part of the compilation
The World’s Oldest Profession
) came out in November;
Pierrot le fou
was released to enthusiastic reviews in January 1969,
Montparnasse and Levallois
(in
Paris vu par
…, released as
Six in Paris
) in March;
Le Gai Savoir
played at the New York Film Festival to great acclaim (particularly from Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
) in September 1969, and
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
was hailed when it opened in April 1970, coinciding with Godard’s tour.

Godard’s most recent work (with and without Gorin) also received wide exposure and respectful attention. Indeed, in New York, Godard seemed to be everywhere, with
One Plus One
opening in April 1970 to praise in the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
(though in the
Village Voice
, David Ehrenstein hedged his admiration by addressing Godard as “you old charlatan, you faker,” and suggested that the film was “a ‘put-on’”).
British Sounds
and
Pravda
opened commercially in May, to an extended and enthusiastic study by Penelope Gilliatt in
The New Yorker
; in the
Village Voice
, Jonas Mekas exulted that “
Pravda
is Godard’s best film to date” and piled it on, saying that it also “may be his most romantic film.”
Le Gai savoir
opened in June;
Wind from the East
played at the 1970 New York Film Festival and was received with rapt attention by Canby in the
Times
.
¹⁵⁸

Godard’s American tours had done much to maintain his celebrity, and the haphazard releases of his films led many critics to overlook the break in his career and his life. The interest American critics and viewers took in the Dziga Vertov Group and its films was sustained in part by nostalgia and the willful assertion of continuity with Godard’s earlier work, and partly by political exoticism. Despite the ideological insistence of those works, the political worlds they addressed were remote from America’s own concerns. The critic who took Godard’s change the hardest, who most clearly perceived its political imposture and cinematic aridity, and who publicly challenged him, was Andrew Sarris.

During the 1970 tour, Sarris profiled and interviewed Godard. Summarizing Godard’s recent career path (and incidentally dismissing Gorin, whom he called an “assistant”), Sarris had little good to say about the recent films. He quoted with astonishment Godard’s dismissal of the realities of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, and he attacked what he perceived as implications of anti-Semitism in Godard’s lengthy diatribe in favor of Fatah. His questioning elicited Godard’s quasi-totalitarian defense of his new
methods: “Hollywood provides many images and not enough sound… It’s better to have no images than too many. The Chinese don’t have millions of books like us. They have only one, and that’s all they need.”

Nonetheless, Sarris attempted to extract some aesthetic sense from Godard’s response, explaining it as a resistance to “the current craze with image quantification for its own sake,” an idea that transcended Godard’s anti-aesthetic purpose. Sarris presciently perceived the long-term application of the ideas latent in Godard’s numbingly rigid films of those years, claiming that he remained “in the vanguard of expressing the almost inexpressible logic of artistic evolution.” Still, summarizing his discussion with Godard, the critic eulogized the director: “The death of an artist is too high a price to pay for the birth of a revolutionary, even when the revolution seems to make more sense than ever before.”
¹⁵⁹

F
RENCH LEFTISM AFTER
1968 had hardened into a fearsome dogmatic rigor, and Godard had gone along with it. In 1969, after the confused response of the Maoist leadership to the events of May 1968 and the restoration of a tense, reformist calm, a new hard-core Maoist group, the Gauche proletarienne (the GP, or Proletarian Left), was formed. The group saw May and June 1968 as a “dress rehearsal,” a bourgeois show that failed due to its lack of contact with French workers. The GP wanted to infiltrate and organize factories and labor unions, with the purpose of creating an authentically proletarian group of Maoists and the expectation that revolution would inevitably follow. But the government now responded to threats of unrest with overwhelming force. Successful strikes and factory takeovers led by the GP caused the government to ban its newspaper,
La Cause du peuple
, and to arrest its editor, Jean-Pierre Le Dantec. Prominent intellectuals, including many who had no particular sympathy for the GP cause (such as Truffaut), took to the streets to sell
La Cause du peuple
. Sartre became its titular editor. In October 1969, alongside Sartre, Godard sold the magazine in the street and visited the journal’s offices and presses. On October 21, Sartre addressed the workers outside the gates of the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt, and Godard videotaped the event.
¹⁶⁰

With
La Cause du peuple
banned, the GP founded, with financing from Godard’s friend Jean-Pierre Bamberger, a new journal,
J’accuse
, edited by Robert Linhart. For its first issue, on January 15, 1971, Godard wrote a critique of Jean-Pierre Melville’s recently released
Le Cercle rouge
, a crime drama, which he had gone to see in the company of “two or three” factory workers, transcribing and including their discussion of the film with his own review. He equated Melville with the minister of the interior Raymond Marcellin.
He signed the review under a self-dramatizing pseudonym, “Michel Servet,” a Protestant burned for heresy in Geneva by Calvin’s followers in 1553.

In January 1971, jailed Maoists began a hunger strike, and supporters undertook a hunger strike in sympathy, assembling in the chapelle Saint-Bernard (beneath the Montparnasse railway station). As one of the celebrity activists who visited the strikers, Godard suggested that the group needed to found its own press agency, which he dubbed the APL (Agence Presse Libération). The agency that resulted (founded soon thereafter by younger militants) turned into a daily newspaper in 1973,
Libération
, which ultimately became (and remains) the leading newspaper of the French mainstream left.

The depth and totality of Godard’s involvement in Maoist politics ultimately put an end to his relationship with Wiazemsky, completing the break that had begun with the arrival of Gorin on the set of
Wind from the East
. “Gorin brought out the worst in him, dragged him toward a cinema that was not his own,” Wiazemsky claimed. “He created a void around him. I left because of [Gorin], because of living with him. He was like the political commissar. All of my problems with Jean-Luc date from his arrival.”
¹⁶¹
The problem that Wiazemsky had with Gorin’s influence on Godard was not necessarily personal but cinematic: “[Godard] asked me to become a partner in his work, but it didn’t interest me. If it hadn’t been for politics, Gorin, yes. It would have been a classic actress-director relationship.” Although Wiazemsky did appear in
Wind from the East, Struggles in Italy
, and
Vladimir and Rosa
(where she plays a feminist T-shirt maker), her roles were schematic and her involvement in them merely formal. (In the meantime, she had acted in several films by Pasolini, pursued her interest in photography, and even acted—shades of Anna Karina—in a film directed by Michel Deville, starring Maurice Ronet,
Raphaël ou le débauché
.)

Wiazemsky’s view of Gorin’s negative influence on Godard echoed that of many French cinephiles, who viewed Gorin with great suspicion as a sort of Maoist guru who held Godard under his sway. Gorin recalled, “People hated my guts in Europe because of what I had done, which they thought was so sacrilegious in nature.”
¹⁶²
What he “had done,” of course, was simply to work closely with Godard at a time when Godard withdrew from his quasi-popular way of working. But Gorin was blamed for luring Godard, like a cinematic Yoko Ono, toward work of arid hermeticism. Godard’s own behavior during this period did not help. He remained out of the public eye, surfacing only rarely on the occasion of a trip to the Middle East or a Parisian museum screening of his recent films.

Godard’s marriage to Wiazemsky broke up when he moved out of their apartment in the Latin Quarter and slept in his editing room. Then, Wiazemsky left and Godard moved back in—but not alone.

Some months earlier, in 1970, Godard had been invited to the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne to show
Struggles in Italy
. Freddy Buache, the director of the Cinémathèque Suisse, was a leftist who addressed his audience as “comrades” and was sympathetic to local radical groups and the radical political cinema. It was there that Godard met the person who would play a crucial role in his life and his work for the next three decades and beyond. “Anne-Marie Miéville often came to the Cinémathèque Suisse,” Buache recounted. “That’s where they met.”
¹⁶³

Anne-Marie Miéville, born in 1945, was active with the local Swiss group, Rupture pour le communisme, connected to the French GP.
¹⁶⁴
Her family, like Godard’s, was from the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, and, also like him, she had moved to Paris. There she briefly sang pop music, then took up photography. She worked at a pro-Palestinian bookstore in Paris and helped Godard make contact with Palestinians and sympathizers there while he worked on
Until Victory
.

Miéville had a young daughter and also had family in Switzerland, and was in the habit of shuttling between the two countries. Godard wrote to Miéville every day in her absence (and continued to do so for more than a decade).
¹⁶⁵
Isabelle Pons, who kept the production company’s books (and who was living with Gorin), recalled that Godard had a calendar on which he marked the days that he made love to Miéville.
¹⁶⁶

With Miéville’s arrival in Godard’s Paris apartment, his domestic life stabilized, but his financial state became ever more precarious. Pons recalled that by 1971, Godard was in desperate need of money. She said that Godard thought nothing of living on a large sack of rice as his diet for the entire week. In early 1971, Pons brought Godard together with a young and ambitious producer, Jean-Pierre Rassam, “who needed to produce something to gain some credibility.”

For Rassam, Godard and Gorin conceived a project that they first called
Love Story
and then changed to
Tout va bien
(All’s Well). It was intended to be an imitation of a Hollywood film but with a heavy infusion of ideology. At first, the project was to be produced by Max Palevsky, of the Xerox Corporation. Then, it was slated to be coproduced by Paramount and the distributor Donald S. Rugoff.
¹⁶⁷
It featured singer-actor Yves Montand, an engaged leftist, as a filmmaker who had withdrawn from the movies after 1968 and who was getting by making commercials, and Jane Fonda as his girlfriend, an American journalist in Paris. The story concerned a strike at a factory where the workers sequester the boss in his office. The journalist and the filmmaker, coming to interview the boss, witness the strike and are themselves briefly detained. The woman journalist begins to question her professional practice and her relationship with the filmmaker.

In sympathy with the film’s political message, the actors agreed to accept a percentage of the film’s earnings in lieu of a fee, and the shoot was scheduled to begin in late 1971. For Godard, the project signified something of a return to the film industry, if only pro forma, and he began to participate again in industry-related activities. In Rome, he took part in a panel discussion with five other directors (including Louis Malle and Alain Tanner) about the distribution of art films.
¹⁶⁸

There on June 7, Godard was preparing to fly to New York to meet with Frank Yablans of Paramount. Before his flight, Godard wanted to buy a book, and his film editor, Christine Aya, offered to give him a lift on her motorcycle. For some reason, Gorin foresaw trouble and warned Godard that he would have an accident.
¹⁶⁹
Moments later, the motorcycle slid under the wheels of a bus. Aya was thrown clear, but Godard suffered a skull fracture, a broken pelvis, and numerous internal injuries. Doctors feared that his femoral artery was irreparably severed. Godard was in a coma for almost a month. As Gorin recalled, Godard “lost so much skin from his buttocks that you could touch the bone.” He also lost a testicle.
¹⁷⁰
Anne Wiazemsky, who was still his legal spouse, was the only person legally empowered to deal with his doctors. She came at once from Rome and arranged with the doctors and hospital staff to keep Godard’s condition secret. It seemed clear that Godard would be unable to direct
Tout va bien
, but, as Gorin remembered: