Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (79 page)

The commission was an important one: loosely modeled on the book’s sections (each corresponding to a region of France that the boys visit), the adaptation was to comprise twelve broadcasts of twenty-six minutes each, which would be shown each evening during the 1977 Christmas season at 7:30 PM—early enough for children to watch it. Unlike
Six fois deux
, which Godard had to get on the air in a hurry, he had nine months of lead time for
Le Tour de la France
—not a lot for other filmmakers but plenty for him.

Toward the end of the school year, in the spring of 1977, Godard asked
his assistant, Philippe Rony, who lived in Paris, to look for children to play the lead roles in the series. Rather than placing an ad in newspapers or going to casting agents, Rony and his girlfriend at the time, the theater actress Betty Berr, videotaped approximately fifteen children from their neighborhood. In July, after reviewing the tapes, Godard selected two, Camille Virolleaud and Arnaud Martin, who were neighbors and schoolmates. Godard’s choice of a boy and a girl, both nine years old, represented a departure from the children of G. Bruno’s novel, who were two brothers of fourteen and seven, but this would prove to be the least of his departures from the book. Yet Godard was slow in getting to work; having so much time before him, he pursued the project only intermittently, and instead attempted to launch his
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and other projects, in a newfound flurry of activity that was intended—in contrast to this new television commission—to bring him back, or closer, to the cinema.

G
ODARD’S FIRST UNDERTAKING
, however, was to leave Grenoble. He and Miéville had chosen the town as a compromise between Paris and Switzerland, but the place itself left Godard cold: “In Grenoble, there is a center. It’s hell. There are little cameras everywhere, there are accordion players everywhere, in all the stores. All this in concrete, in plastic, in chrome. This is the France of today. This is what they call neighborhood renewal.”
²
Grenoble had a local cable TV station, but Godard claimed to have nothing to do with it: “Since I have no product to bring them, I don’t want to see them. In any case I live in a neighborhood where you can’t get cable.”
³

In mid-1977, Godard and Miéville moved to the town of Rolle, Switzerland, midway between Geneva and Lausanne, at the foot of a sweeping hillside that runs down to the strand of the lake. The small town boasts a medieval castle on the east shore and farms on the west hills, and it is only a short walk from one to the other. Rolle, which is more like a village than a city, is a few miles from Godard’s childhood home, and a brief drive from Geneva and Lausanne, the two cities of his youth. Godard and Miéville had been contemplating the change for a while. For both of them, it was a sort of homecoming, but they also had a practical motive: Miéville’s daughter, Anne, had been accepted to a nearby “collège,” or middle school.

The relocation also had consequences for Godard’s cinematic reconstruction: he left behind his video and 16mm film equipment for university film students in Grenoble, because he intended to reconstruct a more advanced studio in Geneva.
⁴
He was thinking of a return to the professional cinema, and began to make contact with new notables of the French film business. He told Marin Karmitz that he now wanted to make a film within the norms of the industry. Karmitz, whose production of
Padre Padrone
, directed by Paolo
and Vittorio Taviani, won the grand prize at the Cannes festival in May 1977, suggested that Godard write a script treatment and submit it to the CNC for an advance on receipts. Godard, for the time being, demurred.

Godard also met with a new star of the French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, who had been discovered by Marguerite Duras to play a door-to-door salesman in her
Nathalie Granger
in 1972, rose to prominence in Bertrand Blier’s
Les Valseuses
(
Going Places
) in 1974, and had recently appeared in Duras’s
Le Camion
(
The Truck
) alongside the writer herself. Depardieu told a journalist of two projects he discussed with Godard:
On va voir
(We’ll See) and
Machin-Machine
,
⁵
a takeoff on the recent French hit film
Cousin Cousine:
“It’s Machin who meets Machine, there is a male connection and a female connection, as in
Numéro Deux
.”
⁶

Meanwhile, in mid-1977, Godard pursued yet another thread of opportunity, which suggests how frenetically he was seeking to relaunch himself. The German independent filmmaker Hellmuth Costard, derisively called by a German critic “the little Godard,” decided to make a film about his own attempt to find funding to construct a system of four synchronized Super-8 cameras. At the same time, the Cultural Committee for the city of Hamburg, of which Costard was a member, invited Godard to present a retrospective of his films. Godard was willing to attend the Hamburg retrospective on the condition that the local television station finance a film for him: either an episode of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
or something to be called
Is It Possible to Make a Film Today in Germany?
Costard decided to record Godard’s negotiations with the Hamburg officials and to include the footage in his own film. In September, Godard went to Hamburg to meet with the Cultural Committee, which turned down his request. Costard’s film,
Der kleine Godard
(
The Little Godard
), resulted; Godard’s did not, and the time was lost.

On October 26, 1977, Bertin traveled to Rolle to hear of his plans for
Le Tour de la France avec deux enfants
. Upon her arrival, Godard insisted that she first watch a short video that Miéville had made, in which a young orphaned girl talks about her mother. Telling Bertin, “She must be independent in relation to me,” Godard tried—unsuccessfully—to elicit a television commission for Miéville, for fifty episodes of twenty-six minutes each.
⁷

Then Godard turned to the matter at hand. He told Bertin that he had personal reasons for having accepted the commission: because he wanted to have his own child with Miéville,
⁸
and because of his relationship with the young Anne, he wanted to make the television series in the hope that it would help him to understand children better.

Although the commission was for a dramatic film based on a fictional period piece, Godard explained that the series—which he renamed
France tour détour deux enfants
(France Tour Detour Two Children)—would feature only
“a moment of fiction, which would deal with the father and the mother” (another departure from the orphaned brothers of the book). He told Bertin that it would mostly be a documentary about the two children, who would not be traveling around France, but rather, living in one particular place, namely, Paris. Bertin warned Godard, “Bear in mind that Jullian expects a work of fiction,” and Godard responded, “I had thought about doing a
Tour de la France
but with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Arlette Laguiller”—a left-wing activist—and added, “You can tell him that it was you who stopped me.”

Godard gave Bertin a poster with a grid that represented the shooting script. He made a postcard-sized version of the same grid and gave it to his crew (Lubtchansky, Chapuis, and Rony), and it was the only “script” that they received. It showed sketches of a girl and a boy in Godard’s own hand, with days of the week and brief notes: “power (snack, music)”; “reality (dinner + family)”; “violence (punishment)”; “light (street).” The peculiar implications of this work plan soon became clear: although Godard was making a documentary about two children, he already had a clear idea of what his film would document. He had not chosen child actors, but children with whom he felt he could speak. But this was not quite clear to the children themselves, who had been recruited to appear in a “film”; they were expecting a conventional movie in which they would play roles. As the girl in the film, Camille Virolleaud, later recalled, she anticipated impersonating a character and performing a text and action provided by Godard. On the first night of shooting, in the fall of 1977, she discovered otherwise; she found herself to be taking part in a documentary about herself, but one in which Godard swung her reality around to match his preconceptions.

Godard asked me, “What do you do before going to bed?” I said, “Nothing, I go to bed.” He persisted; he asked me questions—“and before that?” “And before that?” I avoided saying, “I change out of my clothes,” because I didn’t want him to film me doing it; he must have understood and that’s why he was questioning me. He wanted to have access to my intimacy. I didn’t even have the word to say it.

   My mother said to me, “You aren’t usually shy.” True, but first of all, not in front of the camera, it was as if all of France was going to see me; and also, Mr. Godard is not part of the family.

   When I resisted doing it [undressing], my mother said that I was supposed to do what Mr. Godard asked me to do. And as for him, he blackmailed me—he said that, if I didn’t do what he asked, he was going to stop the shoot.
⁹

Camille’s mother, Martine Virolleaud, confirmed that she indeed urged Camille to comply with Godard’s direction.
¹⁰
Camille was horrified at having
to undress on camera, but did so and put on her nightgown, as rapidly as possible.

After that initial trauma, Camille feared what might come next: “I was afraid that this was only the beginning, that he was going to ask me to do more and more unpleasant things.” Thus many other activities related to the taping, which might under other circumstances have been fleetingly annoying or mildly embarrassing—such as a family dinner which Godard videotaped—became instead, for the nine-year-old girl, an ordeal. She was a documentary subject, but, as his gridlike chart had foretold, the reality of her life and her character was manipulated by Godard to fit into his script.

Shooting with Camille and Arnaud took place on Wednesdays (which in France, then as now, is a day off from school), on Saturdays (a half-day), and Sundays. Only three scenes were filmed in the Virolleaud household, where Godard told the family, “Above all, the shoot must not disturb your way of life; do everything as if we weren’t here, or else the film won’t be good.”
¹¹
But that was not, in fact, how the film was made.

Despite the documentary appearance of much of the children’s action, much of it was carefully arranged. One scene filmed in school showed Camille’s teacher keeping her late for the age-old punishment of copying a sentence fifty times (“I must not talk during class”). Godard had asked the teacher to give Camille this punishment, though the teacher affirmed that Camille had not done anything wrong and indeed had never been punished in school. Camille experienced her fictional punishment as real and unde-served, and later recalled: “I was ashamed to be shown as punished when I was not. He made me do it, it was not the truth, it was his truth, but in relation to me, it was a lie.”

Outdoors, Godard instructed Camille to run through the street and to leap on a bench, run the length of it, and jump off—which she was not at all inclined to do, and did only reluctantly. He filmed her in her bedroom, listening to a record of classical music that he had chosen, though ordinarily, Camille never listened to classical music. He pulled her aside in the school’s courtyard during recess and interviewed her when in fact she wanted to play with her friends. After the filming ended, she endured the taunts of classmates who wondered why she had been chosen and not they. In fact Camille did not at all feel chosen, she felt singled out, and would gladly have resumed her former unremarkable life.

The filmmaker who had never wanted to acknowledge the distinction between cinema and life, who denied any difference between an actor and a nonactor, unfairly effaced this distinction regarding children. Although Camille, like any actress, was paid, she did not appear in the guise of a fictional character. Although Godard had, in his fictional works, implicated his
actors personally in the construction of their nominal characters, their fictional identities always gave them an out. Not only did Camille have no out; she had never wanted to be in.

G
ODARD’S MAIN ACTIVITY
with the children was to question them, at length, in his own voice. Initially, as he had told Bertin, he had intended to create fictional scenes with a mother and a father, to be played by actors. But he decided to dispense with these scenes and instead hired the actors Betty Berr and Albert Dray to take on other fictional roles. At first, Dray was to be Godard’s stand-in. On the first night that Godard wanted to interview Camille, the director put an earphone in Dray’s ear and relayed the questions to him. The process, however, proved slow, and Godard took over the questioning himself.

Godard’s intention was to speak to children about subjects not usually considered appropriate for them, in a way that was not condescending. As he admitted, he wanted to talk to them about the things that concerned him personally.

G: The last time we talked about it, you said that when you get undressed, or right before you undress, you often look at yourself in the mirror.

C: Yes.

G: And who did you see then?

C: An image of me.

G: Your image. And your image, is it you or someone else?

C: It’s me.