Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (78 page)

Despite the success of
Day for Night
, Truffaut had to finance his films mainly with American money. Rohmer made only one film between 1972 and 1979 (and with German financing); Rivette filmed on minuscule budgets cobbled together with great difficulty. Younger directors who were close to and inspired by the New Wave, such as Philippe Garrel and Jean Eustache, had it even worse, and found the doors of the industry closed to them.

As for Godard, he had sought to make himself a forgotten man, and he now had to work to be remembered. The industry distrusted and repudiated him; producers seemed to fear that Godard was a political propagandist, so
now he was worse than forgotten; he was rejected. He did, however, have one self-provided advantage that his former associates from
Cahiers
lacked: because he had video equipment, he could always produce, edit, and show some new work, even without funding. But he was not a part of the cinema, and his work had little to do with the cinema, whether its current state or its history, of which he had absorbed such vast amounts.

Television, this time the second channel, Antenne 2, tossed Godard a small gift: he was asked to make a short film—in effect, a music video
avant la lettre
—of a song, “Faut pas rêver” (Mustn’t Dream) by the pop singer Patrick Juvet, to be broadcast on January 1, 1977. Godard tested the station’s new political independence: he gave them a three-minute-long shot of Miéville’s now almost-adolescent daughter eating an apple at the kitchen table as her mother questions her off-camera about whether all of her things are packed for school. As the saccharine ballad plays in the background, electronic text crawls up a black screen: “When the left takes power, will television still have so little relation to people?”

But Godard was looking for something more substantial—and more lucrative—to do. He did not delude himself about the motive behind his next venture: it was commercial. Godard’s idea was for a million-dollar cash cow: he would make a series of videotapes on the history of cinema that he would sell to American universities, where, as he had seen in his trips to American campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, cinema studies were growing and thriving. He intended to use videotape to combine his knowledge of the cinema with his vestiges of fame to derive a source of income. Yet for all the mercenary considerations, no product could have had a more personal origin: outer and inner necessity happily coincided in Godard’s project. He had proposed a one-hour video on the history of cinema to the INA in 1976, but the program never got made. His plans were now far greater, more ambitious, and wider in scope than that one-hour commission. The project would unleash a terrific burst of mental energy, one from which Godard would continue to draw for decades.

A
T
C
ANNES IN 1975
, Godard said, “The cinema can only interest us to the extent that we succeed in destroying it. Just as one splits an atom or a biologist opens a cell, in order to examine it.”
⁵¹
He did not hesitate to share his jaundiced view with the living prophet of the history of the cinema, Henri Langlois. Discussing with him the future of the Cinémathèque, Godard suggested that Langlois sell off the entire collection and use the money to produce films, and that, if the collection should find no buyers, Langlois should just burn it all, so that the history of cinema, which had, in Godard’s
view, strayed so far off course due to the influences of commerce and politics, could start again. Langlois, who of course rejected this modest proposal, was nonetheless to be the heart, the engine, of Godard’s new project concerning the history of cinema.

The plan was to analyze cinema and television by way of video, and in particular, by way of the video editing effects (such as the incrustation of one image in another) which he considered essential to the project. The intended result was ten hourlong videocassettes, “Studies in art, economics, technics [
sic
], people,” to be sold at a price of “between 250 and 500 dollars” per cassette, a figure arrived at on the basis of Godard’s calculation that each episode would require a budget of between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars.

Godard stated that the project would take two years to complete. The first year’s cassettes would be devoted to the silent cinema, the second year’s to sound, with both series featuring, in order, the cinema of the United States, Europe, Russia, and “others,” with the fifth and tenth “both a sum up [
sic
] and an introduction.” “Silent U.S.A.” would concern Griffith’s discovery of the close-up. In “Talking U.S.A.” a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt would indicate “a new deal between image and sound.” In “Silent Russia,” Godard said, “Eisenstein discovers the angle.” “Talking Europe” would show a shot of Hitler with “Albert Speer, director of photography” and another of Marlene Dietrich with “Joseph von Sternberg, director of photography.” Speaking with a West German journalist, he used the “Talking Europe” episode to explain the allusive, associative method he had in mind:

[Dietrich] was the
femme fatale
. Hitler was an
homme fatal
. If there was a
femme fatale
, there was also the German people who had the same fatality. Thus one could say, that’s how they used lighting. This story is fairly curious. For if one looks deeper into it, one sees that Sternberg, Marlene, like all German intellectuals, fled to America… Sternberg, who was Jewish, met another Jew, who was American. Of European descent. Ben Hecht, a playwright. And it was they who made the prototype for the American crime film. First Sternberg with
Underworld
and
The Docks of New York
. Then
Scarface
, and then Sternberg’s other films. It was German-American Jews who after the existence of Nazism came up with the prototype of gangster films.
⁵²

Just as Godard had relied on Miéville as the “raw material” for
Numéro Deux
, he intended to turn to Langlois to supply the raw material for
Histoire(s) du cinéma et de la télévision
. Langlois would both gush ideas that Godard could refine, and supply films that Godard would excerpt in the series.
But circumstances intervened to reorient the project and to hasten it into reality.

In late 1976, Godard accepted an invitation from Serge Losique, a professor of French literature at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, to spend a week there in March 1977 and present a retrospective of his films. Losique had known Langlois since the 1950s, and when Langlois was fired from the Cinémathèque in 1968, Losique immediately invited him to come to Montreal to teach cinema history. Though Langlois was restored to the Cinémathèque, he honored his commitment, flying to Montreal twice a month in the academic years 1968–1969, 1969–1970, and 1970–1971, but the travel put a strain on his already poor health, and, on his doctors’ advice, he gave up his Montreal classes.
⁵³

When Godard approached Langlois for help regarding the set of video courses, Langlois contacted Losique about resuming his classes in the 1977–1978 academic year. Langlois’s lecture-discussion would be videotaped and Godard would use the tapes as a prime source for the series. Losique accepted the proposal, but on January 12, 1977, Langlois died, at age 62.

When Losique came to Paris shortly thereafter, Godard offered to take over Langlois’s classes. Losique enthusiastically agreed, but Godard put a peculiar spin on their agreement: having proposed to teach in Langlois’s place, Godard not only wanted the classes to be videotaped for use in the
Histoire(s)
, but told Losique that the videotapes themselves would be the raison d’être of the journeys. Instead of being a visiting professor who would arrange to have his lectures taped for his own use, Godard wanted Losique to sign on as “coproducer” of the videotapes themselves. The difference was partly psychological, partly economic, in that Losique would not pay Godard a fee, but would deposit money into the Sonimage account toward production costs. In any case, their agreement launched the series with a momentum that carried it through to completion—twenty years later.

G
ODARD’S VISIT
, from March 9 to 13, 1977, was a major event in Montreal. One journalist noted, “Never has a press conference been so widely covered. There was a little bit of everything, television, radio, the press naturally, and even several Anglophones. Everyone was there.”
⁵⁴
But more important, the weeklong film retrospective was a major event in Godard’s life and work: in the course of five days, Godard watched, contemplated, and discussed his own personal
histoire(s) du cinéma
.

Godard also spent five days with Losique’s students, answering their questions about his films. These conferences were videotaped, showing
Godard sitting on the floor of the low stage alongside Losique and responding with some hesitation and diffidence. He reviewed his career, expressing relief that his films after
Breathless
were financial failures, which, he said, kept him from becoming what he thought Truffaut had become: someone who “talks to nobody, except to Polanski.”
⁵⁵
He mentioned having gone to see
Rocky
, and said that he preferred such “honestly commercial” films to films that are “dishonest in their principle, like films by Polanski or Altman, for example, which seem to me to pretend to be intellectual when it’s pure merchandise.” He took stock of his years of absorption in his video studio, and enumerated its virtues, including the ability to have the equipment at home for immediate and daily use (“It’s like a blank page for the writer, he says, ‘I have to fill it’”).
⁵⁶

Above all, he talked of his own films, of his experiences and intentions while making them, of his methods and the reasons behind them. For the first time since he had begun to conceive his project regarding the history of cinema—indeed, since he had left the cinema in 1967—Godard approached the subject not merely as a form of propaganda or as a diseased cell, but as an aspect of himself, and considered himself as an aspect of that history. This is what Losique had prompted: until that point, Godard’s view of the history of cinema had been one thing and his own films another; from now on, they would be one—and it was in Montreal again, several months later, that Godard said as much.

As a favor to Losique, Godard agreed to go to Montreal in the summer of 1977 to help inaugurate the first World Film Festival, which Losique founded. During the festival, Godard spoke with a journalist about the decisive shift in his conception of the
Histoire(s)
project:

I will soon be fifty years old, and it’s the moment when in general people write their memoirs, recount what they’ve done. But rather than write those memoirs, rather than saying where I come from and how I happened to have followed this trajectory in this profession of mine, which is the cinema; instead of doing that, I would like to tell my stories, a little like tales of the cinema. And that’s what I propose to do.
⁵⁷

The project had decisively shifted from the standpoint of a quasi-detached professor to that of an autobiographer in relation to his cinematic life, and had reawakened Godard’s desire to consider his work, and his life, in relation to the classical cinema. It was now called
Histoire(s) du cinéma;
television had dropped out of it.

Nonetheless, while at the festival, Godard spoke with Losique about postponing his cinema history course at the university until 1978 because of
a new project for which there was a deadline. The reason for the postponement came up in this exchange with a student who asked Godard what he planned to do next.

“A TV series for Antenne 2,
Le Tour de France
, based on the book.”

“You’re going to do what?”

“We’re going to do
Le Tour de la France
.”

“Bicycles?”

Not bicycles.

Camille Virolleaud
(Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. “France / tour / détour / deux / enfants,” 1978. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix [EAI], New York)

eighteen.

FRANCE TOUR DÉTOUR DEUXENFANTS, ET AL., 1978–1979

“Men’s problems”

L
E
T
OUR DE LA
F
RANCE AVEC DEUX ENFANTS
(A
LL
A
ROUND
France with Two Children), by G. Bruno (a pseudonym for Madame Augustine Tuillerie or Thuillerie), a children’s book, was first published in 1877. Written in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, it depicts two young orphan brothers leaving German-occupied Alsace and traveling through France in search of their uncle, who will assure their French citizenship. The book, with its patriotic affirmation of civic virtues, was an instant national success and remained familiar school and family fare well into the twentieth century. Marcel Jullian, the chief executive of the second television channel, Antenne 2, wanted to commission an adaptation of the book for broadcast in the Christmas season of 1977, but the directors he approached rejected the subject as too old-fashioned. Jullian, who was impressed by
Six fois deux
, was considering asking Godard to do something for the station. When Manette Bertin of INA suggested that Antenne 2 commission a fiction film from Godard, Jullian responded, “As long as it’s
Le Tour de la France avec deux enfants
.”
¹