Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (86 page)

The return of culture
(United Artists / Photofest)

In January 1981, the actress Hanna Schygulla was visiting Zoetrope. Godard met her there by chance and asked her to appear in his next film. She had never been in a film by a director other than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but she agreed at once—on the condition that Godard give her a written story. Shortly after getting back to Rolle, he typed up a three-page synopsis for
Passion: Work and Love
, addressed to Schygulla. Godard’s idea was to remake Jean Renoir’s 1934 film
Toni
, about immigrant workers and their conflicts over work and love. He was unable to obtain the rights to do so, but he transformed the general idea into the basis for his next film.

The story outline had little to do with fathers and daughters; it was the story of a German-speaking woman, or a German woman, a French-speaking woman, and a foreign man, “neither refugee nor immigrant, or both,”
⁶
and another unspecified man. The vaguely described action, which Godard likened to the classic American film noirs
Fallen Angel
and
Criss Cross
, was set around a small factory behind a train station, and ended with the male foreigner killed by a stray police bullet. (Godard planned to use a special scientific camera to capture in slow motion a bullet crossing space, and intended to film a troupe of clowns miming the motion of that bullet.)

The synopsis was enough to convince Schygulla to put her name to the project. The success of
Sauve qui peut
, plus the illustrious international names associated with
Passion
, brought Godard what he called a “magnificent” budget, announced as twelve million francs (more than two million dollars). But instead of organizing the shoot, he got to work on what he called the “production of the visual screenplay.”
⁷
Godard estimated that he spent 60 percent of it before the shoot began in December 1981. To do the copious preliminary shooting, Godard needed a cameraman on hand, and he went far to find him.

Godard called Ed Lachman, a cameraman from New York, who had shot
Lightning over Water
for Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray, and met him in New York at the Hotel St. Moritz. As Lachman later recalled, “He told me that he wanted to have a director of photography who would work with him in a different way, who would be with him not just when the film was being shot, but all the time.”
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One of the places where Lachman joined Godard was on the set of Coppola’s new film,
One from the Heart
, a technical extravaganza in which sophisticated new video technology was used to create a fantasy version of Las Vegas. Coppola had involved Godard in the project early on, inviting him to come along on a scouting trip to Las Vegas (which he did) and to film some of the images of the city that would be used as video backdrops (which he refused to do).

The troubled eight-week shoot of
One from the Heart
began on February 2, 1981.
⁹
Before it started, Coppola had lost his European financing and had to come up with $1 million a week to keep it going. The difficulties had little impact on Godard, however, who came to the set with Ed Lachman and
sound recordist Mitch Dubin to do some filming. Godard used a Super-8 camera, and Lachman shot both 35mm and 16mm film, surreptitiously; although Coppola himself had authorized their presence, their covert shoot was against union regulations. The idea, as Lachman recalled, was to make an essay like film that Godard would call
Anatomy of a Shot:
“While Francis was shooting, Godard would say to me, ‘Pick out that extra’: I’d follow her for the whole length of the shot. Then, ‘Pick out that dolly grip,’ and so it would go for all the takes.” The intended visual study of the crew’s activities derived from the longtime project, born with
France tour détour
, to analyze the gestures of work, which became a basic element of
Passion
.

Then Godard oversaw a second shoot on Coppola’s set—and this one added a crucial new element to the new film, and indeed, to his work for years to come. At a cost of $30,000 for one day of shooting, he used Coppola’s studio, sets, and crew to film several
tableaux vivants
—including one of a painting by Rubens,
The Fall of the Damned
, and another of
The Newborn
, by Georges de la Tour. Hanna Schygulla recalled the staging of
The Newborn
as “a sort of holy image of a woman holding a baby, and in the background you would see these actresses going through all kinds of neurotic [gestures] with their bodies and shaking their heads. It had that mix of being funny, grotesque and beautiful, with this glorious music in the background.”
¹⁰
Fifty babies were present as extras on the set, but, as Martine Marignac, Godard’s associate producer, recalled, Godard sent them away and replaced them with dolls “so that it would make less noise.”
¹¹

The quiet that Godard required was central to the day’s work—which found its origins in the “glorious music” that accompanied the shoot. Godard explained:

The film more or less began with my listening 450 times to the Mozart Requiem, thanks to a Sony Walkman, and then Anne-Marie Miéville made me listen, one day, to the Fauré Requiem, and I thought that there were also other musicians, Czech and French, and that one should try for once to create almost a scrupulous kind of democracy on and in a film… As much painting as music, neither one without the other, and no more reality than metaphor. That was a bit of the subject of the film; one could say, as a subtitle, “Passion, the world and its metaphor,” or, the social element and its metaphor.
¹²

Passion
would bring together work and love, politics and personal relations, reality and symbolic life and art. It would be a film of dualities and it would suggest a more radical overcoming of them than it would actually effect.

The story that emerged from the preliminary shoot would be centered on three hives of activity in a provincial town: a small factory that a worker
(Isabelle Huppert) attempts to unionize; a motel and bar, owned by a former factory worker (Hanna Schygulla) who is married to the factory’s owner; and the set of a “gigantic superproduction” for film or television that is shooting nearby, involving a Polish actor (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). The woman who owns the motel would fall in love with the Polish actor, who would be in love with the young striker.

The film-within-a-film involving the Polish actor would be derived from Godard’s day at Zoetrope: it would incorporate the staging of vast historical or mythological scenes from classic paintings which related metaphorically to the lives of the characters, joined by “an orchestra that plays movements from great symphonies of the past.”

In July 1981, Godard put together a more elaborate version of the story, full of possibilities and digressions.
¹³
Hanna Schygulla’s character was now named Bruna, short for Brunnhilde. The factory worker played by Isabelle Huppert, modeled on the philosopher of sainthood, Simone Weil, was called Odile and was a virgin. The specific elaborations made to the project within a mere few months could not conceal the fact that Godard did not know what to do. He was “wandering, in both senses of the word,” as Huppert observed, both in body and in mind.
¹⁵
The increased demand for Godard’s personal appearances after the success of
Sauve qui peut
turned him into even more of a wanderer. Lachman recalled following him “around Europe and across the States for a year.”

He’d pull out a first-class Swissair ticket from his pocket and give it to me and say, “Can you meet me next week?” I’d fly to Paris, he’d pick me up at the airport—he always picked me up himself—drop me off at my hotel. We’d have breakfast the next day, we’d talk a little bit, he’d say he wasn’t ready yet, then he’d give me another ticket and say, “Meet me in Berlin.”

Lachman depicted crazed, frantic activity: “He’d always have a first-class ticket with him. He’d tell me,‘I won’t be here for lunch tomorrow.’ He’d fly to Paris from L.A., meet with somebody, then get back on the plane after lunch and fly back to L.A. the same day. That’s how I see him at that time, always in motion.”
¹⁵

But these peregrinations and indirections were not only an essential part of Godard’s process of discovery, they had become—once again—the subject of his planned film. While presenting
Sauve qui peut
at the New York Film Festival on October 3, 1980, Godard had shocked his audience by declaring to film lovers brought up on the auteurist gospel that the producer was more important to a film than the director.
¹⁶
Later, when editing
Passion
, Godard permitted a television crew to videotape and interview him: he described himself
as a “small businessman” and, holding up his ledger book, declared, “This is a script.”
¹⁷
He now considered the financial risk of a producer, of a businessman, to be the most concrete form of jeopardy, and thought that a director could not be serious about creating personal stories if he did not share in that risk.
¹⁸
Godard’s jet-propelled wanderings to talk business were, in effect, the production of an enormous backstory; through this frenetic activity, he experienced and embodied the dangers and demands of high-level filmmaking.

Despite producing backstory, Godard was still having trouble coming up with the story, and he put off plans to start shooting
Passion
in the summer of 1981. Instead, he called again on the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière to help him come up with something and had Huppert, Schygulla, and the Swiss actor Jean-Luc Bideau (as the factory owner) improvise in the presence of Carrière, in sessions that were videotaped by Goupil.
¹⁹
Afterward, Godard and Carrière spent long hours together talking “about
Passion
, about painting,” as Carrière recalled, “in the street, in a restaurant”—and Romain Goupil recorded all that, too.
²⁰

Then, in the fall of 1981, Godard summoned his actors to Rolle to begin shooting, but he was still not ready. He simply did not know what to film, and with Carrière away in Mexico helping with Luis Buà±uel’s autobiography, Godard was on his own. He gave his actors specific tasks relating to their roles. Huppert spent days in a button factory; Schygulla worked as a waitress in a roadside café; and Radziwilowicz had the most exacting assignment of all: Godard changed the role from a Polish actor to a Polish director, and had the actor follow him around all day to see what sorts of things a director did.

To prepare for the shoot, Godard interviewed Schygulla, Huppert, and Radziwilowicz on video. He told Schygulla that the roles were not yet definitively assigned, and that she might play a foreign actress and Radziwilowicz might play the union organizer. He told Radziwilowicz that he wanted to “do things a little differently” concerning love in the film, and he brought Schygulla and Radziwilowicz together for guided improvisations toward that end. He put on a cassette of a movement from Mozart’s Cminor Mass, “Incarnatus Est,” and told Schygulla, “I want you to direct with your head like a musical conductor.” He wanted the physical connection between the actors to be mechanical, not expressive. As Schygulla later recalled, “He said, ‘I’m not asking you to be in love. You should do it like with a chair.’ He thought that things you have inside you come out anyhow—you shouldn’t express them.”
²¹

Godard sent the actors into a separate room where they could rehearse by themselves, but as Radziwilowicz and Schygulla worked together on their musical number, Schygulla noticed Godard hiding behind a column. He revealed himself and, declaring his satisfaction with their work, decided to shoot it on video.
²²

In this videotape, Schygulla and Radziwilowicz are seen sitting face to face, in medium close-up, as the aria plays. First Godard himself comes around behind her and, taking hold of her head, runs his hand over her face and caresses her lips lasciviously. Then he leaves the frame and restarts the music as Radziwilowicz assumes Godard’s role. The actor takes Schygulla’s head in his hands, and she allows him to move it together with the music, until she lets herself go, singing and swooning beatifically to the aria.

This taped sequence, which Godard would include in the film—indeed, its most powerful scene—dramatizes the inseparability of art from love, and of love from the act of artistic creation.

W
HEN GODARD FINALLY
planned to shoot the film in December 1981, Ed Lachman was no longer available: he had left to work on another project. Before leaving, however, he had recommended that Godard replace him with Raoul Coutard (like many who had been associated with the New Wave, Coutard had not worked much in the late 1970s). But Godard demurred, citing his political differences with Coutard. Instead, he brought in other cameramen—Vittorio Storaro, Ricardo Aranowicz, Henri Decaàë, Henri Alekan—who all refused to yield to Godard’s insistence on natural light. So he returned to Coutard, who had not worked with Godard since 1967. Coutard found him a changed man. Though their relations in the 1960s had often been turbulent, Godard now, according to Coutard, “looked for relations of conflict—more than before. Now he can say some very unpleasant things to you. It stimulates his ideas.”
²³