Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (42 page)

In November 1964,
Les Lettres françaises
published an extraordinarily long and politically provocative interview of Godard with Gérard Guégan and Michel Pétris, a pair of young Marxist cinephiles.
⁴²
Godard, who had long been attacked by the orthodox left, had nonetheless considered himself to be on the left, or rather, considered that the left should be defined by alignment with himself and his own progressive aesthetic. He once again denounced leftists who presumed to impose a narrow range of subjects on their political allies:

One has the impression that people on the left always do things to clear their names. But one is free to do it or not to do it. I mean, it’s not up to me to make a film about the longshoremen’s strike in Nantes, because, really, I don’t know anything about it, and I would do it badly. I can help some people to make it. There are certainly some people who should do it, and who would do it better than I would. But I can only make a mess of it.
⁴³

Guégan, Pétris, and their film-loving friends on the left were aware of the company that Godard kept—as Guégan later explained, “He was with Coutard, who had served in Indochina, which for us was the worst thing in the world, and with Gégauff, who had been in the SS and went around talking about it”
⁴⁴
—but it didn’t keep them from a higher appreciation of Godard’s importance:

For us it was as much a question of aesthetics as politics. For us it was modernity, it was people who to us seemed to be American. Our idea of a hero in the cinema was Farley Granger in
Johnny Guitar
. The actors [Godard] chose had the same style as the American actors we loved. He made us think irresistibly of American youth, the audacity, the vivacity.
⁴⁵

Indeed, young leftists in film circles may have taken vehement exception to American politics and the American film industry, but they continued to endorse with equal vehemence the styles, myths, and artists of the classical Hollywood cinema: in 1964, the young and leftist
Cahiers
critics championed such films as Raoul Walsh’s
A Distant Trumpet
, John Ford’s
Cheyenne Autumn
, and Howard Hawks’s
Man’s Favorite Sport?

Guégan and Pétris were impressed not only with Godard’s cinematic aesthetic but with his personal aesthetic as well, with the palpable fusion of the man—or his persona—with his work. “When we met him,” Guégan recalled, “it was a shock: his sarcasm, his openness, his humor. He was someone who carried himself the way it seemed to us that an artist should carry himself, with a moral and physical elegance, with his yellow Boyard corn cigarette and his raincoat.”
⁴⁶
If Godard found a home on the left, it was because the left had changed: it had become a matter of form and style, of tone and mood, instead of simply an ideology, and had, as such, redefined its criteria and realigned its spectrum to include him—even realigned itself to accord with him. A new generation adopted him as its own. But in the 1960s, generations succeeded each other with a dizzying rapidity, and the new aesthetic left of 1964 would soon look as old-fashioned as the pro-Soviet apologists of the Communist Party and, as such, would give Godard another new worldview to film, to account for—and, so as not to be left behind, to adopt.

T
HE DATE
of the appearance of the interview of Godard by Guégan and Pétris, November 19, 1964, was a red-letter day in French journalism: it was the date of the first appearance of the transformed
France-Observateur
, now called
Le Nouvel Observateur
.

L’Express
, which had been the intellectual magazine of choice in the early 1960s, had recently been transformed, under the tutelage of its founder, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, into a newsweekly that he openly modeled on
Time
magazine, with a sleek, crisp, rectilinear style of graphics, color photographs, and a reduced intellectual substance. Many of its best writers had no place in the strict new formula, which was unveiled in September 1964, and a void was created in the French press.

Jean Daniel, formerly a journalist with
L’Express
, sought to fill that void. He was tapped to transform
France-Observateur
, as he recalled, “in the style of ‘New Journalism,’ adapted to the doubtlessly growing demands of an increasingly educated public”
⁴⁷
—a public that he understood to be that of the French “New Left,”
⁴⁸
the upwardly mobile and aesthetically conscious left, a cultural left that was not of the working class but of the university and professional class, and that had the avant-garde artistic tastes that went along with it. Daniel built an imposingly literary magazine with progressive tastes
in art, music, theater, literature—and inherited a movie section divided between two critics and their opposed views, the
Positif
-ist doctrinaire leftism of Robert Benayoun and the
Cahiers
-ist enthusiasms (and dazzling literary voice) of Michel Cournot. Benayoun had never seen fit to repent of his viciously ad hominem attacks against Godard; Cournot had led the charge in defense of
The Married Woman
. Daniel decided in favor of Godard and let Benayoun go.
⁴⁹

Le Nouvel Observateur
rapidly became something of a house organ for Godard himself. The week of the release of
A Married Woman
, the magazine published both a highly literary celebration of the film by Michel Cournot in the form of an imagined interior monologue from Charlotte’s point of view (“The bed is a white beach smoothed out by the sea, a stretch of earth that is soft on the knees…”), and also a two-page spread devoted to the film that Godard would soon start shooting,
Alphaville
.

A
T THE SAME TIME
,
Cahiers du cinéma
had also, for the second time in eighteen months, entered a new era, this one even more conspicuously new than that of Rivette’s stewardship. Unlike Rohmer, who was a careful and frugal administrator, Rivette was a madly ambitious editor who would not let the reality of practical obstacles stand in the way of his projects. His double issue of December 1963 and January 1964 devoted to the American cinema was over 250 pages long and extraordinarily expensive to produce. By 1964, the magazine was in serious financial difficulty, and it needed outside help in order to stay afloat.

Daniel Filipacchi, the publisher of the popular teen magazine
Salut les copains
(Hi, Buddies),
⁵⁰
was persuaded to buy a majority share of
Cahiers
in June 1964. He brought members of his own team onto the
Cahiers
editorial board and brought
Cahiers
into the visually splashy mode of modern publishing by way of a thorough redesign. The first issue of the newly formatted
Cahiers
appeared in November 1964. It was larger, more generous with photographs; the classic yellow logo was replaced by a streamlined yet free-floating pattern of title over picture; it featured a lively visual jazz of sans serif typefaces and an increased interplay and overlap of word and image. The layout was bold and full of contrast, with large blank spaces competing with dramatic two-page spreads.

The personnel and the thought behind
Cahiers
had recently been rejuvenated. Now the magazine was openly attuned to the energies of youth. As such, it too became a regular home in print for Godard. The inaugural issue of the new format featured Godard’s interview of Antonioni. Godard participated in the January 1965 dossier on the economics of the French cinema.
A Married Woman
was reviewed twice in February 1965, and, after Rivette left
the magazine in May 1965 and was replaced as editor by Jean-Louis Comolli, Godard’s presence at the journal grew even stronger and more frequent: he granted a series of extraordinarily long interviews, he himself interviewed Robert Bresson, and he contributed a sort of “diary” as well as other occasional and incidental pieces to the magazine.

The two rhapsodic critiques of
A Married Woman
that
Cahiers du cinéma
published in February 1965 were distinctly different in tone and import. The first, by the art historian Michel Thévoz, industriously traced connections between Godard’s work and trends in modern art, including Paul Klee, Pop Art, Rauschenberg, Picasso, and Dubuffet. The second, by Gérard Guégan, pointed far ahead to fault lines that would fracture the French New Left almost as soon as it got its footing: “On page 204 of Volume XXXVIII of his ‘Works’ (Russian edition), Lenin writes: ‘Human consciousness does not only reflect the objective world, but creates it.’” Guégan, who called himself “a Marxist but not of the Party,”
⁵¹
picked up on Godard’s conjoined aesthetic and social critique but also attempted to assimilate it into his own political doctrine.

This inner division of the left, the refabrication of a new Marxism in the rubble of an older one, had been present from the start. During his inaugural meeting with Jean Daniel regarding the refashioning of
France-Observateur
, Sartre told the incoming editor, “In general, you’re on the left. Which is to say, that you place yourself in the interior of Marxism.”
⁵²
Daniel thought exactly the opposite and had set himself precisely the problem of “how to reconstruct the left (which at the time had vanished) without (and against) Marxism.”
⁵³
He sensed that Sartre’s remark boded ill for the non-doctrinaire political movement that the magazine was intended to promote and to represent. And, although Godard was no Marxist, he too confronted the same aesthetic and political conflicts that Daniel was struggling to resolve.

S
ARTRE, WHO WAS ALREADY FAMOUS
, had become all the more so since the publication, in March 1964, of his autobiographical book
Les Mots
(
Words
, or
The Words
).
⁵⁴
The short memoir was rapidly acknowledged to be a literary masterpiece and was an instant bestseller. Sartre’s newfound prominence on the French scene was further amplified when, in October 1964, he won and refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. And yet, as great as was his prestige and his fame, his philosophical influence among young people was seriously waning. Sartre was something of an anathema to the new philosophical generation. It was, after all, Roland Barthes who had provided the most serious modern theoretical opposition to Sartre’s notion of engaged literature (in
Writing Degree Zero
), arguing that literary form took precedence over the
explicit content of a book in defining its engagement with history. Similarly, Claude Lévi-Strauss concluded
La Pensée sauvage
(
The Savage Mind
), from 1962, with a chapterlong diatribe against Sartre, charging that Sartre, with his emphasis on conscience, was “a captive of his Cogito” (Descartes’s assertion “I think, therefore I am”) and that “in Sartre’s system, history plays exactly the role of a myth.”
⁵⁵
For the younger generation of intellectuals, the ones who were immersed in structuralism and linguistic theory, Sartre was intellectually passé.

This was not so, however, for Godard, who, in the spate of interviews that he gave in the wake of
A Married Woman
, offered even more, even lengthier, references to Sartre than he had done before. Godard began his 1965 television discussion with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze by defining his entire filmmaking career, in particular his rapid and voluminous work, in terms of Sartre’s 1957 essay on Tintoretto, “The Captive of Venice.” In his interview with Guégan and Pétris in
Les Lettres françaises
, in November 1964, he cited Sartre as the prime reference and role model for his own efforts to unify his life and his work.

What an artist creates is inseparable from his life, from life in general. What makes the difference between Sartre and [author André] Maurois isn’t so much that one of them writes better or worse French, or things like that. It’s that one of them doesn’t separate life from literature, and the other one does.
⁵⁶

As early as 1962, Godard had told interviewers from
Cahiers du cinéma
,“Shooting and not shooting, for me, are not two different lives. Filming should be a part of life and it should be a natural and normal thing.”
⁵⁷
The theme of the inseparability of life and art had been Godard’s since the time he began to think about the cinema, and had been an essential idea of his practice of cinema, from
Breathless
onward. Now, however, in 1964, Godard suddenly sought to weigh the two against each other. This is exactly what Sartre had done in his sole, signal interview regarding
Words:
“What I was missing was the sense of reality. I have changed since then. I have had a slow apprenticeship in the real.”
⁵⁸
For Godard, as for Sartre, the comparison was, for the most part, unfavorable to art. In late 1964, Godard said:

I knew nothing of life, and it’s the cinema that made me discover life… with people, men, women, houses, cars, work, workers. I discovered it as if I were in Plato’s cave and then there was a little window in it and a film being projected. So one day I said: “Look, there is life; so I’m going to do cinema too in order to discover life.” Now, I have the impression of having passed to the other side of the window, and to be looking and filming behind the screen. At the time of
Breathless
, I had the sense, basically, of being in front of the screen, and now I have the sense of being behind it, of seeing life more head-on.
⁵⁹