Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (88 page)

Lang’s cultural intentions were openly political. In one controversial speech, he called for “a real crusade” against what he termed the “financial and intellectual imperialism that no longer grabs territory, or rarely, but grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living.”
³⁹
The imperialism he had in mind was, of course, American, and in seeking to limit the American influence in France, he saw the French cinema as a crucial rampart against it. In September 1981, four months after his appointment, Lang clearly drew the lines of battle with his pointed refusal to attend the Deauville festival of American cinema. He crafted policies intended to favor and to foster the French cinema, as art and as industry, increasing government aid more than sevenfold, giving tax breaks to capital investments in films, expanding the advance on receipts, and introducing aid for script development and for exhibition.
⁴⁰
Lang also tripled government aid to the Cinémathèque and in 1984, inaugurated classes in cinema history for high school students.

Because of the esteem in which Godard and the French New Wave were held by the new cultural authorities, producers and television executives now understood that in dealing with Godard, the New Wave, and its cinematic tributaries, they were, in effect, dealing with friends of Mitterrand and of the government. And in a system in which the government played such a large role in industry in general and in the media business in particular, this was an important advantage. Godard was soon invited to edit and report the noontime news on the French television channel Antenne 2 for a week in August 1982. (He refused.)
⁴¹
He was approached by the Ministry of Culture about a “research project” which, Godard said, “concerns the way a film is made,” and he also lectured about filmmaking at the leading film school, IDHEC.
⁴²

Godard and his erstwhile New Wave colleagues were now able to film copiously. Eric Rohmer, who was no leftist but was a de facto ally of the government’s cultural program, had made only three films from 1972 to 1981; under Mitterrand, he unleashed a torrent of films, making six between 1982
and 1987. Jacques Rivette, who had worked under extraordinary financial constraints in the 1970s, suddenly found himself able to realize large-scale productions with substantial budgets.
⁴³
Truffaut, who had managed to keep busy through the 1970s with financing from American producers and had had great success in France in 1980 with
The Last Metro
, was honored by the new regime: having campaigned actively for Mitterrand, Truffaut was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1981 but refused it, wanting to retain his sense of independence from authority. Lang also offered him the director-ship of the Cinémathèque. Truffaut refused again, recommending Rivette.
⁴⁴
(The job ultimately went to the director Constantin Costa-Gavras.)

As for Godard, his status was definitively transformed by Lang’s policies: a high-culture figure, his value was henceforth measured not in ticket sales or short-term profits but in prestige. He had been relaunched by his own efforts; through Lang’s vision he was now canonized. His pace of filmmaking accelerated suddenly and drastically. Having dramatized himself as the producer and the director in
Passion
, Godard chose a fitting moment for a new role: he began to film himself as an actor, and imbue his work with his own quasi-mythic persona.

A
T
C
ANNES
IN May 1982, Godard offered Adjani the lead role in the story of Carmen, because, he said, he expected her to agree “at once” to play “a legendary figure.”
⁴⁵
The story had regained currency in France for the odd and simple reason that Bizet’s opera had recently fallen into the public domain.
⁴⁶
Other films of
Carmen
(by Carlos Saura, Francesco Rosi, and Peter Brook) were also in the works and would be released in 1983. Unlike the others, however, Godard’s version was inspired, he said, by Otto Preminger’s film
Carmen Jones
, an adaptation of the opera featuring an African-American cast that included Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge; it had recently been rereleased in France after having been unavailable there since the 1950s due to legal challenges by Bizet’s heirs. (In particular, Godard was inspired by the Preminger film’s translation of a line from the famous “Habanera”: for the sentence, “Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi” (If I love you, watch out), Preminger’s film had “If I love you, that’s the end of you.”

Like Preminger, Godard would make the story a contemporary one, and he imagined Adjani as Carmen “Dupont,” the equivalent French Every-name.
⁴⁷
But no sooner did Godard recruit the actress to his project—for which Sarde quickly found financing—than he also began to complain in a radio interview about the restrictions entailed by working with a busy star:

In my next film, the one with Adjani, I’d like there to be a female basketball player. But to resemble a professional basketball player, she has to practice a minimum amount. And because actors go from one film to the next, they can’t do it. So I have to say bye-bye to the basketball. So, what can we do? Subway conductor? Same thing. Lover? That’s not a profession.
⁴⁸

The training and preparation of actors for their roles had become very important to Godard: the films with which he had returned to the cinema,
Sauve qui peut
and
Passion
, had had long periods of gestation that involved his cast and crew. He wanted to work at length with Adjani as he had worked with Goupil, Lachman, and even Schygulla. But, unable to secure the services of an established star for such a duration, Godard would have to create his own.

During the shoot of
Passion
, Godard had selected Myriem Roussel, a young female extra who had been hired for her background as a classical dancer, as a last-minute replacement in a small role. He asked her to play a deaf and mute young woman, working in the factory, who was chosen by the production manager in the Polish director’s film to be an extra on that superproduction—a nude extra, whose “performance” was mainly to disrobe on camera, beside a swimming pool.
⁴⁹

After completing
Passion
, Godard stayed in contact with Roussel. He planned to film her in the project he had begun to discuss several years earlier,
Fathers and Daughters
.
⁵⁰
To prepare Roussel, he began to train her in cinema, taking her to see many movies and videotaping her. Now, to extend his working relationship with Roussel, he wrote her into his film of Carmen as well.

The first version of the project, which Godard called
Prénom: Carmen
(
First Name: Carmen
), was a twelve-page script treatment.
⁵¹
It specified that the film would start with Godard himself: “Assorted shots of JLG arriving from distant voyages, ill and tired from carrying suitcases, ideas, and money, and yet jovial.” This character, JLG, checks into a hospital in Paris, where he lives among “the sick (mentally handicapped),” and there “exchanges a few words with the young female nurse of an old man (Mr. Lear and Miss Cordelia).”
⁵²
Then Carmen comes to visit him at the hospital. She had been married to JLG, and had starred in his early films, but “political events and art” had separated them. She had wandered through Germany and Italy, and came back to France “without hope and without money.” JLG proposes a role for her in a new film, as Electra. In this version, Carmen suggested Anna Karina in disguise. Godard’s choice of Germany and Italy was not random: there the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade had been active, and his Carmen was to carry out a bank robbery as an act of political terrorism (a nod to
La Chinoise
and Anne Wiazemsky). However, Godard ultimately left this side story out because, he later said, “too many things would be brought to it from the outside by critics and the audience”—he didn’t want the political story to
detract attention from the erotic one, the obsession that grips and, finally, dooms Carmen’s lover, Joseph.
⁵³

Early on, Godard also included a character named Myriem, Joseph’s girlfriend, who refuses to sleep with him until he gets a steady job. To please her, he becomes a bank guard, which displeases her: she calls him a “pathetic cop” and is dismayed that he works “to protect rich people’s money.” Carmen is one of a band of robbers who descend on the bank where Joseph works. During the robbery, Joseph captures Carmen, but instead of arresting her, they escape together.

Godard’s second version of the story proved decisive: it was not a script in the usual sense but an audiocassette. The story of
Carmen
, according to Godard, required music, but he had no intention of using Bizet’s opera. Instead, he wanted to develop the film from “fundamental music. Music that marked the history of music. Music that is at the same time the practice and the theory of music”: Beethoven’s quartets.
⁵⁴
The cassette comprised Godard’s descriptions of the action, sequence by sequence, along with excerpts from the quartets as interludes and accompaniments to his narration.

On the tape, Godard states his intention of using Beethoven’s later quartets, in the order in which Beethoven composed them, so that the film would “follow the story of his music, and his music is a part of the story.” These compositions would appear in the film in chronological order; the film and the action would begin with the Ninth Quartet and end with the Sixteenth, Beethoven’s last.

For the cassette, Godard relied on existing recordings of the quartets, but for the film, he hired the Prat Quartet, based in Paris, to perform them—on-camera. Myriem Roussel, who had never played a string instrument in her life, was to appear as a member of the chamber music group. For four months, through the summer and fall of 1982, Roussel studied for the role: she listened to music under Godard’s guidance, and she practiced the violin, on her own and with members of the quartet, to learn to replicate the gestures of playing the instrument and of playing the Beethoven quartets in particular,
⁵⁵
because Godard intended to correlate images of the musicians at work with the film’s dramatic action. For example, he envisioned matching what he called the “rounded” gesture of an arm bowing a violin with the gesture of Joseph or Carmen putting an arm around the other’s shoulder, as well as with the arm of a driver turning a steering wheel. On the audiocassette, Godard described the music as being “on” or “off”—performed on- or off camera—and so, he knew exactly which passages in the Ninth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth quartets Roussel would have to learn to play.

The audio script also features the character of JLG, who was now integrated into the film’s dénouement. He is shooting a film in the lobby of a
grand hotel, and the Prat Quartet, including Roussel, is playing salon music at teatime for “the big businessmen and the old American women.” As Godard describes his own appearance, “There is JLG who is doing his shoot in his sick person’s bathrobe, with the technicians of the film and the nurses who are taking care of him.” The criminal gang, including Carmen—and a seller of videos played by Alain Sarde—then attacks the lobby. The police arrive, and, after a shoot-out, Carmen’s last words are a dialogue with JLG, derived from Giraudoux’s play,
Electra:
she says, “What is it called when everyone is dead but something remains?” and he answers, “It is called dawn.”

Then it’s over, the end of the shoot. We say, “See you tomorrow at such and such a place and time.” They put things away, Myriem too. We’ll have to see about Joseph, maybe he died from a bullet fired by the police. Myriem thanks JLG for having hired her for his film, “Goodbye, Monsieur.” “Goodbye, Made-moiselle.” And Raoul says, as he watches her leave, “My God, is she beautiful,” and JLG says, “You know what beauty is? You know what it is? It’s the beginning of the terror we are able to bear.”

Thus
First Name: Carmen
was, in Godard’s conception, to be the film of two couples: Carmen and Joseph, and JLG and Myriem. But in a written sketch that followed, in December 1982, Godard made clear that the film was also primally based in a third relationship, that of JLG and Carmen, which is shown in a sort of prelude to be an essential precondition to the drama:

Carmen comes to ask JLG, her uncle, whether she can use his seaside apartment to shoot a documentary film with her friends. What’s more, they are looking for an inexpensive director, and wouldn’t JLG want to take this opportunity to make his return to the cinema? Carmen would play a role in it and the film would bear her name. Her explanations are a bit confused.
⁵⁶

Godard would film himself in the melancholic guise of a sick and confused man returning to work as an unwitting front for bandits. It was a self-dramatizing lament for his own sense of isolation, a sarcastic view of the film industry as a den of thieves—and a presentation of himself as the enabler of a scam enacted by Adjani. This accusatory definition of a movie star and pathetic view of a director were soon reflected in the eventful first days of the shoot.

T
HE
“R
AOUL” WHOM
Godard mentioned in his outline was Raoul Coutard, who again worked with Godard, albeit in a modified role. Where
Sauve qui peut
had featured two directors of photography,
First Name: Carmen
was to have none: Coutard was hired as the film’s “lighting consultant,” Jean-Bernard
Menoud was brought in as the camera assistant, and Godard himself planned to compose and shoot the film—principally with the lightweight Aàäton camera that Jean-Pierre Beauviala had manufactured to his specifications. Godard told the twenty-year-old actor cast as Joseph, Jacques Bonnaffé, that the project was “an amateur film.”
⁵⁷