Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (21 page)

Guillaume flew, leaped, sprinted like a hare. Not hearing the fusillade, he stopped, turned around, out of breath. Then he felt a terrible blow to his chest. He fell. He became deaf, blind. “A bullet,” he said to himself. “I am lost if I don’t pretend to be dead.” But in him, fiction and reality became one. Guillaume Thomas was dead.

Thomas l’Imposteur
was one of two novels written by Cocteau in 1922 and published in 1923. The protagonist of the other,
Le Grand Ecart
(The Split
⁴²
or The Great Divide), is named Jacques Forestier.
Le Grand Ecart
is the story of the love life of a sentimental yet vehement adolescent dandy whom Cocteau names in the novel’s first sentence: “Jacques Forestier cried easily. The movies, bad music, a feuilleton, drew forth his tears.” However, the “thin,” “tormented,” and “hirsute” Forestier had taken on “something of hardness” behind which:

He could neither adhere to the right nor to a left which he found soft. But his excessive nature sought no middle ground.

Also in virtue of the axiom: “the ends meet,” he dreamt of a pure far-right, meeting up with the far-left to the point of being a part of it, but in which he could act alone.

Filming a right-wing militant in
Le Petit Soldat
with whom he closely identified, Godard—as he had done ten years earlier in his article “For a Political Cinema”—brought the two extremes together, both romantically (in Bruno’s love affair with Veronica) and psychologically (in his increasing sympathy for pro-Algerian activists). This passage by Cocteau regarding Forestier’s politics appears in
Le Petit Soldat
, only slightly transformed, as part of an eruptive monologue nearly seven minutes long that Bruno delivers in the presence of Veronica, after he is tortured and takes refuge with her. It is the scene in which Godard most completely “let [himself] go.” Bruno’s speech contains allusions to all of the film’s most important and explicit literary references: Cocteau’s Guillaume Thomas and Jacques Forestier, Malraux’s
La Condition humaine
, the right-wing author Drieu La Rochelle, the left-wing writer Aragon. The monologue both embodies and refers to the imperative of self-consciousness, an obsession with talking, and, as in
Breathless
, features a boy who thinks about death.

Godard improvised his text and Subor improvised his performance. “Godard was behind the camera, he spoke it, I repeated it, sentence by sentence.” As to the direction, Subor recalled: “He told me, ‘You can move however you like.’”
⁴³
Though the speech begins as a political reflection, it soon becomes a frantic, tormented search for self-understanding. Veronica prompts the tirade with her assertion that “against the Germans, the French had an ideal. Against the Algerians, they don’t have one. They’ll lose the war.” Bruno disagrees, declaring himself “very proud to be French” and expressing
an intellectualized cultural nationalism à la Giraudoux: “One defends ideas, one doesn’t defend territories. I love France because I love Joachim du Bellay and Louis Aragon. I love Germany because I love Beethoven.”

Bruno then takes up the question of death and suicide:

Women, when they commit suicide, always throw themselves under a train or from a window. They are so afraid not to be able to go through with it that they throw themselves forward, so that it’s impossible to turn back. Men never do that. It’s very rare for a man to throw himself under a subway train and it’s very rare for a woman to open her veins. I find it very courageous of them and at the same time very cowardly… Life is what counts for women, but death for men.

And from these existential questions, Bruno comes back to politics, only to give the subject an intimate spin:

There is a beautiful sentence, I think it’s from Lenin: “Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” I find that sentence very beautiful and very moving too. It reconciles the right and the left. What do people on the right and the left think about? What’s the point of revolution today? As soon as a reactionary government comes to power, it applies a leftist policy and the other way around. As for me, I win or I lose, but I fight alone. Around 1930, young people had the revolution. For example, Malraux, Drieu La Rochelle, Aragon. We no longer have anything. They had the war in Spain, we don’t even have a war of our own. Apart from ourselves, our own face and our own voice, we have nothing. But maybe this is what is important. To come to recognize the sound of one’s own voice and the form of one’s own face.

Godard’s attempt, in this speech, to hear the sound of his own voice and to recognize his own face in the mirror ends with Bruno in front of a mirror: first looking into it, then turning his back on it and delivering the end of his monologue while staring into the camera. Godard described
Le Petit Soldat
as a film where “one has to yield up what one has in the guts, so to speak; and what one has in the guts is not necessarily made to be yielded up just like that.”
⁴⁴

Forty years after the end of the shoot, Godard said about
Le Petit Soldat:
“It is perhaps too personal, it embarrasses me a little… because I was a little… yes, the character was, was not very sympathet—it should have been worked on more, he wasn’t very sympathetic.”
⁴⁵
He had indeed “let himself go” and expressed ideas that he would rather have thought out more carefully. Bruno’s cri de coeur is, in the end, an attempt to escape a narrowly defined political identity, but it was also an aestheticization of the issue at
hand; it was noncommittal regarding the Algerian War. The great advance of
Le Petit Soldat
was also its limitation.

A
S HAD BEEN
the case with
Breathless
, Godard’s spontaneous invention of dialogue on the set was made possible by the fact that
Le Petit Soldat
was filmed without direct sound
⁴⁶
and was dubbed, thus allowing Godard to call dialogue to his actors while the camera was rolling. Yet in constructing the film’s sound track, he made an ingenious and singular choice in the editing room in order to create the effect of filtering the action through Bruno’s memory. Instead of recreating the rich sonic texture of the city, Godard suppressed most ambient sound and couched the voices in a void, as if detached from the characters’ surroundings. Agnès Guillemot, the editor, spoke of the unusual sound-editing procedure:

I remember Godard asking me, for a scene of a car arriving at a railway crossing: “I only want the sound of the match.” Ordinarily, one would have put the sound of the car in motion and then braking, the character reaching for his cigarette then lighting it.
⁴⁷

This practice lent the voices and the discrete sound effects a peculiar intimacy, as if, like Bruno, the viewer were experiencing not a moment in full but a particular, keen, and pointed detail as Bruno remembers it. Godard said of Bruno:

One must be with him, must see things from his point of view, to the precise extent and time as the exterior story is told. The film is like a private diary, a notebook, or the monologue of someone who is trying to defend himself before an almost accusatory camera, as one does before a lawyer or a psychiatrist.
⁴⁸

Even the music points to the film’s struggle with memory: where
Breathless
is filled with Martial Solal’s bluesy swing,
Le Petit Soldat
is punctuated with the modernist composen Maurice Le Roux’s fragmentary, atonal jolts of solo piano, aural pangs of conscience. The film’s first lines, spoken in voice-over by Godard himself, establish the theme: “For me, the time for action is over. I have gotten older. The time of reflection is beginning.”

T
HE MOST OBVIOUS
cinematic point of reference for Godard’s second feature film is Orson Welles’s
The Lady from Shanghai
(1948), in which Welles plays Michael O’Hara, a young man who gets caught up in a plot from which he can extricate himself only at the cost of the life of the woman he loves. The
last line of
Le Petit Soldat
—“There was only one thing left for me: to learn not to be bitter. But I was happy, because I had lots of time ahead of me”—is a loose adaptation of the last line of
The Lady from Shanghai
.
⁴⁹
Godard said that he had originally intended to include an even more direct quotation from Welles’s film, but then decided against it.

Another cinematic reference, however, had a far more pervasive influence on the film and on Godard’s subsequent work: the French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Just after the end of the shoot, Godard told a journalist, “I really made this film under the influence of Bresson (
Pickpocket
) and of Malraux.”
⁵⁰
Pickpocket
, Bresson’s fifth feature film, released in December 1959, is loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment;
it tells the story of an intellectual pickpocket who justifies his crimes with Nietzschean theories of the superior man who is above the law, and of the simple, saintly, long-suffering woman who loves him. The film concludes with a spiritual transfiguration, and Bresson’s aesthetic is up to his metaphysical ambitions. The style of
Pickpocket
is austere, abstracted, indeed exalted, but not weighty or gloomy: the precise gestures and uninflected diction of Bresson’s amateur actors were perfectly adapted to the film’s spare, unencumbered framing and its naturalistic sound track, and these elements were in the service of a sanctification—and a moral judgment—of the stuff of ordinary life. The influence of
Pickpocket
, in particular, was both a model and an intellectual challenge to Godard, and would exert an effect on Godard’s work that was profound and enduring. Bresson’s film obsessed Godard, who went to see it at least ten times, sometimes ducking into a theater just to see ten or twenty minutes of it. In 1983, Godard recalled, “I would surely like to be moved now as much as I had been moved by
Pickpocket
. One thought: ah, such a thing can be done!”
⁵¹
In his top-ten list for 1959 in
Cahiers
, he cited it as the best film of the year, ahead of
Hiroshima Mon Amour, The 400 Blows
, and films by Jean Renoir, Jean Rouch, and Georges Franju. In an interview as he prepared to shoot
Le Petit Soldat
, Godard suggested the grounds of his confrontation with the sublimity of Bresson’s explicitly religious vision:

The filmmaker, upon contact with life, discovers that the theoretical oppositions between contrary positions lack all foundation. It is false to say that there are classics and moderns, fascists and progressives, believers and atheists. There are people concerned with religion, politics, and literary problems, and people who aren’t.
⁵²

Godard was claiming for his own relentlessly secular cinema the possibility of a secular exaltation equal to that of Bresson’s religious work. He set out
to make a film in which he would seek a Bressonian spiritual depth and intensity of inner experience without reference to God or religion.

W
HEN ASKED TO
what extent
Le Petit Soldat
was a political film, Godard answered, “One can say that the film is not political because I do not take a position for anyone and because the subject is not ‘oriented’ in the manner of Russian films.”
⁵³
Rather than engaging himself politically with a statement of position in the conflict, he simply sought to acknowledge in cinema that there was a conflict: he claimed that he did not “take sides” and was “for” both Bruno and Veronica. Godard presents both camps engaging in torture and reinforces this evenhandedness with a verbal gesture: both László of the FLN and Jacques of the Red Hand invoke the same phrase by Lenin to justify their actions: “Sometimes one must have the strength to cut one’s way with a dagger.”
⁵⁴
Yet the balance—or detachment—of Godard’s approach carried moral and personal risks. Godard sensed in advance the battles that would await him as a result of it: “I am sure that this film will not please anyone, because I show the hardness of both sides, because I don’t take sides and I want only to treat seriously the character’s problem.”
⁵⁵

The enmity of the orthodox left toward the members of the
Cahiers
group did not abate now that they had become filmmakers. Because the left did not merely exhort filmmakers to cover certain subjects, but to advance a particular view of them, Godard had long taken the left to stand for constraint, unfreedom; whereas the right, in its avoidance of politics and explicit doctrines in culture, could more easily be identified with freedom of thought, if a self-centered one.

But the war in Algeria brought back into action the old fascist right. Rehabilitated Vichy collaborationists and their sympathizers were committing paramilitary murders of pro-Algerian activists throughout Europe. AntiSemitic demonstrations and attacks, unrelated to the Algerian War, were on the rise; in the first months of 1960, such assaults were sufficiently numerous to be reported daily in
Le Monde
under their own rubric. The war in Algeria and the atmosphere in France made claims to aesthetic political detachment appear dubious. As a result, Godard sought to redefine his politics, to distance himself from the morass of neofascism that had emerged from behind the mask of world-weary romanticism, but to do so without yielding to the doctrinaire demands of the organized left.