Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (20 page)

Tolmatchoff, also an assistant on the film, related Godard’s difficulty getting started to the tantalizing presence of Anna Karina: Godard, he recalled, was already in love with her, but she was there in Geneva with another man, Ghislain (Jicky) Dussart, Brigitte Bardot’s photographer. Since
Le Petit Soldat
was being shot in sequence—in the chronological order of the story—the first scene, of Subor in a car at the border, did not include Karina, so the longer the first scene took to shoot, the longer the filming of Karina would be delayed.

Once Godard did get to shooting, however, he worked with even greater efficiency and audacity than he had on
Breathless
. The crew was smaller and more mobile . In Switzerland, Godard was not constrained to hire a union-minimum crew. This time, there was no need to splice together short rolls of photographic film: Agfa in Switzerland provided very fast black-and-white film in longer rolls, thus permitting night sequences and other low-light situations to be filmed in long takes. In one instance, Godard shot five scenes in a single evening, between nine and eleven o’clock, including a car crash, which was done in one take, without stunt drivers, in an unsecured street in central Geneva.

In fact, Godard filmed on location in Geneva as he had filmed in the streets of Paris for
Breathless
, but with a difference. At the end of
Breathless
, Godard had integrated incredulous or bewildered passersby into Belmondo’s death-trot. They watched Belmondo lurching down the street, and they looked at the camera, thus putting visual quotation marks around the action. In
Le Petit Soldat
, Geneva and its inhabitants became unwitting, though crucial, participants in the film’s action. Subor recalled,

The murder at the end, we did it in the street with the camera hidden far away. I had a gun that was loaded with blanks. I fired. I fled. I was followed. A man cornered me. I pointed the gun at him. He stopped. I said, “It’s a movie.” He said, “You should have said so.”
²⁷

While the effect of the chase on Subor was powerful (he was being pursued as if he were an actual murderer), it was something of a disappointment for Godard, who later admitted that he had wanted people to pounce on Subor
during
the take, not after it.

Godard’s conception of the scene went beyond the desire for dramatic verisimilitude: it exemplified one of his key philosophical ideas about the cinema. “On the screen it appears almost unbelievable,” he explained, “and yet the fact that this could have been filmed so that passersby suspected nothing proves the possibility and the veracity of such an action.”
²⁸
Godard’s idea went beyond using documentary methods to convey a sense of reality;
rather, the fact that a given event could be filmed on location was, for Godard, proof that such an event could have happened in life as it appeared on film. This idea—a big one, which Godard would cite for years to come—was yet another response on his part to the writings of André Bazin, but a response that came from his practical experience with filmmaking: while for Bazin, reality was the touchstone of the cinema, for Godard the cinema was the touchstone of reality.

Godard radically integrated documentary into fiction in some of his most critical indoor scenes as well: while filming the torture of Bruno, Godard subjected Subor to near-asphyxiation with a water-soaked shirt wrapped around his face, telling the actor, “We’re going to do it but not for long.” For Subor’s suicide attempt, Godard had the actor hold a real razor blade between his teeth and press its edge into his handcuffed wrists. For the scene of electrical torture applied to the toes via spring clips leading to a hand-cranked generator, Godard actually had László Szabó, who played the torturer, apply live current to Subor, who said that it gave him “a peculiar feeling.”
²⁹
The journalist Michèle Manceaux, who met Subor after the filming ended, wrote, “I saw Michel Subor still bearing the marks from the electrodes on his wrists and ankles.”
³⁰

W
HEN
G
ODARD FINALLY
began filming Karina, after a week’s delay, the sequence that they shot, the scene of Bruno and Veronica’s first meeting, was framed by a bet between Bruno and his friend Hugues, who introduces them:

H
UGUES
: I’ll bet you that you’ll want to fuck her. She’s got the same kind of mouth as Leslie Caron.
B
RUNO
: No, I only sleep with girls I’m in love with.
H
UGUES
: Well in that case, little man, I bet you that in five minutes you’ll be in love.

Bruno bets Hugues fifty dollars and, after a few minutes’ acquaintance with Veronica, silently pays him the money. The character’s wordless confession was soon reflected in the director’s own, off-camera approach to the actress.

Like Jean Seberg, Anna Karina was not a native speaker of French, and this fact was not incidental to Godard’s choice of actress. He admired foreign actors speaking French in the cinema: “I liked people who had a foreign accent because it made their voice a bit different from French actors,”
³¹
and in
Le Petit Soldat
, he had Bruno say a line to that effect when Karina spoke (“A foreigner speaking French is always lovely”).

Unlike Jean Seberg, however, Anna Karina had almost no experience as an actress. Not only did Godard make use of her occasionally faulty French, but he made her hesitations and her awkwardness an essential element of her performance. In her first major scene, Godard got around her inexperience with a script by letting her make up her own dialogue: Bruno’s pretext for a rendezvous with Veronica is to photograph her, and Godard filmed their photo session with a personal intervention akin to psychodrama. In the scene, Bruno photographs Veronica while asking her questions. On the set, Godard stood behind the camera and asked the questions himself and Karina responded, unscripted—exactly as in Karina’s screen test. Godard confirmed that he filmed the discussion between Bruno and Veronica

as if I, myself, interviewed her, Anna, not the character. And then I had Subor re-ask my questions in the film, and so it became a scene of fiction. Moreover, at the end, Anna says, “Oh, you’re annoying me,” well, I mean, it’s what she was saying to me because she was fed up.
³²

The incipient relations between director and actress made it easy for Godard to identify with Bruno. And the fact that Bruno is a photographer made Godard’s identification with him all the more apparent. As Bruno photographed Karina, he tossed off verbal riffs that echoed the sound of Godard’s own voice: “When you photograph a face—look at me—you photograph the soul behind it… Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”
³³
The latter phrase became a famous and oft-repeated aphorism. Godard used it to adorn a two-page ad for the film that Beauregard placed in
La Cinématographie française
. But its meaning is paradoxical, suggesting that the staged, fictional images of cinema and the documentary images of the news photographer are equally true, equally revelatory of reality—in this case, of the reality of Godard’s own life. As indeed they were, according to Anna Karina’s recollection, decades later, of this particular scene: “It’s a declaration of love. Jean-Luc took the place of the photographer and directed my gestures, the hair like this, the hands like that, the head at an angle… It’s still very moving for me.”
³⁴

During the scene, Karina had a visual lapse that called momentary but riveting attention to the actual situation, physical and emotional, in which she was being filmed. As Godard’s questioning—through Bruno—grew more provocative and titillating (he asked to photograph her taking a shower and, when she demurred, asked whether she was “afraid” for him to see her body), she grew more flustered, until Bruno challenged her: “What do you think of me?” When she didn’t answer, he persisted: “Why aren’t you answering? It’s as if you were afraid.” Karina, obviously confused about whether Godard was
posing the questions in Bruno’s name or in his own, looked at Bruno but then reflexively shot a glance at the camera, where Godard was standing. As Karina recalled, the scene as played corresponded to the general facts off-camera: “We looked at each other a lot during the shoot, but we didn’t do anything.”

Then, one evening during the shoot, in Geneva, while Karina was at dinner with Ghislain Dussart, Godard came along: “Jean-Luc passed a note to me under the table: ‘I love you. Rendez-vous at the Café de la paix, at midnight.’ I packed my bags and I left everything, like a sleepwalker, swept away by him.”
³⁵
She also remembered how she found Godard at the café: “He was reading the paper. He wasn’t surprised to see me. For me it was a thunder-stroke.”
³⁶
Godard clinched their union by paying Dussart to get out of town.
³⁷

B
ECAUSE
M
ICHEL
P
OICCARD
of
Breathless
is not an intellectual or an artist, he is less Godard’s spokesman than the vehicle for his preoccupations. By contrast, Bruno Forestier is a character close to Godard: he is a maker of images and an intellectual; and he is the organizing consciousness of the film. Godard admitted, “The little soldier is more or less my spokesman, but not totally.”
³⁸
To one journalist he said, “It is easy for me to identify with him… Basically, I show a man who analyzes himself, who discovers himself to be different from the idea that he had of himself. Personally when I look in a mirror I often have the same feeling.”
³⁹

Le Petit Soldat
is a staging of that process: Godard attempting to see himself by means of the cinema. As Bruno photographs Veronica, he declares, “What’s important is not the way others see you, but the way you see yourself.” He says it while emphatically staring at himself in a mirror. Significantly, Godard does not contrast “the way others see you” with “the way you really are,” but with “the way you see yourself.” He does not compare appearance with reality, but appearance to others with appearance to oneself. This doubling of self—the development of self-consciousness through the self-image—defines the autobiographical in cinema as the filmmaker filming himself.

As Godard was completing the film, he declared to a journalist,

I thought a lot about Malraux while making this film. I had heard him say in a lecture: “One day, I wrote the story of a man who heard the sound of his own voice, and I called it
La Condition humaine
.” In my film, the hero seeks constantly to recognize his own voice. Even his face, in the mirror, he no longer thinks it corresponds to him.
⁴⁰

In
Le Petit Soldat
, there is no shortage of Godard’s own voice, transmuted into Subor’s. Bruno speaks in eruptively verbose free-floating
aesthetic reflections, sharp aphorisms, and historical speculations (Godard cited those of Malraux’s
Les Noyers d’Altenburg
[
The Walnut Trees of Altenburg
] as a main influence), and the entire film is structured by the narrative frame of Bruno’s voice-over commentary. Of the film’s copious dialogue, Godard said, “There were passages where I let myself go.”
⁴¹

The film’s multiple literary allusions were one way for Godard to let himself go. Early in the film, in voice-over, Bruno Forestier states his name. Forestier is the last name of two important characters in two major works of French literature that have significant similarities, and that were written and published within a year of each other. The authors, Jean Giraudoux and Jean Cocteau, were important references for Godard from the days of his earliest critical writings. Moments after Bruno Forestier introduces himself, he meets Veronica and, in voice-over, states, “The first time I met Veronica, she looked as if she had just stepped out of a play by Jean Giraudoux.” Instead it was Forestier who had stepped out of a novel by Jean Giraudoux:
Siegfried et le Limousin
(to which Godard referred in his article “For a Political Cinema,” in September 1950).

Siegfried et le Limousin
, published in 1922, is set in the turmoil of Germany after the First World War, and features sharp intellectual dialogue, historical meditations, and learned yet witty philosophical asides. The novel, about a Frenchman who goes to Germany to seek a friend who disappeared there during the war, presents the crossing of the border as a change of identity, mentality, and inner music, and reveals Giraudoux’s obsession with national identity, which he conceived in long and deep cultural terms. In the novel, Giraudoux harshly satirizes German Jews as rootless cosmopolitans without regard for regional tradition, and the novel ends with a fulsomely incantatory paean to the local names and age-old customs of which his characters’ French identities are composed. Giraudoux—a conservative writer with an exquisite, arch style, something of a high bourgeois aristocrat of manners—was a prime literary model for Godard, and
Siegfried et le Limousin
would remain a key reference in his work for decades.

The second literary connection to the name of Forestier appears in another scene early in the film, when Bruno is trapped in the backseat of a car between two of his death-squad bosses, one of whom pulls from his pocket a copy of
Thomas l’Imposteur
(
Thomas the Impostor
) by Cocteau and reads aloud from it.