Jean-Luc the Swiss Rasta Wizard
In Godard's eyes, the only thing that counted was making good films.
Cut anything that lacks vigour; keep only that which is strongest, regardless of dramatic import or conventional continuity.
Godard makes for a forgiving subject; a flawed man! Tobi Haslett called him a ‘stroppy malcontent’; Agnés Varda called him ‘a rat’; David Bordwell described him as ‘a sketchy fellow, to put it mildly…. He liked to fight’. Cunning, criminal, aloof; a prankster whom you wouldn’t trust with any task except, possibly, with making a film, though you couldn’t guess what you’ll get. One million dollars for an adaptation of King Lear? Godard had no idea what he wanted to do, and by the time he did he had already spent half the budget on seventy Concorde flights and Norman Mailer. Mailer was dismissed after a few hours of shooting but still asked for his $500,000 fee. ‘It was in the contract, that we’d pay his lawyer. They said “Oh, that’s very nice of you”. That’s all there was to it. We made the film afterwards. We made it with what was left, with nothing’. The casting in the finished film is decidedly more cost effective. Godard ended up playing a shamanic version of himself called Professor Pluggy dressed in dreads of spare A/V cords. Mailer told the story of his departure differently: ‘Is it a reasonable demand to ask someone to, in their own name, play that they have an incestuous relationship to their daughter?’ Serge Gainsbourg had done it in France, there was precedent. Still one gets the impression that Godard loved to insult American celebrities, like when he addressed Clint Eastwood during a prize-giving ceremony as ‘Mr. Honkeytonk Man’. He certainly disliked divas on set. ‘Be quiet and do as you’re told’, he’s reported to have said to Mailer, in an act of asserting the supremacy of the auteur.
Another occasion for Yankee-mockery had presented itself at the start of the production of King Lear (1987) when Godard was sent to New York to interview Woody Allen. Allen was an admirer of Godard’s early films and had been asked to appear in Lear, but that didn’t render him beyond reproach when Godard sat down to edit the footage of their conversation. A black circle shrinks to cover Allen’s face at the beginning of the finished film, Meetin’ WA (1986); at other times the footage is slowed down to render his gestures grotesque; intertitles and music keep cutting in on what he has to say while Godard films himself lit from below smoking a cigar like a cop during a brutal questioning. The conversation must have been pleasant, for Allen agreed to work on the film; it’s likely he’s never seen what Godard made of their discussion.
Godard did not suffer fools gladly, though this posture often forced him to play the fool himself. ‘I need a certain freedom. I get it by sowing a certain confusion. By playing around with the familiar ways. The producer thinks that I’m improvising, whereas I’m only adapting myself to his conditions in order to create a greater possibility of invention.’ His stunts and pranks were efforts to secure artistic freedom under the commercial conditions of the movie industry. ‘I very quickly recognised that what’s important in a film is to control the money; the money, meaning the time’. Movies get money based on their stories and their stars. This reality had to be conceded often, but not without some humour. King Lear had originally been sold as a Godfather-style adaptation of the play starring Mailer as Don Learo and Allen as the fool. At the end of Godard’s Maoist period and collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jane Fonda and Yves Montand were cast in a film, Tout va bien (1972), about a strike at a sausage factory – a bourgeois concession acknowledged during the film’s opening sequence, which shows dozens of checks being written. Fonda went to Vietnam soon after the production had completed to resume her role as a celebrity political activist, prompting Godard and Gorin to record a 52-minute essay critiquing the politics of her media appearances. The many French stars that played in his films – Brigitte Bardot, Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Delon – were, as far as I know, spared such censure, the one exception being Juliette Binoche, who is alluded to in Éloge de l’amour (2001) as a Hollywood sellout.
It wasn’t just Americans and the Europeans they bankrolled that ran the risk of encountering the ‘abrasive, crotchety, boorish Godard’: he could be prickly with his friends if he thought it would make for better cinema. When Agnès Varda tried to visit him at home while shooting a documentary, he refused her entry and reduced her to tears with some hurtful graffiti. One has a sense that he couldn’t trust her to edit an interview.
Being close to the man was difficult. It was impossible to keep him in a single place: when Anna Karina, his first wife, was recovering from a miscarriage Godard would go out to buy some cigarettes and return three weeks later. François Truffaut, fellow Nouvelle Vague director and good friend from his days as a critic, made the mistake of thinking that their years of friendship would grant him special treatment. No such thing: in Godard’s eyes, the only thing that counted was making good films. In the early seventies, after his experiments with Gorin, Godard reconnected with his old friend Truffaut by writing him a letter lambasting his latest film, La nuit américaine (1973), and asking him for money. Truffaut’s twenty-page response shows how the little delinquent portrayed in The 400 Blows had grown-up to become a respectable part of the cultural establishment. Godard held, long after his friend’s death, that Truffaut the filmmaker had failed to live up to the principles he laid out as a brilliant young critic. The man may have lacked decorum, but like Michel in Breathless (1959), he abhorred compromise.
Everything was potential material for his films: Norman Mailer storming off set, Godard’s childhood home, his wife’s infidelity, the Vietnam war, Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the Holocaust. The opening credits to King Lear are accompanied by a telephone-call with the producer Menahem Golan which Godard had recorded behind his back. At the premiere in Cannes, Golan was outraged that Godard had ‘spit in his own soup’. His supremely expansive sense of cinema as a medium that can (and ought to) admit of any content was another source of interpersonal friction.
Truffaut defined the politique des auteurs in 1955 and in 1957 envisaged the cinema of the future as ‘even more personal than a novel, individual and autobiographical like a confession or an intimate diary. Young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will tell us what has happened to them’. By the time of their falling out in 1973, Godard could call Truffaut a ‘liar’ for the way he depicted himself in La nuit américaine, a film about the making of a film: ‘one wonders why the director is the only one who doesn’t fuck in La nuit américaine’. From the beginning, Godard realised the ideals of auteur cinema to a much higher degree than Truffaut. In Breathless, his first feature, Godard succeeded in creating a film imbued with the spontaneous energy of an essay. Without a script and with a minimal crew, anything could be thrown into the film and be transformed at the editing table from ‘chance into destiny’. When it came to portrayals of himself in such films as Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Passion (1982) – a practice no doubt inspired by Truffaut – he was unsparing. He rarely worked from a script, instead writing dialogue on the morning of a shoot or ad-libbing through an earpiece into Marina Vlady’s ear in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). When Allen says in Meetin’ WA that he never re-watches his own films because the finished work always fails to correspond to his initial conception, Godard says that he no longer feels such disappointment because he has no idea what film he’s making until it’s finished. ‘The film of tomorrow’, as Truffaut wrote, ‘won’t be made by functionaries of cinema but by artists for whom the shoot will constitute a formidable and exalted adventure’.
The shoot used to be the moment when the director would make his mark: having had a script written by a screenwriter selected for him by a producer, he was now responsible for turning the text into sound and image, orchestrating the play of actors and the movements of the crew, before handing the footage over to the editors for cutting. For the auteur Godard, responsible for all aspects of production, editing became an even more potent tool for self-expression than shooting. From asserting his presence in the jump-cuts of Breathless to commenting on the footage through disruptive intertitles and screeching seagulls, editing grew in importance over the course of his career, with his final film The Image Book (2018) being made entirely from archival footage. Many of Godard’s films contain original images of exceptional beauty, but where he had to work with bland footage, as in the case of Meetin’ WA, he allowed himself greater freedom to comment through editing. In his critical polemics in the Cahiers du cinéma during the fifties, Godard argued against André Bazin for the importance of editing. In ‘Montage, My Beautiful Concern’, Godard writes ‘If direction is a look, montage is a heart-beat. To foresee is the characteristic of both: but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time’. While Bazin held that long-shots with deep focus and without editing come closest to conveying reality, Godard asserted the way in which montage brings out spiritual or psychological reality which is temporal in nature. Far from the objective medium that Bazin envisaged, cinema according to Godard is the most existential, rightfully superseding the novel as supreme psychic metaphor.
Books appear like characters in almost all of his films. People have called him a failed writer, and by his own admission he wanted to be one. In an early interview with L’Express, the reason he gives for his failure is interesting:
‘Yes, of course [I wanted to be a writer]. But I wrote “The weather is nice. The train enters the station” and I sat there for hours wondering why I couldn’t have just as well written the opposite: “The train enters the station. The weather is nice” or “it is raining”. In the cinema, it’s simpler. At the same time, the weather is nice and the train enters the station. There is something ineluctable about it. You have to go along with it’
This little self-observation, this difficulty with the sequential nature of writing provided the inspiration for Godard’s unusual definition of montage: it is not, as for Eisenstein, a theory about the intellectual effects of combining images sequentially; ‘montage’ for Godard refers to the presentation of multiple ideas in one time, in one image. Whereas Soviet montage freed cinema from a logic of spatial continuity that brought it closer to literature, Godard saw cinema as a superior literary medium. Cinema became his cunning strategy to become a great author writing not with ink but with Alexandre Astruc’s caméra stylo.
He was cunning, a brilliant tactician. He made his first film Opération Béton by taking a job as a physical labourer on the construction of the Grande Dixence Dam, at the time the world’s tallest, a position he got by beseeching his mother’s young lover. After scrambling together equipment and money from friends he was able to sell the film to the company which administered the dam. He knew the advantages proximity to the monumental affords. Yet his early success did not make him content to rest on his laurels, like Truffaut: his art called for more than mere respectability and prudence. Flaubert’s dictum to be regular and orderly in one’s life so that one may be violent and original in one’s work did not apply to filmmakers.
‘There is nothing revolutionary about Godard’, wrote Serge Daney, ‘rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present’. True to this statement, Godard never made a period film, whether set in the past or in the future. His one foray into science-fiction, Alphaville (1965) was set in an alienating present rather than some imagined tomorrow: ‘we are already living in the future’, he commented at the time. When he occupied the Cannes Film Festival in 1968 he criticised himself and his fellow filmmakers for not making films reflective of the situation of the students and workers. ‘I’m talking to you about solidarity with the students and the workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!’ Despite anticipating and critiquing the Maoist student movement in La Chinoise (1967), Godard’s political engagement did not shy away from extremes. ‘He has always been a little ahead of his time,’ writes Daney, ‘but nothing has protected him from the average illusions of the day’. Yet his most enduring political stances concerned the media and American imperialism. In a description that wouldn’t be out of place in a speech by Putin, Godard claims that cinema had died twice: the first time when Hollywood displaced France as the leading cinema following WWI; the second time when Hollywood allied itself with Germany to colonise Europe following WWII. The film that treats of this most explicitly is Éloge de l’amour, which features a couple of obnoxious Hollywood producers trying to pay an aged member of the French Resistance for the film-rights to her story.
We turn like flowers towards the light; this is a fact that Godard took very seriously. Television is like the sun, while cinema is like the moon: one a ray beamed at our face, the other a silvery reflection whose source remains in the projector-room behind us. First televisions and then ‘devices’ have become our household gods from which we are compelled to walk away from backwards. The viewing of video content on private screens no longer affords the ‘simultaneous collective experience’ whose political potential Walter Benjamin was excited about. Watching is not something to be done passively: the illusion of cinema is no longer bounded by any proscenium, not dampened by crimson velvet upholstery. Media technology is totalising, it succeeds in cocooning its consumers in a chrysalis of clichés; in its relentless urgency, it affords no space for self-reflection or criticism. This is antithetical to Godard’s conception of cinema: ‘I don’t make a distinction between directing and criticism. When I began to look at pictures, that was already part of moviemaking’.
Godard was an auteur who asserted, in extremely disruptive ways, the presence of his intentions in his films while withholding their meaning. ‘It’s what I like in cinema,’ someone says in Nouvelle Vague (1990), ‘A saturation of glorious signs, bathing in the light of their absent explanation.’ The viewer is made to consider image and sound as aesthetic objects rather than merely vehicles for stories and stars. We are asked to remain in Plato’s cave rather than to seek any false light, to become sensitised to fleeting beauty, to views of Lake Geneva, a phrase from a Beethoven Quartet, a quote from Aragon:
When I close the book, I will have no regrets.
I’ve seen so many people live so badly,
and so many people die so well.
First time I have been interested in Godard.
“Television is like the sun, while cinema is like the moon: one a ray beamed at our face, the other a silvery reflection whose source remains in the projector-room behind us.”
Beautiful