Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (9 page)

Godard did get a cushier position at the work site, thanks to the unforeseen intervention of Eric Choisy, chief executive of the Grande Dixence Corporation, who looked out at a group of workers and, recognizing Godard—his cousin—among them, quickly arranged to have him transferred to the cleaner and calmer post of telephone switchboard operator.

Meanwhile, another one of Godard’s Swiss friends, Roland Tolmatchoff, came to Godard’s aid. At the time, Tolmatchoff owned a garage near the Grande Dixence work site; when he learned of the movie project, he suggested that Godard could more quickly earn the money for the film’s budget by doing ten days of consecutive shifts—in other words, as Tolmatchoff later recalled, by working around the clock: “He spent the nights there on a cot, he
got up when the telephone rang.”
¹⁵
Then Tolmatchoff persuaded friends in Geneva who owned a 35mm movie camera to lend it to Godard for the shoot; one of them, Adrien Porchet, served as cinematographer.

I
N APRIL 1954
, Laubscher used vacation time to travel with Godard’s mother to Paris, where he applied for admission to engineering school for the following year; on the basis of tests in math, physics, and chemistry, he was accepted. (One of her friends had a spare room where he would live.) On April 26, soon after Laubscher returned to work at the dam, Godard, who was on duty as the telephone operator, put through a call to him from Laubscher’s mother, who reported that Odile Monod had had a scooter accident the previous night on her way to visit the caller herself after a terrible scene with her younger son—Claude Godard—and that she had died from her injuries.
¹⁶

The funeral took place three days later at the Lausanne Crematorium. Godard left the work site and arrived at the Lausanne train station in order to be at the funeral, but members of the Monod family barred him from attending because of his stealing. That night, he dined with Laubscher and Laubscher’s mother. He then returned to the work site and completed the film.

Godard was able to shoot on 35mm film on his low budget because he was spared the expense of renting a 35mm camera. He edited the film himself, on weekends, in an editing room in Geneva. The original commentary for “La Campagne du Béton” (The Campaign of Concrete or The Concrete Countryside), written by Laubscher and dated October 17, 1954, was two pages long and concise; it merely labeled the action. But Godard gave the film a rhyming title instead,
Opération Béton
(Operation Concrete), and rewrote the commentary. Though he kept several of Laubscher’s felicitous turns of phrase, Godard’s version, which he recorded in his own voice, greatly amplified the verbiage and resembled, instead of a series of photo captions, a person’s enthusiastic, digressive account of his experience at work.

Exhibiting as great a devotion to the reality of the sounds as of the views, Godard rented a hefty professional sound truck, the heavy synchronized-sound equipment that was the film industry standard, to record location sound—an unusual procedure for documentaries at the time. He captures with striking clarity the overwhelming sonic energy of the thunderously cascading water, the rush of the wind, and the percussion of industrial noise.

The film credits mention two names: Godard and Porchet. Neither Laubscher the writer nor Tolmatchoff the assistant and fixer is named. As Godard had hoped, the company that administered the dam bought the film and used it for publicity purposes. A journalist who saw it commented enthusiastically on the film by “Jean-Luc Goddard” [
sic
] in a Swiss film magazine: “For
two years, he tightened his belt to be able to show what he could do. Like a medieval artisan, he created his masterpiece in order to obtain his mastery. Now, he wants to make a more ambitious film.”
¹⁷

WITH THE MONEY earned from the sale of the film, Godard was able to quit his job on the dam. He moved to Geneva and produced an inexpensive short film in the nonprofessional 16mm format,
Une Femme coquette
(A Flirtatious Woman). Based on the story “Le Signe” (The Signal), by Maupassant,
Une Femme coquette
is a nine-minute tale about a woman (Marie Lysandre) who, seeing a prostitute beckon to passing men, decides to try the gesture herself. When a young man—played by Tolmatchoff—responds, she tries to dissuade him but he insists and, for fear of being accused of soliciting, she yields to his advances.

Maupassant’s version takes place indoors: the woman signals from her window and the man comes into her apartment. In Godard’s version, the two characters meet at a bench on the Ile Rousseau in Geneva. Godard turns the necessity of filming cheaply and rapidly, without movie lights, into an aesthetic virtue: the outdoor setting allows the man’s obstinate advances to become physical drama, culminating in a chase scene, which Godard filmed with an exciting tracking shot in which the man pursues the woman by car as she runs along the walkway of a bridge.

Even more important than Godard’s clever staging, however, is his theme, the question of imitation.
Une Femme coquette
is the story of someone who wants to try out a gesture she has seen, who is enticed by what she observes into imitation of it, and who, from the imitation, takes on the reality. It is a film about watching, about trying to live what one has watched, and about the inherent dangers of doing so. It is about fear and embarrassment, and about living with yourself after doing something you regret; it is about money and what to do with ill-gotten gains; it is about prostitution—about doing for money what is properly done for love—and how someone unintentionally practices it by merely imitating the gestures of a professional. Godard’s first fictional film is about the perilous path that he was taking as he sought to enter the cinema, and it anticipates the moral dangers that awaited him there.
Opération Béton
had been a commercial project, undertaken with an eye toward its sale;
Une Femme coquette
was an extraordinarily personal and self-regarding work.

With two films in hand and some money left in his pocket, Godard was ready for another shot at Paris. He had been back to visit and had stayed in contact with his accomplices at
Cahiers
, in particular spending time with Rohmer and Gégauff, joined at times by Tolmatchoff (who occasionally drove him there).
¹⁸
On January 15, 1956, Godard met two friends in
Geneva—Hugues Fontana, whose wife had played a small role in
Une Femme coquette
, and Jean-Pierre Laubscher—and took them to dinner, declaring that he was leaving for Paris but would be back in four days. Laubscher recalled that he and Fontana knew Godard would not be back soon; indeed, he did not return to Switzerland for four years.

The Paris to which Godard returned was utterly changed from the city he had left in 1952. In his absence, his friends from the CCQL had begun to publish articles in
Cahiers du cinéma
, and they had caused a stir. In May 1953, Jacques Rivette followed Godard’s praise of Alfred Hitchcock with an encomium to “The Genius of Howard Hawks,” and Claude Chabrol, another longtime CCQL/Cinémathèque habitué, enthused over
Singin’ in the Rain
in November. Then, in the January 1954 issue, François Truffaut’s ferocious polemic, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” (A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema), sparked an intellectual controversy that definitively put the magazine and its contributors on the map of French cultural life.

Truffaut had presented a draft of “A Certain Tendency” to André Bazin as early as December 1952, but Bazin, who anticipated a scandal, demanded that Truffaut tone it down. Even toned down, it aroused shock and outrage. In it, Truffaut attacked the internationally respected films of the recent French cinema, the weighty literary adaptations (such as
La Symphonie pastorale
and
Le Diable au corps
) which garnered prizes at film festivals—the French “Tradition of Quality,” as it was called—and declared them worthless, indeed pernicious.

Though Truffaut aimed his harshest attacks at these films’ renowned screenwriters, such as Charles Spaak and the duo of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (accusing them of a cynical amoralism that clashed with his own conservative values), he did so merely to set up his key polemical point: “directors are, and wish to be, responsible for the scenarios and dialogues they illustrate.” Thus Truffaut, asserting directors to be the ultimate authors—“auteurs”—of their films, blamed them for the “vile beings,” the “infinitely grotesque” characters that they brought to the screen from the scripts he derided. Truffaut went on to list the eight French directors he considered “INCAPABLE of conceiving” such characters and such films: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati, and Roger Leenhardt. As if to make clear that his contrast of these worthy eight to the rest of the French film industry is not merely one of degree, Truffaut drew the battle lines in the strident terms of the Cold War: “I do not believe in the peaceful coexistence of the ‘Tradition of Quality’ and an ‘auteur’s cinema.’”

The
Cahiers
critics who had come from the CCQL and the Cinéma
thèque, and who came to prominence through Truffaut’s fiery pen, were recognized for their heterodox love for American films and filmmakers, and the line that they defended was known as the “
politique des auteurs
.” According to this “policy” or “politics,” the director’s role is the central one in the art of the cinema, and the mark of the director’s presence through his visual and sound style is the prime mode of perceiving a director’s artistry. The “auteurists’” enthusiasm for the American cinema—as exemplified by Godard’s praise of films by Hitchcock, Hawks, and Preminger, and Rivette’s of Hawks—was not a blanket endorsement of the Hollywood studios’ entire industrial output. Instead, through careful viewing and passionate critical discussions, they recognized the artistry of a handful of Hollywood directors whose work they understood to be art of the first order despite its origins in a restrictive commercial system. They asserted that these filmmakers, working in the studio system, were the artistic equals of the best filmmakers working anywhere else, and they took the filmmakers whose work they loved to be
auteurs
—the authors of their films, whose moral authority over their work and personal imprint on it made them the peers of novelists, painters, and composers. They considered these filmmakers to be artists of the same stature as those in any medium, and they considered them to be so whether they worked in France (like Jean Renoir), in Italy (like Roberto Rossellini), in Denmark (like Carl Theodor Dreyer), in Japan (like Kenji Mizoguchi), or in Hollywood (like Hitchcock or Hawks).

By 1954, the group had already made clear what it admired and supported; Truffaut’s fierce article was the first to declare what it despised. Overnight, Truffaut had become the angry prophet of the French cinema, and he and his circle of friends rapidly became as famous for the filmmakers they rejected—more or less the entire squad of French mainstream directors—as for those they championed. Yet unlike the nihilism of the the Lettrists and their successors, Truffaut and his friends were not merely conducting a scorched-earth policy; they were clearing the ground for the recognition of their own artistic heroes, avatars of what they considered a truer and worthier classicism, as well as their own artistic models in view of the day when they themselves would become filmmakers. The enthusiasms of the young critics who had become known as “Schérer’s gang”
¹⁹
permeated
Cahiers du cinéma
, which featured serious and enthusiastic critiques of American films by such directors as Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger, George Cukor, and Fritz Lang.

The
politique des auteurs
served a theoretical purpose, but, as its name implied, it was also political in the general sense: it was the platform by which this group, whom actor Jean-Claude Brialy remembered as “revolutionaries,”
²⁰
intended to “take over”
²¹
—that was, as Rohmer recalled, the phrase they used—the French cinema. Godard himself later emphasized the “politics” of the
politique
, likening the critical enterprise of the young
Cahiers
critics to the Resistance: he said that they considered the French cinema to be occupied by directors who “had no business being there,”
²²
whom they intended to throw out, and whose place they intended to take. As Truffaut had written, the
Cahiers
group did not believe in “peaceful coexistence.”

Soon after the notorious article was published, its publicity value became clear. Truffaut was invited by the editors of the weekly
Arts-Lettres-Spectacles
to join their film page: he would be published once a week, enjoy broad nationwide circulation, and be paid five times
Cahiers
’s per-page rate. But Truffaut’s presence at
Arts
further inflamed the tensions between the
Cahiers
group and left-wing critics:
Arts
, a popular journal with a high intellectual tone, had a political agenda that was an open secret. Its publisher was the writer Jacques Laurent, who had held office in Vichy and was one of a group of right-wing writers derided as “Hussars” in a famous 1952 article by Bernard Frank in
Les Temps modernes
. Instead of expressing their political tendencies openly, these writers defended an apolitical literature and opposed what they considered the politicization of literature, by which they meant the affiliation of literature with the left. Rejecting calls for artistic attention to the sufferings of the poor and to political responsibility for them, the Hussars depicted with an unapologetic hedonism the sensual adventures of flamboyant bourgeois sybarites.