Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (74 page)

Yet Truffaut admitted that he remained interested: “For a while, following May 68, no more was heard of you or else it was all very mysterious: it seems he’s working in a factory, he’s formed a group, etc., and then, one Saturday, there’s an announcement that you’re going to speak on the radio with Monod. I stay in the office to listen to it, in a sense just to know what you’ve been doing; your voice trembles, you seem very nervous, you declare that you’re going to make a film called
La Mort de mon frère
” (The Death of My Brother). Truffaut then lambasts Godard as a “poseur” and a “phony” for mentioning this humanistic project, which he had no intention of making.

Truffaut also offered an unsparing critique of
Tout va bien
, which he compared to
Breathless
and found “disheartened and cautious.” He closed with a pointedly chosen quote to criticize Godard’s politicized work with the Dziga Vertov Group. The line came from
The Diary of a Country Priest
, the novel by Georges Bernanos and the film by Robert Bresson: “If, like you, I had forsaken the vows of my ordination, I would rather it had been for the love of a woman than for what you call your intellectual development.”
⁷

What Truffaut failed to notice about Godard’s letter was that in an oblique and backhanded way, Godard was crediting him with having found a fruitful subject in
Day for Night
—a film contrasting the private lives and public image of people in the film industry—and was in effect proposing to do with it what he had done fourteen years earlier with Truffaut’s sketch for
Breathless:
to use its naturalistic drama as a framework for his own preoccupations.

Just as Godard appeared, haltingly but determinedly, to be returning to the cinema and to himself, he was also attempting to return—with an aggressive pride as if concealing shame and penitence—to Truffaut. Despite his financial demands and his peremptory, insulting tone, what Godard seems to have wanted was simply “to talk it over.” The clearest sign of his intentions was found not in the letter but outside it, on the back of the envelope, which Godard marked with a return address of subtle tenderness: “Sender: a former admirer of J. Daniel-Norman.”
⁸
Jacques Daniel-Norman was a popular
French director of the 1940s and 1950s whose films Truffaut and Godard had often seen together.
⁹
When Godard reminisced in
Cahiers
several years earlier about his New Wave youth, he called it “the period when François loved the films of Jacques Daniel-Norman.” In a preface to the published screenplay of Truffaut’s
The Soft Skin
, Godard had mentioned their adolescent passion for the actress Tilda Thamar in
The Red Angel
, from 1948, directed by Daniel-Norman. The director’s name was a sort of code between the two men, signifying the first years of their friendship, and in 1973, Godard used it to send his letter. The message conveyed the code, but Truffaut had become immune to it.

Although Godard had sought to talk with Truffaut, his effort at communication did not signal a desire to resume his old place in the French film industry or among his peers of the New Wave. He had left the New Wave, had gotten out of the film industry that he and his associates had so defiantly entered, and had now also left the ideological enclosure for which he forsook the cinema. He was not about to go back; he was going still further ahead, working in new collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville. However, he thought that he could learn from Truffaut—not necessarily about how to direct, but about how to produce. Truffaut had kept his production company, Les Films du Carrosse, afloat since the late 1950s, even through hard times, and had just made a film,
Day for Night
, in which he attempted something that Godard had in mind to do (even if Godard would do it differently): a film about himself and his work as a filmmaker.

Stymied by Truffaut’s response, Godard nonetheless kept the dialogue going (his side of it, at least)—through sniping in public. Although the angry exchange of letters was at the time unknown to the world (it was first published in 1988, in a volume of Truffaut’s correspondence), Godard put his criticisms of Truffaut’s filmmaking on the record at every chance he got. Truffaut, for his part, kept his views to himself, until he made use of an interview in
Cahiers du cinéma
in 1980—his first there since 1967—to vent publicly about Godard: “Even at the time of the New Wave, friendship with him was a one-way street… One had to help him out all the time, to do him a favor and wait for a low blow in return.”

In 1980, Godard invited Truffaut (along with Chabrol and Rivette) to join him in a roundtable discussion on the occasion of their new works; Truffaut refused, writing Godard another angry, derisive letter in which he again brought up Godard’s slur against Braunberger and declared that Godard should next make a film called “A Shit Is a Shit.”
¹⁰
The two men crossed paths in New York, but Truffaut refused to shake Godard’s hand. Yet until the end of his life, in 1984, Truffaut collected press clips about any project of Godard’s (albeit highlighting the mean remarks made about their old
cohorts). Godard, for his part, kept the tacit dialogue going in the way that, then as always, meant the most to him—in his films. Truffaut became, in his absence, as crucial a reference for Godard as he had been when the two were close, in the early 1960s.

T
RUFFAUT WAS RIGHT
that Godard had changed greatly; indeed, Godard had changed even more than Truffaut believed. Video technology, and the new methods it suggested, were now at the heart of Godard’s campaign to re-approach the cinema; in fact, for the moment, the accumulation of new equipment took priority over the actual creation of films or videos with it. But Godard had had little experience with equipment; he had not gone to film school, he had not come up through the ranks of technicians, and, as his machinery grew far more complex than consumer electronics, it began to outstrip his ability to handle it. He needed to study; he needed to practice; he needed lessons.

In mid-1973, Godard attended a meeting of Marxist-Leninist film technicians on the Île de la Cité in Paris. After the meeting ended, he talked to a younger man from Grenoble, Jean-Pierre Beauviala, about his attempts at “kinéscopage,” the transfer of images from videotape to film. He asked Beau-viala to come up to his studio on the rue Rochechouart to lend him a hand.

Beauviala was—and still is—something of a cinematic utopian. In the wake of 1968, he planned to make a film about street life in Grenoble (which was being menaced, he thought, by monumental modernization). To film with direct sound in the street, he wanted a 16mm movie camera and a professional-quality tape recorder that would be synchronized without a connecting cable running between them. No such equipment existed, so Beauviala set out to invent it. He did so, with great success. In 1971, Beauviala formed his own company, called äton,
¹¹
to produce the camera, and installed the company in a Grenoble storefront.

After meeting Beauviala, Godard remained in contact with him, learned of his camera project, and took an interest in it. Godard asked Beauviala to move to Paris; Beauviala refused. The next logical step was for Godard to follow him to Grenoble. This suited Godard in several ways. To film himself and the life of people in and around the cinema and television, Godard needed to hear again the sound of his own voice, to recover his own identity. He needed a quiet place away from the clamor of protest, away from the closed circuit of sympathizers and allies, away from the hum of intellectual currents and those who plugged into them. Godard needed to leave Paris, the capital of ideology. Anne-Marie Miéville also wanted to leave Paris to be closer to her family in Switzerland, so they departed for Grenoble in late 1974, taking with them the equipment they had acquired.
¹²

For Godard, leaving Paris also meant turning his back on the capital of the French film industry. Godard had traveled to Cuba, England, Czechoslovakia, Quebec, the United States, and the Middle East, but each of these other places was, in its own way, the capital of something—of revolution, of rock, of “revisionism,” of populism, of empire, of resistance. In going to Grenoble, he was moving to the capital of nothing.

But since his motorcycle accident, Godard had become agoraphobic and easily panicked: he had limited tolerance for contact with others. The move was as much the refuge of a convalescent as a withdrawal from the turbulence of ideological exhortation. This exile was a sign of political remorse, a search for personal understanding, far from the city’s stimulations and currents and trends. With regard to the cinema, Godard described his move to Grenoble as “an auto-expatriation”
¹³
; during his time there, he deliberately ignored contemporary films, except when he actively dismissed them. He later described that time as “coming attractions”
¹⁴
for his next change of venue, of cinema, and of life—his move to Switzerland in 1977—and even recalled his years in Grenoble as “nothing.”
¹⁵

However, his activities there were of far greater importance than he allowed. Godard was putting into practice the video techniques and methods that would inform his work in the future. There he learned to make films in a newly collaborative way, and to integrate behind-the-camera social relationships even more openly into the film’s substance. There he began to make images in a daily notebook-like process, working like a writer or an artist in his own studio, and joined that process to the compositional demands of a feature film. Most importantly, he established the groundwork for a colossal history of the cinema which would become both the pathway that led him back to the center of the French film industry and the great obsession of his later years. No matter how far Godard went from the movie business, he never abandoned the cinema. Whether from the ideological enclosure of post-1968 Paris or his physical and mental recuperation in the provincial isolation of Grenoble, he worked with an undiminished fervor and achieved ever-more-copious results. But by exploring the history of cinema—the intellectual cornerstone of his identity—with a newfound depth, he would effect both an artistic and a personal renewal. And by the time Godard did make his return to the film industry, it was with a more developed sense of craft, a replenished and novel idea of film form, and a reinvigorated personal commitment to the medium. The preceding disjunctive years had led so decisively to his return that they seem to have followed a plausible, purposeful plan.

A
LTHOUGH BEAUVIALA HAD
refused Godard’s invitation to move to Paris, he was delighted for Godard to join him in Grenoble. He offered Godard
and Miéville his own apartment in an old building in the center of town, around the corner from the workshop of his company, Aäton, in exchange for use of Godard’s apartment in Paris. But Miéville refused Beauviala’s home, calling it “dirty,” and she and Godard rented a recently built apartment outside the city limits, in the Olympic Village (which had been constructed to house athletes when the Winter Olympics were played there in 1968).
¹⁶
Godard also rented a storefront that would serve as an office and a studio, at 2 rue de Belgrade, just across the street from the river’s south bank. Further down the street, Godard also rented a garage in which he installed his bulkier equipment.

The first project Godard planned there was a film about Aäton itself, which he intended to call
L’Instant fatal
(The Fatal Instant). He was interested in filming the moment of industrial creation, the moment at which an idea becomes a material reality. Aäton was to be the model for Godard and Miéville’s new company, Sonimage (Sound Image, or His/Her Image); Beauviala was in business to make money, but to do so by producing a highly technical product (in Aäton’s case, cameras; in Sonimage’s, films) to serve an aesthetic end.
¹⁷
But just as Godard began to prepare the shoot, Aäton lost its two main clients, the BBC and Swedish television, and was at risk of bankruptcy. There was little patience in the desperate, panicked workshop for Godard’s inquisitive presence, and he was quickly forced to abandon the idea.

At the same time, Godard and Miéville had been spending long hours in the editing room watching the abandoned footage from the Middle East that he had shot with Gorin. They tried to figure out what to do with it. The first thing they needed was a good translation of the recorded Arabic discussions. The former translators, Palestinians living in Paris, had refused to translate literally what was being said, reducing the exchanges to generic sloganeering. When Godard and Miéville brought in a United Nations translator, they were shocked to discover that the Palestinian fighters who had been filmed in the heated wake of failed battle were talking about their inability to resist the superior Israeli forces and accusing their officers of sending them to their doom in hopeless combat.

As he and Miéville worked on the footage, Godard was contacted by Nourdine Saïl, a journalist from a Moroccan newspaper,
El-Moudjahid
, to whom he granted, on April 5, the only interview he would give in 1974, and with whom he discussed at length his return to the long-dormant project. Speaking with Saïl, Godard criticized the cinema of pure militant exhortation that he and Gorin had set out to make, and suggested that the film he and Miéville were making was to be a self-critique: “All we want to say about Palestine, four years later, is that we didn’t look at these shots. We didn’t
listen to them.” He blamed himself and Gorin for having attempted to make a film that was not about what the Palestinians were in fact saying and doing, but about what he and Gorin had wanted to say and to do (as was of course apparent from their storyboard and script). Godard and Miéville took a problem of principle underlying the shoot—the idea that French people in France wanted to make a film in the Middle East about Palestinians, which would then be shown in France—as the subject for their film. They called it
Ici et ailleurs
(Here and Elsewhere).