Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (76 page)

But the extreme exposure is precisely the point of the film. In
Numéro Deux
, Godard took the first step toward realizing the idea behind the unmade
Moi je
, a film about himself:
Numéro Deux
begins and ends with Godard on camera. At the beginning, in a single eight-minute-long fixed-frame shot, he stands in shadows next to his “kinescoping” equipment and beside a large TV screen on which his own talking head is transmitted live on closed-circuit video, and delivers a monologue about how he came to make the film—specifically, about Beauregard’s visit (“He saw all these machines and then he said, ‘Look, Johnny,
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you’ve got to make something with all these machines’”).

At the end of
Numéro Deux
Godard is seated at a console of video equipment, not speaking but listening to the voice of the woman in the film, whose dialogue was largely “produced” by Miéville, as she discusses her burgeoning desire to become an artist too: “To be able to do that, and to want that ability.” He is listening to the future filmmaker whose untapped creativity is the new source of Godard’s own reawakening artistry. Though Godard had previously taken dialogue from Karina and Wiazemsky as he now took it from Miéville, the latter’s main contribution was something new: her presence in and around the shoot, her input in the editing room—in general, the fact that she talked cinema with Godard, indeed was willing to criticize his cinematic practice. And, though
Numéro Deux
heralded Godard’s newfound cinematic ambition, his actual appearance in the film conveyed not triumph or breakthrough, but anxiety, self-doubt, and reticence.

G
ODARD KNEW THAT
his fame was the commodity that would enable him to continue to make films, but he did not want to make the films that would nourish his fame. Still, he was deeply adept at the process he and Beauregard were setting in motion, and he participated in it as far as necessary: despite his harsh indictment of the information industries, Godard once again played them like a virtuoso.

Even prior to its release,
Numéro Deux
gained Godard a great deal of publicity in the general press, the first he had received since the release in 1972 of
Tout va bien
. Godard complained to an interviewer that his move to Grenoble had deepened his isolation: “Leaving Paris at a given moment consists of burying yourself, of no longer seeing anyone, because no one wants to see you anymore.”
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And yet, when he went to the Cannes Film Festival the following week, he found that everyone wanted to see him.

A press conference held at the Carlton Hotel was packed with journalists, and Godard expressed his surprise that they should bother to hear him
plug the film (“I’m just here to do my job”). But he made use of this bully pulpit to explain his new methods of production, which, he claimed, distinguished him from every other filmmaker in the business. In the process, he slammed his former colleagues in the New Wave:

I am amazed that people who lack ideas for new films (including some old friends like Truffaut, Rivette, who don’t have any more ideas than the guys whom they denounced twenty years ago), continue to adhere to the one and self-same system of filmmaking, which is easy to describe: a sum of so many million, multiplied by so many weeks, multiplied by a certain number of people.
²⁶

Godard considered himself, like them, to be inescapably trapped in old ways of thinking about movies, but described his studio as a way of “seeing [his] prison.” He summed up his new way of working: “I’m remaking my life from zero.”
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It was quite a performance; a journalist from
Libération
called the press conference “the best film of the festival.”
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When the film was released in September 1975, Godard went to Paris to do a series of interviews. Asked in
Le Monde
about his return, Godard answered, “I was never away.” In
Le Nouvel Observateur
, Jean-Louis Bory declared, “Finally Godard returns. Better: he is reborn.”
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The talk of a return was wishful thinking. And the film was not the commercial success that it would take to relaunch him in the industry.

G
ODARD DID NOT
wait for the verdict on
Numéro Deux
. As he had done at the time of
Breathless
(with
Le Petit Soldat
), he got Beauregard to finance a second film before the first was completed. The initial point of departure of this new film,
Comment ça va
, was another tawdry affair, about a woman on a Club-Med-like vacation who has an affair with one of the employees: “The two, who are fucking together, are fucked by the system which draws them toward each other…”
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The project was impractical—it demanded travel—but the idea behind it proved fertile.

Comment ça va
would, on the basis of that outline, borrow from
Ici et ailleurs
the problem of a trip to “elsewhere” that served only to reproduce the discontents of “here.” But the outline was revised later in 1975 to address the question of journalism, particularly the journalism in which Godard was most implicated, the new daily newspaper
Libération
.

Godard knew many of the editors and writers who worked at
Libération
, and they, in turn, took an interest in his new ventures. On September 12, days before the release of
Numéro Deux
, several writers from the paper received Godard in their offices for an interview that would be published along
with coverage of the film. In the interview, Godard suggested that
Libération
itself might be the subject of his next film: “My next film will be called
Comment ça va
. It’s the story of a guy who gets hired as a compositor and who says to an editor: ‘You are dictating too fast for my hands.’ That’s all. ‘
How’s it going?
’ [Comment ça va?] ‘Well, it’s going too fast!’”
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Several days later, Godard picked up
Libération
and saw a photograph that accompanied a report by the editor-in-chief, Serge July, on a protest by leftist Portuguese soldiers against Portugal’s new, non-Communist government.
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He wrote a letter to the editor in which he criticized as uninformative the coupling of the photo and the text. He thought that the photograph of the Portuguese conflict should have been paired with another photograph, one that showed a young worker confronting a policeman during a strike at the Joint Français gasket company in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, in 1972: “And I would have tried to ‘speak’ starting out from this montage, that is, to start out listening to these two comrade photos taken two years apart.”
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He did not say “photos of comrades” but “comrade photos”: it was the images themselves that were the militant subjects he wanted to “listen to.”

Godard seemed to be planning a kind of
Ici et ailleurs
analysis of leftist militancy, in which two images that were distant in time and space informed and interrogated each other. Soon thereafter, he went to the offices of
Libération
to film the hands of typists and compositors at their keyboards. Then he returned to Grenoble and made
Comment ça va
, which would have as its centerpiece the analysis, through video superimposition, of the two photographs from Portugal and Saint-Brieuc—the journalistic work that he charged
Libération
with not having undertaken.

Comment ça va
can be summarized as a film about the writing of a letter about a series of meetings regarding a failed attempt to make a videotape about the workings of a left-wing newspaper. And yet, these nested forms of communication are coiled tightly with stories that build and resolve their tension as surely as a political thriller. Like
Le Petit Soldat
in relation to
Breathless, Comment ça va
is more sincere, more naturalistic, and more classical than
Numéro Deux
.

From the very first scene,
Comment ça va
exudes nostalgia for the possibility of filming a fictional love story. In a moody, romantic shot from inside a car, a young man with long hair and a gentle voice drives and talks with an unseen young woman; the city at night is seen through the rainstreaked windshield, as a gruff male voice-over describes a letter “from one guy to another guy; and this guy is the other guy’s father.” The young man and young woman hesitantly discuss the beginning of their relationship. The voice-over, which turns out to be that of the young man’s father, mentions a woman he met, Odette,
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at the Paris newspaper where he works. The father says that his
relations with Odette, who has proposed videotaping the newspaper’s operations, are “relations of production,” but the two have argued.

The son has taken up factory work in the provinces, and Godard’s images of the younger man’s life in a smaller city suggest the glimmer of new-found aesthetic ambition, a yearning for beauty. He films the young man at a café in a wistful image in which a glass of beer and a notebook are seen on the table in the foreground while through the window behind it, street life unfolds. A recurring shot of the young man walking in the street at twilight has a nostalgic, melodramatic aura. Yet politics are never far from intimate relations: as he and his girlfriend sit in their kitchen and listen to radio reports on strikes in Portugal and the death of the Spanish dictator Franco (November 20, 1975), they quarrel, exactly as do the father and Odette. Ultimately the newspaper union’s central committee rejects Odette’s videotape project, and the father-journalist never sees Odette again.

Godard does not appear in the film (though his voice is briefly heard on the sound track). Odette, whose voice and silhouette dominate the film but whose face is never shown, is played by Anne-Marie Miéville.

If
Comment ça va
suggested Godard’s desire to return to the cinema, it was not the only return in the air at the time. In 1976, critics Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana took control of
Cahiers du cinéma
, purged it of the most rigid ideologues of its Maoist years, and adopted a catholic, open-minded view of the cinema, based on a revived but wary cinephilia, in an effort to articulate an auteurism that would be politically aware and self-questioning. They saw Godard’s new films as a touchstone of their critical line.
³⁵
In May 1976 they sought to put this new line into action by presenting a weeklong series of films at a Paris theater, the Artistic-Voltaire, under the magazine’s aegis. The centerpiece was Godard and Miéville’s three recent films.
Comment ça va
, labeled as a premiere, and with Godard in attendance, played to a full house. Godard used the occasion to lament his solitude in Grenoble and admitted that he came to the screening “to get a sense of the boys and girls who would want to see [his] films.”
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Two weeks later, “the film was shown at a sidebar to the Cannes festival. It was eventually released in May 1978. In
Cahiers
, Alain Bergala recognized the film as “narration rediscovered,” as Godard’s incipient return to fiction.
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T
HE DECEIT OF
Numéro Deux
—the failure to deliver anything that resembled a remake of
Breathless
—had left Godard stranded in the industry. After
Comment ça va
, Beauregard’s support came to an end, and other movie producers (at least, those with the money to finance a film) kept their distance.
Godard announced plans to make a film in Mexico, financed locally, in which he would revive his idea about tourism, specifically, the story of a French travel agent who has a relationship with a Mexican woman.
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However, before he could go to Mexico, French television stepped in.

Manette Bertin, an executive at the newly formed INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), went to see
Numéro Deux
and thought that such a film was well-suited to television. (The film’s explicit sexual elements were no impediment to her appreciation of its aesthetic originality.) In late 1975, INA, courtesy of Bertin, made a small financial contribution to
Ici et ailleurs
and
Comment ça va
. Then Bertin approached the office’s new general director, Michel Roux, about coproducing a film by Godard; Roux was enthusiastic.

Soon thereafter, in early 1976, Bertin and Roux went to Grenoble to visit Godard and see his studio. They signed with Sonimage for a series of four one-hour television essays to be made over a two-year span. Two of these projects were derived from notions left over from the unmade
Moi je:
one offered Godard’s speculations regarding retroviruses as the cause of cancer, and another concerned the history of cinema. But in June, Bertin and Roux turned to him with another more pressing commission.

The third, noncommercial French channel, FR3, had six 100-minute Sunday night prime-time slots to fill in late July and August and an unfulfilled quota of programs from INA. Bertin asked Godard to make a feature-length film to fill one of those slots. He responded with a paradox:

A program of one hour forty in three months, we can’t do it, it usually takes us a year to do one hour. On the other hand, six times one hour forty—that makes almost ten hours
³⁹
—that isn’t the same thing. If one considers ten hours altogether, one has the time to think, one has the time to start over, to correct oneself, not to be panicked.
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