Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (94 page)

The augmented
Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard
was released to favorable notices in November 1985. But Bergala then sought to take the project a step further, proposing to direct a biographical film about Godard that would be produced by
Cahiers du cinéma
and Marin Karmitz. Godard agreed, and planned to take an active role in its preparation. As Bergala recalled:

I wanted us to revisit all the places of his life; so I wrote a structure, I scouted locations
with
him, we went to see his father’s house in Switzerland, his apartment in Trouville… I even chose the clothing. But I made a big mistake: I had hired Raymond Depardon as director of photography, and that was the beginning of an immediate hatred. They were like cats and dogs… Before the shoot we had lunch together. Depardon was totally overwhelmed in Godard’s presence, he didn’t say a word, not a single word, so I spoke for two. Godard said to me, “What’s with him? He’s not saying anything to me.” I should have known that it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t.
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As Bergala noted, Depardon had signed on as an integral partner in the project and could not be fired. “We shot a little bit. Godard couldn’t stand it any more and he left.”
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Godard may have gone along energetically with Bergala’s and MacCabe’s projects but, for all of his self-dramatization and self-presentation, for all of the exposure to which he submitted his working methods and his private
life, and despite the rapidly increasing productivity that resulted from his unimpeachable celebrity, he was ambivalent about this display of himself and claimed to regret the turn of affairs that had prompted it:

People pronounce the name “Godard,” which paralyzes me, alienates me, and even prevents me from reaching my true public, the public to which I have the right… I have the impression that with the New Wave, I participated in my own misfortune. Since then, people name things without wanting to know them. So when we said, for the first time in the history of the cinema, that we were “auteurs,” we found ourselves trapped. The name “auteur” stuck to us, and we became our own name. Today, talking about me does me harm. I feel more solitary than ever. I feel like a nothing, a non-being, nonexistent. People say “Godard” but they don’t go see my films.
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Godard’s fame, his iconic status as the living face of modern art, had become both the source of his continual artistic renewal and of his sense of public martyrdom. This sense of martyrdom would itself become a central subject of his art and a principal mode of his self-representation.

H
AIL
M
ARY
HAD
brought not only obligations, but also some financial stability. When the film was menaced by censorship, the production and distribution company Gaumont had come to the rescue, deciding to throw its weight and prestige behind the film. The chairman of Gaumont, Nicolas Seydoux, who had known Godard since the early 1970s and had helped to finance
Tout va bien
, now stepped in again and signed a four-year contract that paid Godard not by the film but by the month, like an employee, in exchange for distribution rights to his films made in this period.

As a result, Godard could now put together a team to work with him steadily. In September 1985, he called Caroline Champetier, William Lubtchansky’s former assistant, who had recently begun to work as a director of photography, and told her, “I’m looking for someone who knows a little but not too much.”
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She accepted, despite having witnessed vehement arguments between Godard and Nuytten (on the set of
Detective
, where she took still photos), which left her feeling like “a child watching her parents argue.”
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With Champetier, Godard inaugurated the sort of working relationship with a technician that he had long sought: she was hired not to work on one particular film but to work with him over a period of time on whichever projects might come up. He also hired an assistant, Hervé Duhamel, to work with him full-time. And he bought a 35mm Arriflex camera and a set of Zeiss lenses so that he and Miéville, who was preparing to make her first feature film, would not have to rent equipment and could shoot on their own schedule.

Godard’s studio was now, Champetier said, “like a small business,”
²²
and like any small business, Godard found himself being audited by France’s fiscal authorities. As Duhamel recalled:

Godard had an appointment with Jack Lang. He called him and said, “I can’t come, because your colleague from the Ministry of Finance here is being a pain in the ass.” So Lang calls Claude Davy, our press agent, to find out what’s going on. There was an audit but it was done quickly; he had to pay a small tax penalty, that’s all, because of his apartment in Paris which was paid for by the production company. The inspector said, “You live here, it’s not like an office.” Godard said, “I shoot here.”
²³

For two weeks, the auditors occupied the office and went through Godard’s records on site (as is standard practice in France). The inquest was all the more stressful for Godard because of his financial practices. As Duhamel explained: “With him, all the accounts are combined. He takes money from someone to make the film that he wants to make”—not necessarily the film that he has been commissioned to make—“then he has to find some elsewhere.”
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In Godard’s next work, in early 1986, a television film that he shot on video, he documented this state of affairs and its implications, both cinematic and personal. In the process, he turned his commission into a study of the burdens that he faced, artistically and financially, in attempting to fulfill it.

The production company Hamster Productions, which had a contract with the French television station TF1 to provide a monthly film based on a
Série noire
story, asked Godard for a film in the series based on a novel by James Hadley Chase,
The Soft Centre
, called, in French,
Chantons en choeur
(Let’s Sing in Unison).
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To put his patrons at ease, Godard stated in advance that he planned to make a standard film noir adaptation of a classic pulp fiction novel. Despite these assurances, his film is minimally related to the Chase novel. It is, instead, based mainly on his own life and crises, on his financial worries as a producer and his creative worries as a director, and on the role of women in his working life. With this project,
Grandeur et décadence d’une petite entreprise de cinéma
(Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company), Godard again managed to convert a conventional
Série noire
story into an extraordinarily personal, painful, and revealing work—into a film noir, of sorts, about the making of a film.

The casting, and the names given to the lead roles, suggested Godard’s emotional investment in the small-scale piece. Jean-Pierre Léaud played a
film director, Gaspard Bazin, whose creative crisis stems from a television commission for a film based on a
Série noire
novel by James Hadley Chase; Jean-Pierre Mocky, a director whom Godard had known since the 1950s,
²⁶
played Jean Almereyda (the real name of the director Jean Vigo), a film producer with a small and troubled production company.

The film was constructed in three parallel stories, involving a classic Godard triangle: Gaspard’s frantic quest for actors and for a story; Almereyda’s struggle to keep his company afloat by juggling the books, siphoning off cash, and seeking to fend off tax inspectors; and Almereyda’s conflict with his wife, Eurydice, who wants to become an actress and tries to get Gaspard to cast her in his film.

In Bazin’s story, the director observes a depressing parade of unemployed actors marching through his studio in a line and auditioning for a video camera (each declaiming one word from a phrase by Faulkner), and he labors deep into the night to try to find something interesting to do with what he calls the “bad novel” that he is compelled to adapt—none other than
Chantons en choeur
, by James Hadley Chase. Meanwhile, Almereyda struggles to make films, meet a payroll, and make a living while contending with a tax audit. In Almereyda’s company, Albatross Films, the production manager is exhorting the producer to find original receipts for everything, but Almereyda’s main worry is an outstanding question over a bundle of missing deutschmarks.

The two men are brought together when Eurydice comes to see Bazin late one night to beg him for a screen test. When Almereyda finds out, he counsels her against it: “Look at Gaspard, the cinema has killed him.” She complains, “Albatross Films is your life. I don’t have a life. At least let me share it.”

Godard himself makes a comic appearance near the film’s end, meeting Almereyda by chance and hitching a ride with him (the gag is that Godard now lives in Reykjavik); he and the producer get nostalgic, tossing each other names of classic-era French actresses Eurydice reminds them of, and Godard offers the struggling producer a word of advice that also serves as a touching credo: “Everything is going backwards today—fashion, politics, and what-not. The cinema is going backwards too… So maybe since she’s old-fashioned, she has a chance. To each his freedom, after all. But you have to land in the right place. It’s not a question of time or of era, it’s a question of tempo.”

But Almereyda never finds his way out of his crisis: he attempts to sneak away from his office (disguised, with poignant ineptitude, as a woman) but is caught by intruders; when Eurydice turns around, she finds his body lying beside his Mercedes.
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Having lost his producer, Bazin—a director who
is not also a producer—is reduced to auditioning, in vain, for the hip new company that has taken over the offices of Albatross Films, where stylish young people lounge about in stylish indolence.

The title, which appears as “The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company as Revealed by the Search for Actors for a Film for Public Television Based on an Old Novel by J. H. Chase,” is Godard’s elegant way of biting the hand that was feeding him: the state. To make sure that his message was understood—or rather, to make sure that it was misunderstood—the final title card is a dedication as well as a jibe: “To Jack Lang.” The left had lost the legislative elections in March, François Mitterrand had to share power with a center-right legislature, and so by the time the film was broadcast, on May 24, 1986, Lang was no longer minister of culture. Godard’s next film,
Soigne ta droite
(Watch Your Right), drew its title from this state of affairs.

M
ORE THAN ANY
project that Godard had realized to date,
Soigne ta droite
took its inspiration from practical, electoral politics, to which, as Godard recognized, his cinematic fortunes were peculiarly bound. In taking on politics, he was, therefore, also taking on his own prominence and his own persona: accordingly, in
Soigne ta droite
, Godard gave himself his first lead role as an actor.

It was a film that Godard had planned as early as April 1983, when he outlined for an interviewer a project “which will be an homage to what [Jacques] Tati did” and which he planned to call either
Soir de fête
, a play on
Jour de fête
, Tati’s first feature film, or
Soigne ta droite
, referring to a short film from 1936,
Soigne ton gauche
(Watch Your Left), in which Tati stars.
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Godard’s idea was to act alongside the popular comic actor Jacques Villeret (who had appeared in a small role in
First Name: Carmen
) in a comedy about two policemen, one a leftist, the other a rightist. He intended the film to serve as a prelude to the March 1986 legislative elections, but when it clearly could not be completed (or even begun) by that date, he changed the theme drastically.

“Witness means martyr,” Godard had Jean-Pierre Léaud say in
Detective;
in
Grandeur et décadence
, Godard had another stand-in, Jean-Pierre Mocky, suffer a filmmaker’s martyrdom after he declares that the cinema is an art that kills. Following that train of thought, Godard reconfigured
Soigne ta droite
as a confrontation with death; the film was to define the cinema itself and his own cinema in terms of that confrontation.
Soigne ta droite
became a grandly philosophical film based on the classic existential definition of life in terms of death. Yet Godard kept its political aspect and indeed amplified it. The retrospective view of the cinema and of his own life that he planned in
Histoire(s) du cinéma
also entailed a growing obsession with political and social history; and
Soigne ta droite
—as the title hinted
at in its allusions to Tati’s 1936 film about the French left-wing Popular Front government as well as to the right-wing victory in the elections of 1986—reflected, with a new fullness and directness, Godard’s meditations on modern history, and also confronted its deadly toll.

D
EATH HAD PASSED
close to Godard in the recent past. In 1984, Georges de Beauregard, who was ill with cancer, won an honorary César for his contributions to the French cinema. In his acceptance speech, Beauregard first acknowledged Godard for “his natural talent, his constant solicitude, always seeking what will happen next in the new audio-visual world and in life itself.”
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On September 10, 1984, Beauregard died. Godard wrote a memorial and published it as an advertisement in the trade magazine
Le Film Français
, praising him, in brief phrases separated by ellipses, for his “soul of Faust… under his airs of a shopkeeper,” and credited him with producing “Belmondo’s first smile and Bardot’s last.”
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