Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (83 page)

The videotape also served as the springboard for the film’s action and the story’s particulars. But it was not Godard who came up with those details: for that, he again called on the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and asked him to come to Rolle to view the videotape. As Carrière recalled, Godard showed him images and asked him, “Is there a scene there?” The screenwriter knew that he had to say “Yes”—“or else there’s no movie”—so he associated freely and improvised story lines as he watched the tape.
³
But
Sauve qui peut
also depended on another corpus of preexisting images—the vast stock of images that Godard had in mind, if not at hand, from the history of cinema. While working on
Sauve qui peut
, Godard was also planning his video series,
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which he related directly to his return to the film industry and to the making of this film in particular. At a symposium at the Cinèmathéque Suisse in June 1979, Godard spoke candidly of his effort to “attempt to live again”:

Sooner or later, one returns to one’s homeland. I wanted to return to my homeland in the cinema, in other words, in the fact that I need images in order to live and need to show them to others… Because at a given moment, I myself belonged to the history of cinema, little by little I became interested in the history of cinema… and finally started to wonder how the forms that I was using had been created, and how this knowledge could help me.
⁴

The
Histoire(s) du cinéma
series was conceived with an expressly political purpose: to relate the forms and subjects of film history to events in political history. Thus, by combining his return to the cinema with his return to the history of cinema, he associated
Sauve qui peut
with the politics of the day—not directly through the filming of political subjects, but through the use of formal elements which corresponded to contemporary life. As implied by the ambiguity of the French word “histoire,” which means both “history” and “story,” Godard connected his ideas on film form and political history to his new effort to tell his own story.

A
S
S
AUVE QUI PEUT
DEVELOPED
, the casting changed: when Miou-Miou found out that she would be playing opposite Huppert, she left the production.
⁵
To replace her, Godard contacted Nathalie Baye, whose first important film role was in François Truffaut’s
Day for Night
, and who had also played significant parts in his
The Man Who Loved Women
and
The Green Room
. Godard took unusual steps to integrate his prospective actress into the production: he asked whether he could spend several days with her in her country home. As Baye later recalled, “He was with me when I lived my daily life, when I was cooking. He observed me. He said very little to me about the film.” She sensed that, in order to work with her, he “needed to imbue himself with each of [her] gestures.”
⁶

Despite the commercial allure of his three young stars, and despite the involvement of Karmitz and Sarde, Godard still had difficulty getting full financing. Sarde’s efforts at cobbling together international coproduction money resulted in long and enervating negotiations. Godard turned to his cousin Jérôme Monod, the politically connected CEO of the French water company and (through industrial conglomeration) of a television station, but Monod refused to see him,
⁷
and Godard had no choice but to turn to the mainstream of the industry. Suddenly the exiled artist of Rolle found himself entangled in a new web of personal and professional obligations. These stresses and uncertainties, combined with Godard’s own trepidations over returning to the regular milieu and recognized norms of the commercial cinema, made for an exceptionally tense mood during the planning and the shoot of
Sauve qui peut
.

Early in pre-production, Godard hired Romain Goupil as his assistant, even though the backing for the film was not yet guaranteed. Goupil, a teenage student activist in the revolts of May 1968,
⁸
had recently worked as an assistant director (an administrative position) to Chantal Akerman and Roman Polanski, and was beginning work on a documentary film about a militant friend who had disappeared. As Goupil later recalled, Godard asked him, “Are you ready, even if the film doesn’t get made, to spend a year with me, at a small salary, to see whether we can do something?”
⁹
(And indeed, when funding came in, Godard offered him the industry-scale rate for an assistant director.) In addition to helping organize the shoot, Goupil served as something of a paid companion, an interlocutor with a great dedication to the cinema as well as to Godard’s own work.

Godard went even further to personalize his relations with the crew: in his letter to the CNC of April 12, he explained his plan to hire “two or three” directors of photography so that during the shoot, he “could listen calmly, ask them some questions, and even see them each give a different answer, like doctors to a sick person.”
¹⁰
He wanted William Lubtchansky, who had worked on all of his productions since
Ici et ailleurs
, to be joined by Renato Berta, a Swiss cameraman, and by Vilmos Zsigmond, who was shooting
Heaven’s Gate
. Zsigmond, however, priced himself out of the running, leaving Berta and Lubtchansky to work together. Both were skeptical of the plan, but accepted in deference to Godard. The pair joined Goupil, Pierre Binggeli (Godard’s video technician), and Jean-Bernard Menoud (the assistant cameraman) in a sort of managerial committee, and Godard organized preproduction meetings with them in order to generate conversation.

The meetings were tense. Godard claimed that he didn’t know what he wanted to film or how to proceed; at times he cried in the presence of his team. Then, as his ideas for the project became clearer, he became increasingly desperate about the possibility of realizing them. He could not decide whether to shoot
Sauve qui peut
on videotape or film. Initially, he wanted to work in video to take full advantage of the special effects of video editing, particularly the “decompositional” slow-motion technique that he had used in
France tour détour
. But knowing that the finished product would have to be released on 35mm film for theatrical distribution, he shot video tests and sent the tapes to four different laboratories in order to compare the quality of their transfers to 35mm film. Though the tests proved to be unsatisfactory, Godard was nonetheless unwilling to rule video out.

At one such meeting Godard brought in every kind of 35mm camera available, so that his technicians could examine them and discuss their pros and cons. He met Lubtchansky and Jean-Pierre Beauviala in Paris and filmed several images with the prototype of the lightweight 35mm camera, the “35–8,” that Beauviala had made to his specifications. Godard wanted a camera light enough for him to carry easily at arm’s length, small enough to fit into a car’s glove compartment, and simple enough that he could shoot 35mm film images as spontaneously and casually as with a Super-8 camera—or a video camera. He had channeled a large chunk of the budget of
Sauve qui peut
to Beauviala for its production. But the prototype did not work as Godard had hoped—the images were not, according to Lubtchansky, as sharp as those of a full-sized 35mm camera—and it did not fulfill a specification that Godard had not foreseen: it was too noisy for filming indoor dialogue scenes. Within weeks of the shoot, which was scheduled to begin in October 1979, the crew still did not know whether
Sauve qui peut
would be shot on film or on video. Godard himself claimed not to have decided, and he put the matter up for a vote among his crew. Video won out. Then Godard decreed that the film would be shot on 35mm film.

A crucial aspect of the project’s modernity was the presence—so to speak—of a new literary model for Godard, the novelist Marguerite Duras. The sixty-five-year-old author of such books as
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
and
Moderato Cantabile
(she was still several years from writing
The Lover
) and the director of such films as
India Song
and
Le Camion
(The Truck) had
developed a style that could be called postexistential: her stark, incantatory sentences seemed to be wrenched from a cosmic silence. The writing and the struggle to write were one, and she worked herself into her books as a writer trying to write them. She began to direct films in 1966, claiming, “My films are the same as my novels,” and she made them so, involving her writing overtly and explicitly in the process of her filmmaking.
Le Camion
, from 1977—in which she and Gérard Depardieu sit at a table in her house and read passages from the script and discuss them, thus conjuring and analyzing a fictional story but without staging it—was an impressive and intimidating example for any self-implicating filmmaker, and for a filmmaker of literary inspiration, like Godard.

Duras herself recognized that “the film was made at the same time as it was filmed; the film was written in step with its unspooling,”
¹¹
and criticized directors who did not understand “that the making of the film is aready the film.”
¹²
Le Camion
was something of a template for Godard’s
Sauve qui peut
, and he wanted Duras to participate in it. Specifically, Godard recalled a recent incident in which Duras, invited to present her work at a film festival, showed up at the festival but refused to appear in public. Godard wanted to re-enact that scene in his film, with his stand-in, Dutronc, inviting Duras to a class where she would refuse to appear. On the set, Duras replicated the scene beyond Godard’s expectations: she also refused to appear in his film, but allowed him to tape-record several conversations with her. Godard then filmed a scene in which Dutronc was supposed to be driving Duras, unseen in the passenger seat, back to the airport. Although she was not actually there, her voice, clipped from the interviews onto the film’s sound track, created the illusion of her presence.

For Godard, Duras represented a model for integrating his own private experience with the work of art without sacrificing any of its political or vatic power. He had criticized Sartre, in the wake of 1968, for having distinguished his writing of the time (his biography of Flaubert,
The Idiot of the Family
) from his political activism—for having two separate “drawers”: a “Flaubert drawer” and a “‘class struggle’ drawer.”
¹³
Duras made no such distinction:
Le Camion
, a story of a woman who hitches a ride with a pair of truck drivers, is dominated by the political delusions of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, without yielding to dogma or diluting the film’s artistic immediacy—and Duras told that story herself, on-screen. Adapting Duras’s strategies, Godard, beginning with
Sauve qui peut
, would approach politics by other means, creating feature films that reflected his first-person implication in their subjects, however great or abstract.

T
HE
I
NTIMATE VIEW
of political events that Godard would present in
Sauve qui peut
was inseparable from the film’s personal aspect. He explained
that the film represented the beginning of his “real life,” namely, “the cinema”: “Godard returns to civilian life after having made many voyages. He returns, he settles down, he seeks a profession. He no longer tries so much to change the world, but to change what he can change, himself.”
¹⁴

The film’s main character, played by Dutronc, is called Paul Godard, a filmmaker who is not making films. Paul Godard goes back and forth between the big Swiss city where he now lives and the small one where he used to live with Denise, his lover. Denise works in television and is about to quit her job for a local newspaper in rural Switzerland. She has left Paul and wants to find someone to sublet the apartment they shared. Paul attempts to remain involved in the cinema through teaching, but his inactivity weighs on him. He also tries to maintain contact with his pubescent daughter and her mother, his ex-wife. In the city, Paul meets Isabelle, a prostitute who is being pursued by some pimps she refuses to work with and who wants to leave the large communal apartment where she lives and move elsewhere. Isabelle answers an ad for an apartment, which happens to be Denise’s. Paul meets up with his ex-wife and his daughter, and tries to restore relations. His ex-wife is hesitant to do so. Paul walks away, looks back at them, and is hit by a car.

Sauve qui peut
tells a story of multiple conflicting relationships, and conflict was at the heart of its production—of the experiences that informed its story. In the film, Godard presents yet another “Paul,” the name of his cinematic surrogates since 1962, giving his actor his own last name (and his father’s first name), as well as his sport jacket to wear.
¹⁵
Dutronc knew that he was playing someone closely modeled on Godard. Nathalie Baye similarly understood that her role was closely related to the character of Miéville.

Anne-Marie Miéville was often present on the set, taking still photographs and discussing with Godard the work at hand. Their tensions were in the open—according to William Lubtchansky, “They argued all the time”—and affected Godard’s relations with his colleagues. On the set, he had become extremely difficult with his crew and permitted himself violent transports of anger. It was a familiar pattern for Godard, reminiscent of many of his shoots in the 1960s, but now the people were different and the times had changed. In the old days, Godard and Coutard might have had a shouting match, Anna Karina may have avoided Godard, Beauregard and Godard might have come to blows, but they were all of a hard-nosed generation. Now, social relations had advanced; society itself was growing more civil, and the turmoil that Godard sowed was considered, by the younger, more idealistic actors and crew, a needless and troubling aggression that did not serve the creative process but disturbed and poisoned it.