Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (65 page)

Scala spoke with John Lennon and with the Rolling Stones’s agent; both were interested in working with Godard. Scala advised him to choose the Stones, who, unlike the Beatles, had not yet appeared in a film.
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Godard preferred the Beatles and met with Lennon in London, offering him at the same time the lead role in another project—a film about the assassination of Trotsky, from a script by Robert Benton and David Newman—but Lennon was not interested. While in London, Godard and Wiazemsky spoke more frequently with Paul McCartney, who was ready to work with Godard, but now Lennon refused to let the Beatles be filmed in the recording studio.
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The Stones, however, agreed to have Godard film them in a London studio, but the project’s producers, Collard and her partners, Iain Quarrier and Michael Pearson, got nervous: consistent with his view of revolutionary cinema as amateur cinema, Godard planned to shoot with 8mm home-movie
equipment. The producers talked Godard out of it; Godard, for his part, prepared to go to London in May to film the Rolling Stones.

But events would intervene. As
La Chinoise
had shown, the engine of radical political change in France was its student population, and in early 1968, protests persisted in Paris and throughout France. Universities were on edge, especially the campus at Nanterre.
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In January 1968, student protesters attacked busloads of policemen and chased them away from the school grounds. In Paris, on the night of March 17—18, two American banks and the offices of TWA were attacked, as was American Express on March 19. A protester from Nanterre, Xavier Langlade, was arrested, an event that led to a new round of demonstrations at the university. On March 22, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most prominent of Nanterre’s left-wing anarchists, led a takeover of the Nanterre administration building,
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which he declared the founding act of the “Movement of March 22,” named in tribute to Fidel Castro’s Movement of July 26.

Student anarchists now took control of Nanterre’s classrooms, disrupting lectures at will. The newsletter of the Movement of March 22 contained an authentic recipe for making Molotov cocktails. Several days later, the dean of Nanterre, Pierre Grappin, told Minister of Education Alain Peyrefitte, “We have gone far beyond the stage of protest. We have reached the stage of pre-revolution.”
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The dean added that many of the professors were siding with the student militants, whose goals were nothing less than utopian: they demanded a reorganization of academic life for the purpose of producing “revolutionaries” and a change in the political order to align with the plans of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, whose names they chanted with enthusiasm.

In Nanterre and in Paris, Cohn-Bendit’s allies physically assaulted right-wing student groups, which counterattacked. Protests and poster-pasting were occasions for fistfights, ambushes, and serious bloodshed. Parisian high school students organized their own coordinated revolutionary annex, the Comités d’action lycéens, or CAL (High School Students’ Action Committees); as one of their leaders, Romain Goupil (who would later work closely with Godard as an assistant), recalled: “There was an unbelievable political ferment; those who didn’t see anything coming were really very cut off from reality. We considered ourselves the heirs to 1789, the Commune, 1917: we carried the torch.”
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The hard-line intellectual Maoists of the Ecole normale supérieure were dubious of the ideologically vague, temperamentally libertarian, joyfully nihilistic anarchists of Nanterre, but recognized their usefulness, their ability to attract large numbers of committed, militant, and fearless protesters on short notice, as well as their effective control over their university.

The Maoists saw the anarchists as an important link between theory and practice and hoped eventually to infuse the fervent freethinkers with a strong dose of theory. On April 28, Maoists and anarchists together destroyed an exhibit on the rue de Rennes that presented a favorable view of the South Vietnamese government. Cohn-Bendit answered a journalist’s question regarding the violence: “We demand freedom of expression in the school but we deny it to the partisans of the Americans. Nobody would allow a meeting on the theme, ‘Hitler was right to massacre six million Jews.’ Why tolerate a pro-American meeting, organized by fascists on an entirely similar theme?”
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On May 2, reports of a right-wing counterattack on a two-day “anti-imperialist” teach-in at Nanterre brought out Robert Linhart and his Maoist shock troops, who had studied the tactics and techniques of the Red Guards. The police turned up and closed down the meetings. Word got around that Cohn-Bendit, together with other student leaders, was threatened with expulsion and would have to appear before a university tribunal at the Sorbonne the following week. In anticipation of massive protests, the dean of Nanterre suspended all classes until further notice and closed the university.

On May 3, students from Nanterre took the fight to the heart of Paris, and together with students from the city’s universities occupied the Sorbonne. Shortly before 5:00 pm, busloads of police came to dislodge them. Cohn-Bendit later recalled,

The entry of the police into the university sufficed to outrage thousands of students. Although all the militants were imprisoned, the student rebellion began spontaneously. The police were surprised by the aggression and mobility of the protesters. It took them several hours to restore order.

   During the weekend, several protesters were sentenced to prison. Solidarity with the imprisoned was a motive as strong as liberating the Sorbonne in the expansion of the movement.
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For several hours, students and police fought in the streets. Officers not only blocked streets with tear gas grenades but indiscriminately beat passersby who were in their path. Student organizations called for a general strike. On May 6, while Cohn-Bendit and others were attending their disciplinary hearings, an even more violent protest began. Five thousand students headed toward the Sorbonne, which was blocked by police. Ten thousand students filled the streets of nearby St.-Germain-des-Prés. When the police began making arrests en masse, the violence rapidly spread. As Goupil recounted:

The [university] students, our leaders, were there from ten in the morning with their two-by-fours. We high school students said, “No, we can’t be there before 4:30, when school lets out.” That’s when things got wild. The students were loaded onto buses [by the police], and we threw rocks at the cops. To be fifteen years old and be pelting the cops and protected by the crowd, perfect bliss! The cops were dumbfounded. The student leaders too. They were in the buses and said to themselves, “Unbelievable, it’s catching on.”
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Police threw tear gas canisters into movie theaters and used water cannons to beat back crowds; students smashed and overturned cars and hurled paving stones. Police arrested people in large numbers, often beating them. One of the people in the streets that day was Godard, with a handheld camera, filming the events from atop a bench and from the street, accompanied by Wiazemsky.

The next day, May 7, thirty thousand students marched in Paris. That week, left-wing unions called for solidarity strikes. On the night of May 10, unable to dislodge the massive police presence from the Latin Quarter, students barricaded themselves in the streets with overturned cars, refrigerators, construction debris, and chopped-down trees, and enjoyed the support and assistance of many of the residents of the buildings they had blocked off. Police pressure broke the blockades; injuries and arrests numbered in the thousands, and central Paris, the next morning, resembled a desolate wartime landscape.

A
LAIN
J
OUFFROY, THE
writer whom Godard had met during the making of
Pierrot le fou
and frequented thereafter, had become increasingly engaged on the left. As the demonstrations gathered momentum, he brought together at his home Godard, the critic and filmmaker Michel Cournot, and the filmmakers Philippe Garrel, Jackie Raynal, and Patrick Deval. Jouffroy remembered:

It was May 4 or 5, right after the first demonstrations. “So, what are we going to do?” Someone said, “We must destroy the archives of the Centre du cinéma,” and Philippe Garrel said, “No—in the Center for Research, there are cameras—we must go there, take the cameras, and give them to the students.” So Godard, Garrel, Cournot, and I went there—and we went into [Center director] Pierre Schaeffer’s office and we told him to give us the cameras. “What?” We said, “The students are outside.” And Godard said, “Call the police, if you want.” Schaeffer said, “That’s blackmail!” and Godard said, “No, it’s advice.” He gave us the cameras, and Garrel and I took one. At the time, I had a convertible sports car, a Lancia that I’d bought cheaply because it had been in an accident. With me at the steering wheel, we filmed the demonstrations. We called it
Actua One
. We printed about twenty minutes. We did the editing together. Then Philippe Garrel said, “We need a commentary.” I said, “The Marquis de Sade.” I chose some political texts of de Sade. Then we showed it. Godard said, “It’s a masterpiece, I would like to have done such a thing. Look after it.” And he was right. A young man came, he said, “We need your film for a screening.” He took off with it and he never came back.
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Godard recalled
Actua One
as “the best film made about May’ 68,” and regretted that it had all been lost.
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O
N
M
AY
13, the day of a march of almost a million people denouncing the government of de Gaulle, students again occupied the Sorbonne and turned it into an ongoing seminar and festival (the “Université autonome populaire,” the People’s Autonomous University), covering walls with a proliferation of one-liners that remain, to this day, catchwords exemplifying the exuberant sense of freedom and limitless possibility the young participants felt: from “Under the paving-stones, the beach,” “Prohibiting is prohibited,” and “Don’t ever work!” to “Art is not coming back, and there’s nothing Godard can do about it.”
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(Also, one that read, “Godard: the biggest jerk of the pro-Chinese Swiss.”) On May 15, the Odéon theater was occupied and became a sort of public forum, where round-the-clock audiences were present to hear speakers from any walk of life address themes of their choice. On the same day, a Renault factory was taken over by its workers, and the next day, strikes were widespread throughout France.

Meanwhile, film technicians and professionals met at the Vaugirard film school in Paris and, on May 17, declared themselves the “Etats généraux du cinéma” (General Estates
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of Cinema). Godard attended these meetings and described them in derisive terms: “For two or three days there were meetings with several thousand people from film who had never seen each other before and never saw each other again.”
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They debated and voted on many motions of no lasting value (such as the demand that admission to movie theaters be free of charge) and on one of immediate effect: to shut down the Cannes Film Festival, which had gotten under way on May 10. The festival had already taken a one-day hiatus on May 13, in sympathy with strikers. On May 17, Truffaut, who did not participate in the protests or the Etats généraux, arrived at Cannes for a planned public conference regarding the Cinémathèque and found at his hotel a bunch of messages from Jacques Rivette in Paris. Calling back, Truffaut learned that the Etats généraux had voted to stop the festival.
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Godard himself arrived at Cannes at about 11:00
AM
on Saturday. As Truffaut later recalled, “Jean-Luc, who had just come from Paris, where he
lived through the whole affair much more closely than I had, said, ‘Let’s go into the big hall to deliberate.’ That was the Sorbonne-like part of the story. It was 11:30
AM
. We occupied the hall.”
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The festival, as Truffaut recognized, was in effect closing down anyway: Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, and Michel Cournot had withdrawn their films; Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Monica Vitti, and Terence Young resigned from the jury. Nonetheless, some debating took place onstage, with most calling for the simple and complete termination of the festival. Truffaut thought it absurd to continue the event when the rest of France, and especially Paris, was for all intents and purposes shut down. Godard, however, argued that instead of showing festival films, the forum should be used to screen militant films and documentary footage of the events taking place; otherwise, he too called for shutting the festival down. Godard was a vocal and impassioned leader of the debate, shouting,

There isn’t a single film showing the problems of workers or students today. Not one, whether by Forman, by me, by Polanski, by François, not one! We’re late! Our student comrades have set an example when they got their heads bashed in a week ago. There’s no point to showing films here… It’s a question of showing solidarity, at a week and a half’ s remove, of the cinema with the students’ and workers’ movements that are happening in France, and the only practical way to do that is to stop all screenings immediately.
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Truffaut stood beside Godard looking uneasy. He seemed to wish to be anywhere else as Godard cried with the voice of one possessed, in response to a festival defender, “I’m talking to you about solidarity with the students and the workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!”