Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (80 page)

G: And this “me” that you see, does it too have an existence?

C: Yes, because I’m the one who is looking at it in the mirror.

G: Yes, but the image, does it too have an existence?

C: Yes.

G: So it is as if you had two existences?

C: Maybe.

Godard’s approach did not work as intended. Though Camille started out voluble, she grew more and more inhibited as the filming went on, and finally she clammed up.

At the beginning I was freer, I spoke more freely. In the French educational system, when one is asked a question in class there is just one right answer, and when Godard asked me questions, I looked for the right answer, I didn’t want to make a mistake. But the questions he asked were often very complicated, very abstract, I didn’t really understand them, so I tried to give the minimal responses where I was least at risk of making an error.

If the educational system was responsible for Camille’s increasingly inhibited responses, if the system had disciplined Camille into internalizing shame when punished even unjustly, if it compelled childhood into a regime of quasi-martial training—as Godard says over images of students marching during gym class—then, by capturing Camille’s frustration and inhibition on videotape, he did render the effect of that miseducation visible on-screen. But Godard provoked this response by preventing her from speaking and behaving as she normally did. Although his unwillingness to approach the children on their own terms reeked of self-centeredness, there was a deeper theoretical and political principle at work. Godard treated the children like little adults because he considered them to be copies of adults (as he says to Arnaud in one scene where the boy is cranking out copies of an assignment on a mimeograph machine). His approach to the children in adult terms was his way of approaching, in microcosm, the world that is made by adults.

C
HRISTMAS CAME AND
went, and the series was still being filmed. In January, the shoot continued, in Rolle, with what Godard had called, for Bertin’s benefit, the “moment of fiction,” in which Betty Berr and Albert Dray play a pair of television commentators named Betty and Albert.

Throughout the series, the commentary spoken by Dray and Berr refers to “the monsters,” the adults who do the things that constitute daily life and which, seen as regimentations imposed on the children, come off as monstrous. Their recorded commentaries relate the life of the schoolchild to training for servitude in the military-industrial complex. As Camille leaves the teacher’s desk and heads to her seat, Godard superimposes the word “violence,” then truncates it to “viol” (in French, “rape”). There follows news footage of tanks, gunships, and warplanes, and then, again with the word “violence,” a line of students in gym class being ordered to march in step, as Dray’s voice explains, “From birth, the monsters are taken in charge by military organizations in the aim of providing cheap and docile labor to the large industrial companies.”

Godard and Miéville, who collaborated on much of the series, albeit largely behind the scenes, depict children in a state of class subjugation in a factory-like environment, and view homes as replicas of society’s political maladies—women not paid for their housework, money matters kept concealed, cultural inadequacies resulting from noxiously deceptive television broadcasts, a stultifying ordinariness of routine that is the equivalent to collaboration with tyranny. The conclusions that they draw from these analogies are disturbing. During a sequence showing rush-hour commuters in the underground passageway of a métro station while a busking cellist plays Bach, Betty accuses them of complicity in the making of a monstrous world.

In voice-over, she declares that terrorists are people who “would rather die standing up than live lying down,” but advises them to change their methods: rather than kidnapping the famous, they should take ordinary people hostage “to make the people who believe in the goals agree to change the program.” The image freezes on individual passersby as she asks: “Guilty or not?” Betty declares each person guilty: “of having slapped a child… of having refused to go out for a drink with friends… of not having complained about the low quality of sweaters or the price of medicine.” Her suggestion is that the terrorist-kidnappers declare, “We’ll kill them unless fifty thousand employees of Volkswagen give ten percent of their salary. If it’s too much, they should ask for a raise. If they don’t, he’ll be executed and it will be your fault.”

The advocacy of terrorism—such as Miéville had already undertaken in
Ici et ailleurs
, where she defended the methods of the Palestinian attackers at the 1972 Olympics in Munich but criticized their demands—takes off from the extreme means pursued by radical leftist groups in Europe at the time, after the mass mobilizations of 1968 failed to bring about revolutionary change. The rhetorical call to murder, however, was at odds with the contemplative tone of the images it accompanied. Godard’s calm, even tender, images of daily reality belied the call—notably made in Betty’s voice—for its destruction. Despite the vestiges of revolutionary cant, the sheer profusion of thought—in image and sound—in the six hours of
France tour détour
is exhilarating; the series conveys the impression of an artist emerging from a chrysalis of his own making. Godard was struggling to be able to represent and to create beauty without sacrificing his newfound powers of cinematic analysis. The music from Camille’s record player, the Bach in the subway corridor, the Handel aria that accompanies the scene of a waitress in a café, suggested that he was, with the help of Miéville, coming back to himself and to what he loved.

F
RANCE TOUR DÉTOUR
is a vigorously political work that silently but constantly poses one fundamental question: what, then, is left of 1968?

The question is asked through the fictional use of one real name that dominates the series. Godard, who is questioning the children, is not called in the voice-over commentary by his actual name. He is called Robert Lin-hart, the most charismatic intellectual behind the revolution of 1968—and the one who, like Godard, fled (in his case, to a clinic) and returned, unbroken but more realistic.

In the wake of his personal debacle, Linhart, like many devoted Marxists of the time, became a factory worker to identify more closely with workers’ struggles and to raise the workers’ political consciousness. In the mid-1970s,
he became a professor of economics and wrote a book that pertained to the cinema and contributed a crucial concept to
France tour détour
. This book
, Lénine, Les Paysans, Taylor
(Lenin, Peasants, Taylor), published in 1976, analyzes the rationalization of labor by the Soviet leadership. Its cover is a still from Dziga Vertov’s 1930 film,
Enthusiasm
, and a key chapter relates Vertov’s films to industrial modernization. In particular, Linhart emphasizes Vertov’s efforts to use the movie camera “to decompose work into
simple elements
.” Taking Linhart at his word, Godard used new video technology to analyze the gestures of his subjects with a quasi-scientific precision. Moreover, in the role of Linhart, Godard provided both the visual study of action and the verbal commentary on it.

The footage of the children and of the action in Paris was filmed with Godard’s new equipment, one of the first Betacam packages to come on the market. It featured a time code, which made it possible to capture and to manipulate individual frames of video. Godard used this device to break the action down via slow motion. He invented his own type of slow motion, repeating each image in freeze-frame a number of times, with the result being not a continuous flow but a sequence of staggered stop-action images. This breaking-up of the moving images into their constituent moments is the principal visual trope, and discovery, of the series. To distinguish it from ordinary slow motion, and to make sure that its significance was understood, Godard gave it a special name—borrowed from Linhart: “Slow motion is a falsely poetic movement; I chose the decomposition of movement.”
¹²

The series starts with Godard “decomposing” the first shot of the first episode: Camille getting undressed for bed. When Camille saw the scene in Paris, at the offices of INA, she was shocked at the exposure of her body, all the more so because what she had tried to do as quickly as she could was slowed down to play out on-screen at length. “I was terribly ashamed, I didn’t want anyone to see it. When the film was shown on television, the next day in school the other children said that they had seen me on TV, and I said, ‘That wasn’t me.’” Her denial went even further: for more than two decades, she never spoke about the series with anybody, not even with her parents. In retrospect, she considers the effect of the film on her to have been “hyperviolent.”

I
S THE FILM’S
shock effect on Camille emblematic of what was left of 1968?

Camille said in jest that she considered herself to be a “soixantehuitarde,” a veteran of’ 68, because that was the year she was born. This self-identification conveyed a truth that Camille perhaps did not intend. In
France tour détour
, Godard brought together those who made 1968 and
those who were made by it—philosophically as much as biologically. He made clear that what was left of 1968 was not the expressly ideological side, but the desire to change personal relations and to reform the education of children in order to bring about a true revolution. But the liberating currents of 1968, which were reflected in the easing of laws regarding abortion and censorship, offered children a far more ambiguous legacy. Camille Virolleaud suggested that if, on the first evening of the shoot, Godard didn’t hesitate to film her undressing and her mother didn’t intervene to prevent him from doing so, it was perhaps due to the fact that at the time there was less inclination to hear the voice of the child in distress—precisely as a consequence of the permissive forces of 1968. As Virolleaud observed, “It was a time of liberation, of openness to sensuality, the rejection of inhibition.”

But there was also something more aggressive and more troubling at work: an active, respected, and influential movement in favor of sexual relations between adults and children.

Le Grand Bazar
, Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s book of interviews concerning his course of action and thought after 1968, features a discussion of his work as a teacher at a nursery school in Germany in the early 1970s:

It happened to me many times that certain children opened my fly and began to tickle me. I reacted differently according to the circumstances, but their desire posed a problem for me. I asked them: “Why don’t you play together, why have you chosen me, and not the other children?” But if they insisted, I caressed them anyway. Then I was accused of “perversion.”
¹³

This passage, which elicited no particular attention in 1975, when the book was published (and sold well), was exhumed in 2001 in an attempt to embarrass Cohn-Bendit, and it worked. Though parents of children who had attended Cohn-Bendit’s school immediately came to his defense, a media frenzy nonetheless ensued in France. Cohn-Bendit defended himself against the charges, claiming to have based his ostensible first-person account on the deeds of another teacher. He said, “Knowing what I now know about sexual abuse, I regret having written all that.”
¹⁴
However, crucially, he added: “Without seeking to justify myself, it was the debate of the era.” At the time of the book’s publication, he explained, this passage “did not arouse any reaction,”
¹⁵
because “we thought that an anti-authoritarian education should permit a child to grow up without sexual ‘forbiddens.’”
¹⁶

In 1976,
Libération
published an article in defense of a confessed pedophile and in favor of “a society of tolerance which will recognize children’s
liberty to enjoy their bodies and adults’ right to all differences.” Alongside the article, the philosopher René Schérer (Eric Rohmer’s brother) defended the “inalienable right” of children to have sexual relations. In 1977, the same journal published a petition seeking to lower to age thirteen the legal right to consent to sex with adults. Among the eighty petitioners were Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, André Glucksmann, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, Philippe Sollers, and Jack Lang. At the time of the 2001 controversy, one of the signatories, the psychiatrist Bernard Muldworf, explained: “It would have seemed dishonest to me not to sign it because there were ideological stakes: to be on the side of the challengers rather than of the cops.”
¹⁷
The writer Pascal Bruckner, also a signatory, described the mood of the times: “Every notion of authority was synonymous with abuse. Every allusion to rules, to regulations, to norms was intolerable.”
¹⁸

However, the intellectuals—who by and large signed petitions freely (Sollers noted that “there were so many petitions at that time that one didn’t pay close attention to what they said”)
¹⁹
—were mainly pro-pedophile in the same way that some among them had been pro-Maoist, advocates in theory of a perversion that they would not have put into practice. Yet their extreme and impractical positions nonetheless had psychological and aesthetic effects. In the name of ideology, Cohn-Bendit did not hesitate to depict himself (albeit fictitiously) as participating in sexual relations with children. Under the influence of the times, Godard, through his film, explored tense relationships of power with children, especially with Camille; and he implicated himself personally through images in a nexus of curiosity and anxiety that was, for him, as emotionally self-revealing as it was revealing of Camille’s body. Godard did nothing physically inappropriate with Camille, but his representation of her, and his use of his directorial authority, were themselves powerful signifiers of the highly charged and hazardous emotional relationship between adults and young people, between parents and children, between fathers and daughters. This relationship had made an earlier appearance in Godard’s work, in
Six fois deux
, and, because of his quasi-paternal relation to Miéville’s daughter, Anne, it would remain in evidence for years to come.