Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (30 page)

Godard knew what he had accomplished with
Vivre sa vie:
it was the first of his own films that he included in his year’s ten-best list for
Cahiers
(at number six, modestly placed behind Truffaut’s
Jules et Jim
and Rohmer’s
Le Signe du Lion;
in first place was Howard Hawks’s
Hatari!
). The director attributed a significant measure of the film’s quality to the star’s devotion to it, as well as his own: “The film was made in a sort of altered state, and Anna isn’t the only one who gave the best of herself. Coutard succeeded in doing his best photography.”
⁴¹

All had not been paradise, however; not by any stretch. Braunberger had given Godard the key to his office, where the director was often found in the morning, having slept there after a scene at home. Karina attempted suicide again (delaying production for half a week), after Godard decided to change the ending of the film from the sardonically happy one where Nana lives to the tragic one where she dies.
⁴²
Nonetheless, the film achieved Godard’s purpose, and even sooner than might have been expected. It created horizons for Karina as a performer which might otherwise have remained closed for a long time to come.

Yet years later, Godard recognized that the film, with its visual and emotional austerity, contributed to their eventual separation: “She was furious afterward because she thought that I had made her look ugly, that I had done her a considerable wrong by having made this film; that was the beginning of our breakup.”
⁴³
Despite their mutual cinematic achievement, and the opening of new doors for Karina, they were not, Godard thought, the ones she wanted to pass through: “I think that she always regretted not making films in Hollywood.”
⁴⁴

In the spring of 1962, immediately after making
Vivre sa vie
, Godard tried to find a way to make her wish come true. He had conceived another
musical extravaganza for Karina, costarring Gene Kelly. It would be filmed in the United States and would be of unquestionable intellectual value, since it would also, remarkably, costar William Faulkner. It would be the story, Godard said, of

Anna herself, Anna who is an actress and who arrives in New York. She goes to see Gene Kelly and she says to him, “I am a French actress, I admire you, can’t you find me some work?” Finally it’s the discovery of America by this girl, from within seven or eight great genres of the American cinema. Then Gene Kelly says, “But no, my little girl, the musical comedy is finished, the great stage at MGM no longer exists.” Then they go into the street and it becomes a little bit musical. Then, I don’t know what, she needs money, she steals money, she meets people and it becomes a criminal episode. I would have wanted, for example, for her to get hired as a maid, or a gardener, or whatever, by Faulkner.
⁴⁵

Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, and Godard abandoned the project.

A more realistic proposition for Godard and Karina involved another theater-based project, one that could not have been further from a Hollywood musical. In an effort to help Jacques Rivette get his directorial career going after the commercial failure of
Paris Belongs to Us
, Godard had introduced him to Beauregard, and Rivette had proposed to the producer a film of Denis Diderot’s
La Religieuse
. The story, which Diderot began in 1760 and took up again in 1781 and which was published posthumously in 1796, concerned a young woman who is interned by her parents in a convent against her will and attempts to escape. She is subjected to attempts at seduction both by a nun and a priest. Although the book was a recognized classic, many Catholics still considered it offensive, and after his difficulties with
Le Petit Soldat
, Beauregard put Rivette’s project off.

However, in the spring of 1962, at dinner with Godard and Karina, Rivette suggested that the actress would be perfect for the part in
La Religieuse
, if it ever got made. Godard brought the notion up with Beauregard, who was skeptical that Karina, with her Danish accent, could play the lead in a film of an eighteenth-century French classic. Nonetheless, Godard went into action, introducing Rivette to the producer Eric Schlumberger, who submitted the scenario by Rivette and the screenwriter Jean Gruault to the CNC for “pre-censorship.” Predictably, the commission anticipated that the film would be banned. Godard was not deterred. As Karina continued to study French diction with the text of
La Religieuse
in hand, Godard approached the theatrical producer and director Antoine Bourseiller
⁴⁶
about staging the play in his Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, with Karina in the lead role—and at Godard’s
expense. As Bourseiller later recalled, Godard “knew that, if the play was put on, and if it wasn’t censored, then when the film was made they could argue, ‘You didn’t ban
La Religieuse
in the theater, you can’t ban it in the cinema.’”
⁴⁷

Bourseiller, who welcomed the chance to work with Godard and Karina, not only accepted
La Religieuse
but also raised the theatrical ante for the glamorous couple. In the summer of 1962, Bourseiller was scheduled to direct a production of
Pour Lucrèce
, by Jean Giraudoux, at a summer theater festival in Brittany. He offered Karina the lead role of Lucile, a woman of fierce rectitude who is tricked into believing herself to have been raped, and who, in her humiliation, commits suicide. He also offered a small part in the play to Godard: “I had very little money, and so, since I knew that Godard was going to come with Anna, I asked him to play the notary. He wasn’t paid, of course.”
⁴⁸
When Godard accepted, Bourseiller changed the text of the play to amplify Godard’s role; in the process, Bourseiller turned the couple’s work together into self-dramatizing allegory. In Giraudoux’s text, Lucile, after her suicide attempt, is found unconscious by her maid. In Bourseiller’s production, Godard’s character, the notary, would find Lucile in danger and would cry out, “Madame has taken poison!”

The play went off as planned, but one night, Godard took matters into his own hands: he spoke his big line over and over again, with as many different inflections and tones as he could muster, and the audience laughed uproariously. Karina was not amused: “He went on for five minutes. He played the clown. He ruined my show… He couldn’t keep from upstaging the star. I was busy dying at the end of the play—in front of three thousand people.”
⁴⁹

Karina was not long in finding a way of upstaging Godard in return.

When the couple got back to Paris, Godard started to plan a film of
Pour Lucràce
, which he would shoot in early September, immediately after the presentation of
Vivre sa vie
at the Venice festival. It was to be a rapid production: as Raoul Coutard later recalled, “He wanted to shoot it in one week.”
⁵⁰
Godard would not film a staging of the play, but simply a reading of it, in the garden of the house in the suburbs of Paris where Louise de Vilmorin (the novelist, and André Malraux’s mistress) lived. Godard told a journalist that the project was to take up where
Vivre sa vie
had left off, as a film of theatrical inspiration: he planned “simply to direct a voice on the screen, show someone more or less motionless on the screen speaking a fine text.”
⁵¹

Godard, who coproduced the film with the distribution company Cocinor-Marceau,
⁵²
recruited a cast of well-known actors—Sami Frey, Marie Dubois, Charles Denner—which did not include Karina: she had left for Spain to play the title role in a big-budget historical fantasy,
Scheherazade
, directed by the Old Wave director Pierre Gaspard-Huit
(who had been an object of derision for Godard and his friends at
Cahiers
).
⁵³

On the first day of the shoot, it rained. Godard asked Raoul Coutard, “Can we shoot anyway?” Coutard responded, “We can, but it would be comical to have people sitting on the terrace right outside the door in the rain, wouldn’t it?” They went on waiting. Then Godard took Coutard aside and asked him, “What would they say if I said I was stopping the film?” Coutard answered, “They’d laugh.” But Godard called an early lunch, and as Coutard later recalled, “Everyone was at the table, he gets up and he says, ‘This is the meal for the end of the shoot.’ Everyone laughed, but he was serious.”
⁵⁴

It was an expensive decision, because as coproducer, Godard himself was responsible for paying off the actors and the crew. To raise the money rapidly in order to do so, he pressed Braunberger to buy back from him for thirty thousand francs (six thousand dollars) his half share of
Vivre sa vie
, the value of which Braunberger estimated at 100,000 francs (twenty thousand dollars), and which would soon become all the more valuable with the film’s successful release and international sales. (The relationship ended badly: several years later, in the midst of a dispute, Godard called Braunberger a “dirty Jew,” an insult that Braunberger said he could never forgive.)
⁵⁵

Then, making plain his motive for canceling the shoot, Godard left at once for Spain to join Anna Karina. (He even made a cameo appearance in the arrantly commercial
Scheherazade
.) Godard was distracted by her absence and all too mindful that it had been less than a year since the debacle of the shoot of
Le Soleil dans l’oeil
in Corsica—a date that Godard would soon commemorate on film.

I
N THE FALL
of 1962, Godard signed three contracts for films with three different producers—the short film
Le Nouveau Monde
(The New World) for a compilation by the Italian producer Alberto Bini; the medium-length
Le Grand Escroc
(The Great Swindler) for an international consortium of producers; and the feature
Les Carabiniers
for Beauregard. As a result, Godard was suddenly flush enough to produce
La Religieuse
, starring Karina and directed by Rivette, at Bourseiller’s theater.

The play opened on February 6, 1963. It was not a financial success, but it won favorable reviews. The film historian Lotte Eisner called it the best stage production she had seen “since Brecht.”
⁵⁶
Moreover, Beauregard was enthusiastic about Karina’s performance and the prospects for a future film, but censorship was still an issue. Rivette and Gruault rewrote the script, which Beauregard submitted to the precensorship board. It passed, but Beauregard found himself again on a financial downswing and could not afford to produce it. Meanwhile, in July 1963, Rivette agreed to take
over the editorship of
Cahiers du cinéma
from Eric Rohmer, and thus
La Religieuse
was again placed on hold.

E
ARLY IN THE
shoot of
Vivre sa vie
, in a café in the Latin Quarter, a journalist took Godard aside during the setup of an elaborate sequence and asked the director whether he had any “masters.” “No,” Godard answered, “or perhaps just one, because of his will to independence: Rossellini.”
⁵⁷

Roberto Rossellini had been a crucial inspiration for the New Wave, first by example (
Voyage to Italy
, from 1953) and then in practice (his effort in 1955–56 to organize a series of 16mm features for the Young Turks of
Cahiers
and their associates). As Godard’s friendship with Melville waned, his connection to Rossellini deepened. The correlation between Rossellini’s films and his life could not have escaped Godard’s attention: Rossellini’s relationship with Ingrid Bergman was inseparable from their extraordinary series of films from the early 1950s, and their marriage foundered on the same shoals that Godard and Karina’s was scraping against, in particular the actress’s desire, in the face of the commercial limitations of her husband’s films, to work with other directors in the mainstream of the industry.

Yet Godard and Rossellini had several major differences of opinion. Rossellini was hostile to cinephilia and to any veneration of the cinema as a means of artistic expression. In late 1962, at the time of the release of
Vivre sa vie
, Godard acknowledged this difference uneasily: “I love the cinema. Rossellini no longer loves it, he is detached from it, he loves life. Compared to Rossellini, I have the sin of the cinephile.”
⁵⁸
Moreover, Godard thought that Rossellini’s dedication to ideas ran the risk of antiemotionalism, and he contrasted his own intentions with Rossellini’s in this regard: “One might say Rossellini’s failure is that the principal feature and beauty of his films is that they are shot from remote distances: he probably shoots them like this on the assumption that his underlying conception is the most important thing, but people seen from a distance are rarely very moving.”
⁵⁹

Moreover, Rossellini and Godard disagreed about the importance of the recent works of a veteran filmmaker who had suddenly, in the early 1960s, become emblematic of the times—and who had taken over from Rossellini the vanguard position in the Italian cinema—Michelangelo Antonioni.

Although Rossellini’s films had led Italian cinema out of the exclusive realm of the working class—the subject par excellence of neorealism—to depict the rise of the managerial middle class, he was unable to take, or even to understand, the next step, which was Antonioni’s: to show a society of mass culture and media, of technology and ostensible progress, and to consider the transformations in individual consciousness that were taking place
in this new world. Rossellini believed so strongly in the freedom of individuals that he could not make sense of the idea that people who could be alienated from themselves by the mass media, which he considered merely to be a form of rhetorical persuasion that should be rejected by claims of reason. He acknowledged that an artist might want “to talk of incommunicability, alienation,” but thought that the artist was then obligated to tell the public, “‘One can indeed not be alienated, and one can also, indeed, communicate.’ That is the function of the artist: to overcome things, to find a new language.”
⁶⁰
Rossellini blamed Antonioni for allowing his characters to wallow in their alienation, for giving viewers the idea that such alienation is inevitable, and for creating cinematic forms which enshrine alienation as an aesthetic mode.