Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (56 page)

The project had originated with Bernier, who had become friendly with Ben Barka in the mid-1950s while working as a radio journalist in Morocco and who had later been imprisoned in France for aiding the Algerian struggle for independence. Bernier had brought Franju into the picture through a mutual acquaintance, Georges Figon, a singular character of the French underworld, who had promised to produce
Basta!
²⁸

Born in 1926, Figon was the son of a prominent French government official. He had been a smart but troubled adolescent whose first attempts at crime resulted in three years in a mental hospital. In the 1950s, he was arrested for bank robbery and attempted murder; at trial, he unleashed an insolent tirade, declaring himself to be “a son of the bourgeoisie who had straightened himself out.”
²⁹
Upon his release from prison in 1962, he frequented the artistic cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés, was interviewed by Duras, consulted on a TV film on prison life, tried to start a magazine, wrote for Sartre’s
Les Temps Modernes
, and harbored dreams of producing films.

Figon also harbored dreams of easy money (and openly contemplated extorting it by planting bombs). When word of his indirect connection to Ben Barka (via Bernier) circulated in the underworld, a Moroccan secret agent contacted Figon and recruited him for a scheme intended to lead to the kidnapping. Figon was playing it both ways: on the one hand, he used his involvement as producer of
Basta!
to set Ben Barka up;
³⁰
on the other, Figon really wanted to make films. If Ben Barka should become permanently unavailable to make
Basta!
, Figon had other projects to propose to Franju.

In November 1965, Figon, identified as a conspirator in Ben Barka’s disappearance, also vanished (although he had been reported traveling to Belgium to visit his girlfriend). However, Figon soon made a dramatic reappearance on the public stage—not in person but through the media—with a long interview published in the January 10, 1966, issue of
L’Express
, in which he detailed his version of Ben Barka’s kidnapping and death.
³¹

A warrant for Figon’s arrest was issued immediately. On January 17, when the police attempted to enter the Right Bank apartment where Figon was hiding, he was found dead. His death was officially deemed a suicide.
³²
A tape recording was found among his affairs, and it was played in court. It featured Figon’s accounts of his film scripts, one concerning an extortionist bomber and his stewardess girlfriend, and another described as the story of “a clandestine network at the heart of an imaginary country in revolution.”
³³

When the Ben Barka affair took form for Godard, it was centered on Figon, an outsider and frustrated filmmaker whose situation Godard assimilated to his own. In late January, after Figon’s death, the name of his girlfriend, the actress Anne-Marie Coffinet, was revealed to the press, and Godard recognized her as someone he had known from the cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés in the 1950s. It was this personal association, Godard said, that prompted him to imagine the story of a woman who goes in search of the wanted Figon. By refashoning Westlake’s novel into a
film about the Ben Barka affair, Godard produced another allegory of himself:

I imagined that Figon had not died, that he had taken refuge in the provinces, that he had written to his girlfriend to join him. She goes to the address where they had planned to meet, but when she gets there, she finds that he is dead… Instead of “Figon,” my character is named “Politzer”… In the name of love, she plays detective. Then she gets tangled in a network of police and criminals and ends up wanting to write an article on the affair.
³⁴

Georges Politzer was a Marxist philosopher active in the wartime resistance who was arrested and executed by the Gestapo. In
Made in USA
, the character called Richard Politzer, like Figon, leaves behind an audiotape. Paula Nelson (played by Anna Karina), a journalist who left
L’Express
because she “had come to equate advertising with fascism,” is led to a copy of the tape. On it, she hears Politzer’s voice intoning a series of elaborately doctrinaire Marxist incantations (taken from contemporary speeches and articles by leftist writers and politicians). The aggressively dogmatic voice is that of Godard, who thus effected a direct identification of the Figon character, whom Anna Karina is desperately seeking beyond the grave, with himself.

T
HE POLITICAL SUBSTANCE
and historical antecedents of
Made in USA
merged with Godard’s dominant story, the allegory of his romantic trials with Anna Karina. He made sure this was clear from the start: the first time she is seen in the film is in close-up, lying on a bed in a hotel room where she and Politzer are supposed to meet, with a detective novel splayed open near her face—
Adieu la vie, adieu l’amour
(Farewell Life, Farewell Love)—as she awakens and soliloquizes: “Happiness, for example. Whenever he wanted something, I wanted it too. Or fame, for him.” Moments later, when a sinister character, “Mr. Typhus,”
³⁵
arrives instead of Politzer, her character, Paula, figures out that Politzer is dead, and explains to Typhus: “We were hardly seeing each other anymore. I don’t even know whether I still love him, but I owed him something because of what was between us.” This line, which Godard wrote for Paula to explain what she is doing in the hotel, also sounded like Karina’s explanation for what she is doing in the film.

The cartoonishly tangled intrigue concerns a conspiracy to eliminate certain political enemies and freethinkers, including Politzer—and the agents of that conspiracy are characters named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara (played by the two young
Cahiers
critics, Godet and Biesse). The “sociological” or political aspect of the film noir allusion is contained mainly in Godard’s idea itself, namely, that the structure of the American film noir is
itself political, a Trojan horse for a conspiracy. The American influence seen in the fictitious France of
Made in USA
is not that of cultural epiphenomena such as Coca-Cola or the Beatles, but the crucial one of political violence. In effect, Godard’s vision of a France infiltrated by Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara and terrorized by a secret police force suggests that both the Ben Barka affair and its elaborate cover-up were products of the Cold War, were “made in USA.”

The film’s dénouement reinforces the allegorical effect with rare psychodramatic cruelty. It involves Paula/Anna’s relationship with a writer, one named David Goodis, no less—the American author of grim, scathing crime novels (including
Down There
, from which François Truffaut had adapted
Shoot the Piano Player
). In his synopsis, Godard had described the actor playing the role, Yves Afonso, as “Belmondo’s double,” and in the film the character wears a striped bathrobe like the one Belmondo wears in
Breathless;
he sits in bed before a small manual typewriter, pecking out what he calls “The Unfinished Novel.”

At the climax of the action, the head of the secret police, a character named Paul Widmark (played by László Szabó) holds Paula at gunpoint and announces that he will shoot her, but Goodis sneaks up behind Widmark and guns him down first. Paula thanks Goodis for saving her life; the writer takes out his notebook and, reciting some phrases and jotting them down, thanks her for helping him to finish his novel. “No, David,” she responds, “you must prepare to die. The truth must not be known. If you finish your novel, everyone will know it, because poetry equals truth.” Paula shoots David, who, stunned, is still able to cry, “Oh Paula, you have robbed me of my youth.” Sobbing, Paula / Anna is seen saying, with almost incoherent regret, “Oh, David, love, love, to love truly, sadness,” while Godard, suggesting that the words are foreign to Karina, removes all from the sound track but
“Oh, David”
and
“sadness.”
(Szabó later recalled that Karina, as she played this scene, was weeping for real).
³⁶

This exercise in torment and condemnation was Karina’s farewell to Godard as he had constructed it, forcing her to bear responsibility, on-screen, for destroying him. Godard tied
Made in USA
together with a circular structure of hyperbolic accusations: Anna Karina goes in search of him, but he has already been killed; then she finds him again to kill him again. Since he is (in his view) a poet who will tell the truth about her, she has to kill him off.

Godard filmed
Made in USA
with an indifferent and blank flatness. The only images that Godard invested with energy in
Made in USA
are those of Anna Karina. The film’s visual raison d’être is the extraordinary number and duration of close-ups of Karina. Many long scenes of dialogue are shot in extreme close-ups of her both speaking and listening. The many shots of
Karina, with their wide variety of mood—each a different pose, angle, expression—serve as a catalogue of reminiscences. These shots are less indicative of the character Paula Nelson leading her inquiry than of Anna Karina as an obsessional apparition from the past. The close-ups are the most expressive ones in color that Godard had made to date, and they are signifiers of the act of remembering. With them, the film appears to exist for the simplest of purposes, fulfilling the primal function of portraiture: to see again the face of a person who is no longer present.

O
N AUGUST 29
, at a month’s remove from the hectic shoot of
Made in USA
, Godard filmed an epilogue that differed drastically in mood, substance, and appearance. Visually, it provides the film’s only scene of landscape and light, of open space and open vistas, of a third dimension seen in depth. In content, it replaces paranoid speculation with practical politics. It features Paula escaping from the scene of the crimes and hitching a ride with an old acquaintance, the journalist Philippe Labro, playing himself.

After a close-up of a book cover that reads
Gauche année zéro
(Left, Year Zero), there follows a single long take of the pair, driver and passenger, filmed through the windshield of the car, heading down a highway in early morning, for a full two minutes and forty-five seconds. The pair engage in a rhetorical, quasi-literary dialogue about politics, which Godard treated as a platonically passionate encounter, accompanied on the sound track by a rhapsodic passage from a Schumann symphony. Labro finds Paula in a somber mood because of the failures of the left and successes of the right, and attempts to console her: “The left and the right are the same. One cannot change them. The right, because it is idiotic and brimming with nastiness; and the left because it is sentimental. Besides, right and left, it’s a completely outdated question. That’s not at all the way to pose the problem.”

Karina responds with an open question, which ends the film:“Then how?”

Made in USA
shows Godard to have been in a political crisis that was at the same time a cinematic crisis; he had no idea what to do about the things made in USA, whether the Gaullist regime or the cinema. The most politically significant moment in the film was also the simplest, most human, and most realistic. It was a scene of a calm, sincere conversation such as Godard and Labro (who had reported from the set of
Masculine Feminine
and whom Godard met occasionally thereafter) might have had on exactly these themes—and it ended with a question that Godard would seek to answer, practically, in film and in life.

P
OLITICS DOMINATED THE
public response to the film.
Made in USA
was released on January 27, 1967, and received with a variety of critical cheers.
Claude Mauriac in
Le Figaro littéraire
wondered whether in Godard, might we “finally have an artist, a great artist, of the left?”
³⁷
In
Les Lettres françaises
, Georges Sadoul compared the film to Picasso’s
Guernica
,
³⁸
and Michel Capdenac went so far as to claim that the film “offers the cinema after
Pierrot le fou
what
Finnegans Wake
gave to the novel after
Ulysses
.”
³⁹

Despite such hyperbolic praise, Godard felt that the film had been decisively rejected: “[The] first film that didn’t succeed, at least in the little audience that I had formed, was
Made in USA
.”
⁴⁰
Specifically, the film, as Sadoul reported, was “very badly received by a certain leftist audience when it was shown for the anniversary gala of
Le Nouvel Observateur
.”
⁴¹
This audience was the young left that had gathered at the publication, and it included the new generation at
Cahiers du cinéma
, where the response was equally reserved. Bernardo Bertolucci, writing in
Cahiers
, called
Made in USA
“a film that betrays politics, that is paralyzed in its great liberty by ideological conformism.”
⁴²

Responding in an interview in
Le Monde
, Godard asserted that the film embodied his progressive politics in a progressive form, and reproached “the elegant left” for being insensitive to it:

In
Made in USA
, there is a title card where one can read the cover of a book: Left, Year Zero. The last time that this card is used, one hears the beginning of a movement from Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. Unless one is blind or deaf, it is impossible not to understand that this shot, that is, the mixture of an image and a sound, represents a movement of hope. One can deem it false, ridiculous, childish, provocative, but it is what it is, like a scientific object.