Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (82 page)

Godard knew that he needed stars in order to find financing for a film that would have a place in the French film industry. In mid-1978, he contacted Jean-Paul Belmondo on the pretext of offering him a role in
The Story
. During their conversation, however, Godard came around to his real point: Belmondo had purchased rights to a recent book,
L’Instinct de Mort
(The Death Instinct), by Jacques Mesrine, France’s new public enemy number one, famous for his ruthless crimes and for his daring jailbreaks, and Godard proposed to direct Belmondo in a film based on that book.

Godard was in effect asking to be hired. Belmondo was hesitant; he was ready to bring Godard in to direct, provided that Godard wanted, as the actor said, “to make a film in the style of
Pierrot le fou
.” But Godard had no such thing in mind. He proposed a film in which Belmondo would play an actor who wanted to play the role of Mesrine, and in which Godard himself would play a director seeking to make that film. Belmondo turned the proposal down. Godard later took his frustration public, claiming in an interview in May 1980 that Belmondo was “scared” of him and adding some
choice insults about the actor’s recent work. Belmondo responded in kind, writing an angry full-page retort: “There’s no doubt that the person I saw who called himself Godard, with his lies and his little tricks, has nothing to do with the auteur of
Breathless, Pierrot le fou
, or
Band of Outsiders
. The Godard of the 1960s is dead forever.”
⁴¹

Still stymied in finding a film to direct, Godard attempted to advance his cause through publicity. He granted the request of two journalists from
Télérama
magazine for an in-depth interview covering his entire career—for which he demanded to be paid four thousand francs.
⁴²
The interview, which took place in early June, ran in July and August 1978. The magazine’s banner declaration, “Godard Tells All,” was a natural lure: his name was more valuable to the magazine than was his new work to France’s producers.

Godard fulfilled his end of the bargain: he spoke with flair about his family of “collaborators” with Vichy, his postwar years in Paris, his first attempts at making films. He discussed the early days of
Cahiers
—and he settled scores: “I think that François absolutely doesn’t know how to make films. He made one that truly corresponded to him, and then it stopped there: afterwards, he only told stories… Chabrol is honest like a thief. Truffaut is a thief who passes himself off as an honest man, which is the worst thing.” As for Rivette and Rohmer, he called them “believers. Super-Catholics. People who belong to a sect and who are faithful to those who keep the rites of that sect,” and he added: “I should rather have called them little fetishists. They brought the plague, and everyone caught it.” The journalists asked, “You too?” “Yes, me too. But it’s over. It was long. The essential thing is to recognize that one is living with the plague. As for the others, they don’t know it.”

G
EOGRAPHICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY
, Godard was obliged to go very far to find financial backing. When the
Télérama
interview ran, he himself was in Mozambique, with Miéville, working under the auspices of Mozambique’s national film program, run by the Brazilian filmmaker Ruy Guerra (who had been born in the former Portuguese colony). The project’s roots dated back to 1977, when Godard attended a conference in Geneva on the subject of Mozambique. There, he spoke with a representative of the government. The newly independent country, ruled by its socialist revolutionary leader, Samora Machel, had no television station yet, and on December 9, 1977, Godard signed a contract with the government to help it develop a broadcast system unsullied by Western bourgeois and capitalist influences. He was also contracted to make a film about the project.
⁴³

Carlos Gambo, a cameraman who owned the only video camera in the country (prior to Godard’s arrival) and who worked with him there, later
recalled Godard’s lengthy meetings with “engineers from the university, with technicians from radio, and with filmmakers from the National Institute of Cinema, to discuss the future television of Mozambique.” The issues under discussion were practical—whether to choose the PAL or SECAM broadcast standards, how to set up a local repair service for the video equipment.
⁴⁴
Gambo explained the group’s preliminary fieldwork: “We filmed and captured the image of a countrywoman, then we showed her the image to see the reaction of this person who couldn’t read or write. This way, we saw who we needed to make television for. For the peasant or for the intellectual? And if it was to be for everyone, how would we do it?”
⁴⁵
The minister of information at the time, José L. Cabaço, later described Godard’s plan to “go to the villages, train the peasants to use the equipment, and leave the equipment in their hands, so they could produce whatever they wanted.”
⁴⁶

What emerged from Godard’s Mozambique visits appeared in
Cahiers du cinéma
. He was asked to guest-edit the ceremonial issue number 300, to be published in May 1979. One section of the issue, “The Last Dream of a Producer,” devoted to Godard’s work in Mozambique, was a photographic essay, similar to the pictorial synopsis for
The Story
. Godard planned to make a film about his ongoing project in Mozambique, to be called
North Against South, or Birth (of the Image) of a Nation
. It would in fact comprise five films: two centered on a couple, a man who is a producer and a “woman commentator/photographer” traveling to and from Mozambique—fictional stand-ins for Godard and Miéville—who would be played by an actor and an actress; and three collections of visual sketches, drawings, and notes regarding Mozambique.

The essay-outline incorporated a snapshot travelogue of Godard and Miéville’s trip. The photographic evidence, which showed meetings with local and international officials, and views of local inhabitants, suggested little of the locale or the project’s promise. In a separate text published in the same issue of
Cahiers
, Godard wondered “why people of the cinema have such a desire to film other people with so much frenzy.” He answered his own question: “In fact, they tend to hide behind the image of the other, and the image then serves to erase.”
⁴⁷
The interest in Mozambique was unfortunately close to this category: despite Godard’s plan to film fictionalized surrogates of himself and Miéville there, the country’s significance for him was unclear. He was not connected to it by language, history, or culture. He did not know Mozambique, and his outsider’s view of the illiterate and visually inexperienced villagers was no different from that of any travel journalist. The photographs were neither analytical nor ethnographic, no more revealing than souvenir snapshots.

The unrealized project was, however, significant in one regard: it suggested the extent to which Godard had become, in a sense, the outcast of the Western cinema world.
The Story
was blocked for lack of stars, Belmondo had rejected him, and Godard was traveling wildly, from Mozambique to Paris to Montreal to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Grenoble to get something going. Though he lived in Rolle, his home there might as well have been a hotel. He was desperate and constantly on the road—but it was in his peregrinations that he would soon find the key to his return.

I
N OCTOBER 1978
, Godard returned to Montreal to fulfill his remaining commitments to Serge Losique. There, Godard decided that the story he wanted to film was not one taken from the Hollywood story machine but his own—the story of his wanderings. Again he called upon Jean-Claude Carrière to help him shape it. Once again, the two met for lunch. According to Carrière, Godard said, “I have an idea for a film.” The idea: “A man leaves Paris, a horrible city, he goes to Switzerland or someplace else, he meets a woman or two, and he stays there or he comes back.”
⁴⁸

The return of nature
(New Yorker Films / Photofest)

nineteen.

SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE)

“To return to my homeland in the cinema”

G
ODARD HAD THE IDEA; THE MEANS WERE, AS ALWAYS
, elusive. But his new project about his travels went forward when Marin Karmitz, who urged Godard to apply for an advance on receipts, bought advance distribution rights to the film and a young producer, Alain Sarde, decided to produce it. Sarde, a cinephile who loved Godard’s films, had met Godard in the early 1970s while working as an assistant to Jean-Pierre Rassam. A fledgling producer, he had a bright new approach: he knew that French television had a new mandate to coproduce films for the cinema, and he became an expert in such coproductions. For Godard’s new film, Sarde lined up financing from television stations from France, West Germany, and Switzerland.

Godard called the film
Sauve qui peut (la vie)
; it was released as
Every Man for Himself
in the United States and as
Slow Motion
in the United Kingdom, though Godard said that the best translation was really “Save Your Ass.”
¹
He referred to it as his “second first film,” suggesting its great significance for him. As with
Breathless, Sauve qui peut
was marked by its unusual and personalized ways of production. Godard was intent on making the film on the basis of an ongoing dialogue with its participants. The production would create a set of personal relationships that the film would reflect.
Sauve qui peut
was even more permeable than Godard’s previous films to the people who worked on it and to his life while making it; the film would embody a new era of intimate politics.
Sauve qui peut
would be an intensely personal film, about Godard’s years of not making films, and, in particular, about his relationship with Anne-Marie Miéville.

In Montreal, when Godard discussed his plans for a return to what he called “cinema cinema”—movies with stories and stars—he said, “Relying on what I learned from audiovisual journalism, [I want] to do fiction but in a somewhat different way… it will take lots of time, to compose as if for an orchestra, or instead alone, like a painter.”
²
He was right: it did take lots of time. To create a “screenplay,” Godard used videotape instead of paper: as a result, he needed to have a cast and crew on hand from the project’s conception.

Godard treated video as a sketch pad with which he stayed in constant practice making images. Moreover, he used his “sketch pad” as a painter does: by referring to preparatory images of the actors and locations, he gave the film a more finished quality. While Godard’s work of the 1960s was impressionistic, recording his thoughts and caprices of the moment, his later movies, beginning with
Sauve qui peut
, emerged as more classical, more composed. The new means of visual notetaking, or sketching, allowed him to achieve a kind of plastic, formal perfection with limited crew and equipment. That small group of actors got to work early on, holding meetings, researching locations, practicing gestures, shooting tests.

Godard’s work methods were not all that had changed. The world of French cinema to which he had returned was quite different from the one he had left. New producers, actors, new technicians, and even new equipment had made their presence felt. Godard could not help but work with the people of these times, citizens of a post-1968 world. Like Alain Sarde and Marin Karmitz, who came of age in the film industry at a time when Godard was already an established and central artistic figure, the other participants in
Sauve qui peut
recognized him as an artistic hero; unlike many elders, they did not hold Godard’s years of political extremism and artistic experimentation against him.

Early in 1979, Godard called on three young actors: Isabelle Huppert, who was about to travel to Wyoming for a major role in Michael Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
(Godard visited her on location for a single day); Miou-Miou, an actress who had started doing guerrilla theater in Paris in the late 1960s and had made her name in the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s film
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000;
and Jacques Dutronc, a French rock star of the 1960s who had moved into acting.

Dutronc would play an idled filmmaker shuttling between a large Swiss city and a smaller one; Miou-Miou would be his ex-lover, who moved from the small city to the countryside, and Huppert would play a prostitute in the big city who is also looking to change her life.

The “script” of this vague plot, which Godard submitted to the CNC on April 12, 1979, for an advance on receipts, was composed on videotape.
Accompanying still photographs of his actors, Godard explained, in a voice-over commentary, that he was not trying “to show the images of the film, how they will be,” but instead to show “how I see.” He said that his way of seeing was derived from his planned use of effects in editing, “For example, superimpositions, dissolves. And then slowing down, slowing down in order to see.” He wanted to construct the film around the technique of “de-composition” devised for
France tour détour
and intended to use this technique to analyze his characters’ travels from place to place.