Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (72 page)

I found myself having to maintain the fiction that the film would be made. Otherwise the insurance that was keeping Jean-Luc alive and was paying for his hospitalization would collapse. So I work like crazy on it, and I’m pleading with the stars that they maintain the illusion that the film will be done. There’s no problem with Montand, despite the fact that he’s very wary of us. Simone Signoret was afraid that we were going to make her husband look like an idiot. I was berated by her on the phone at 3:00 am. In the middle of this, Jane Fonda calls… She says, “I have decided not to work with men any more.” I tell her, “I think you should come to Paris and tell that to the man who is between life and death on a hospital bed.”

Gorin resolved the situation by confronting Fonda in person. The actress was in the south of France, where her ex-husband, Roger Vadim, lived:

I got my girlfriend’s car—I had no license—and drove to meet her. I surprised her. I told her, “At least have the guts to tell [Godard] face to face.” I was constantly arguing with her. Her people were afraid—they thought I was connected to two billion Chinese. The next day, I heard from the lawyer that she would do the film.
¹⁷¹

After coming out of the coma, Godard was in need of intensive physical therapy and was admitted to another hospital. Though his initial hospitalization was frightful, Wiazemsky remembered him being in excellent form in the second round, “with the piles of Red Books and the joking around… First of all, he was a survivor, he was fairly cheerful. Then on top of that, he played the clown a little.”
¹⁷²
Yet Godard was in terrible shape. He came to the set but was hardly able to do much work. He used a crutch and needed a catheter.

Tout va bien
was largely directed by Gorin. He had arranged for the factory set to be built as a cutaway, like the house in Jerry Lewis’s
The Ladies Man
, with all the rooms exposed. The riotous goings-on, with the boss as the buffoon, betrayed their origin in popular comedy. Gorin directed scenes that were intended to mime scenes and styles from Godard’s earlier films, such as a long tracking shot which ran the entire length of a supermarket.

The work that Godard did on the film was largely of a theoretical nature. He elaborated the idea that the two stars not in fact be the main characters, so although Fonda and Montand do get the bulk of the screen time, they were not filmed in a glamorous or glorifying way. This led to conflict. Both actors had political advisers on hand—Fonda’s from feminist circles and Montand’s from the French left—to whom they complained because they felt “disarmed” by the experience.
¹⁷³
There was talk of revolt, but Godard adroitly convinced the intermediaries of his worthy intentions. He conceived a sequence in which Montand would be filmed from behind, his head concealing half of Fonda’s face, and he initiated a long discussion onset as to whether Montand’s ear should have a light on it. Montand, upset by the perceived diminution of his role, argued and at one point raised his hand as if to strike Godard, who replied, “You wouldn’t hit a cripple!”
¹⁷⁴

Despite Godard’s separation from Wiazemsky, he wanted her to act in the film, writing three different parts for her, two of which would be dubbed. When Gorin balked, Godard proposed that she do the still photography from the set instead, but, as Wiazemsky recalled, “Anne-Marie Miéville got upset, and said, ‘My brother is a photographer, I can do the photography too.’” Miéville did the photography; Wiazemsky had a small part in one scene. “I spent the whole week doing nothing,” she recalled.
¹⁷⁵

Despite its tendentious politics and ample speechifying,
Tout va bien
nonetheless suggests, in a quasi-documentary way, a new world of relations between men and women: Jane Fonda’s feminist discourse in the film presages a coming world of politics that has little to do with strikes and marches, with bourgeois bosses and the proletariat.
Tout va bien
suggests a requiem for years of a one-dimensional engagement that it couldn’t entirely shake off.

After completing
Tout va bien
, Godard and Gorin made a 16mm film to accompany it at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1972 called
Letter
to Jane
, a fifty-two-minute-long analysis of a still photograph of Jane Fonda in Hanoi, published in
L’Express
on July 31, 1972. This film features Godard and Gorin talking to each other on the sound track about the picture. Their insistent, incantatory analysis, centered on Fonda appearing as the star of a political image in lieu of allowing her North Vietnamese interlocutors to take the lead role, and comparing her image to others, including Richard Nixon’s, is a clever and enlightening work of journalistic semiology. In the literal sense, the film is documentary in its relentless investigation of the political psychology implicit in a single image. Yet Godard and Gorin approach it as an immediate experience, not through a scrim of doctrine; in speaking about the image, they speak in their own voices, without the deflecting burlesque of
Vladimir and Rosa
. The work is personal, sincere, and spontaneous; the direct discourse suggests a will to restore their personal presence to their films. The effect is that of a verbal jam session; for all of its analytical intensity,
Letter to Jane
marked a return to aesthetics. The exchange also points to its origins in the kind of vigorous discussion Godard and Gorin had been sharing privately for half a decade. It is the closest thing to a documentary of their behind-the-scenes laboratory work.

Again, Godard and Gorin undertook an American university tour to raise some cash; it was less festive than Godard’s first, in 1968, less contentious than the one with Gorin in 1970. They planned to come back again in the spring of 1973, but by then, their relationship had undergone a change.

After
Tout va bien
, Gorin was ready to make a film on his own. Godard implored him to remain in their partnership, but Gorin was desperate for his own well-deserved identity. Gorin recalled bitterly a derisive review of
Tout va bien
in the satirical
Charlie-Hebdo
that was just a few words: “Quite a guy, this Gorin”—implying that the younger man had managed to hijack Godard’s fame to generate his own. When
Le Monde
wanted to interview Godard and Gorin upon the release of
Tout va bien
, Godard, in an act of support for Gorin, stipulated that they be interviewed separately and that the two interviews be exactly the same length. Godard measured the columns to make sure of it.
¹⁷⁶
In October 1972, while in New York to show
Tout va bien
and
Letter to Jane
, Gorin told an interviewer, “Now I know what it’s like to be a woman. I am the Yoko Ono of the cinema.”
¹⁷⁷

But Gorin’s reputation as the artist responsible for coming between Jean-Luc Godard and the cinema was undeserved. Though Gorin and Godard went on to do better, greater, and more important work separately, their partnership was, in effect, the crucible from which that subsequent work arose.

The crucial ideas they explored were hardly in evidence in the films Godard and Gorin actually made together, but they shaped Godard’s work for decades to come. When Godard fled the movie industry in 1967, he was
escaping not just a set of narrative conventions or even his own public image; he was also fleeing the entrenched industrial schema of movie production. If Godard’s post-1968 ideological straitjacket inhibited his actual filmmaking, the underlying ideas behind the ideology—the notion of workers’ control of the means of production to reduce the emotional distance between the worker and his product; the notion of collaborative work as part of a collective—provided the foundation for a new, cooperative form of film-making. It is what Godard began to realize with Gorin, and what he would bring to fruition with Anne-Marie Miéville.

Godard now began to rethink the system of production, distribution, and consumption of films from a material point of view; he would become a producer, in the Marxist rather than the Hollywood sense: he would own the means of production and apply the labor of his own hands to those tools. He turned to the fledgling technology of videotape in order to localize the entire chain of production under his own roof. Several years later, Godard explained:

I prefer to consider myself a producer, but in the sense of the Internationale: “Producers, rely on yourselves,”
¹⁷⁸
because if you count on others to produce, you are lost… And the word “producer”is especially interesting in the cinema, where it means “boss,” it doesn’t mean “worker.” The cinema has the same terms as Marxism: “production,”“distribution,”“exploitation.”
¹⁷⁹

In 1975, Godard declared, “The only original filmmaker I ever encountered in my life was Jean-Pierre Gorin, whose originality was not that he wanted to make shots like Hitchcock or Eisenstein, but that he wanted to make his mark on film together with somebody else.”
¹⁸⁰
In another interview he remarked that “just to do something I need to be more than one… the only aim of a self is to be two.”
¹⁸¹

Gorin went on to direct a film which he called
L’Ailleurs immédiat
(The Immediate Elsewhere). It was an extremely personal film, in which he starred and which took as a central subject his own sex life. The arrest on drug charges
¹⁸²
of the lead actress had a disastrous effect on the film. Gorin abandoned the project and left Paris for Morocco, Mexico, and ultimately California. He soon began work there on
Poto and Cabengo
, a documentary about twins who seemed to be speaking a private language and who, when separated in school, began to speak comprehensibly. It is an extraordinarily touching allegory for his years of work with Godard.

Gorin was the nominal administrator of his company with Godard, Tout Va assez Bien Films, and so, was financially responsible for it, although Godard and Rassam actually handled the money matters. After Gorin left France, Godard encouraged him to return to take care of the business. Gorin did not
want to return to France, and Godard arranged matters to suit himself. He removed the equipment—which had been bought with funds set aside for that purpose—to his new studio and from there to Grenoble, and left behind rent due on their joint editing room. Gorin, out of touch and officially owing the back rent on the editing room, was held to be in “fraudulent bankruptcy.”

While in California, making
Poto and Cabengo
with little money to work with and little to live on, Gorin had gotten word that
Tout va bien
was scheduled for broadcast on French television and called Godard about getting the fifty percent share of the deal to which he was entitled. Godard’s response was, first, that there was nothing left after Montand and Fonda got paid; and then, as Gorin recalled, Godard told him, “Ah, it’s always the same thing, the Jews come calling when they hear the cash register.”
¹⁸³
Gorin hung up on him. The two did not speak again for years—until
Poto and Cabengo
was completed and shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Godard saw it there and paid it fitting tribute—albeit not in public.

M
AOISM WAS A
peculiar foible of French intellectuals in the wake of the student-led revolts of 1968. Those who yielded to its allure—they were legion, and included Sartre and Philippe Sollers, as well as countless lesser figures—did so with a peculiar form of cognitive dissonance. They defended as humane and enlightened the government of Communist China even as, at home, they called for the necessity, even desirability, of a cleansing political violence exercised in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their blindness to the firsthand meaning of dictatorship was all too evident, and when, in 1973, Simon Leys, among others, began to issue reports of the brutal realities of Mao’s China, French Maoists began to grow scarce.

With any perspective, the undesirability of the utopia that French Maoists dreamed of seems self-evident; but, unlike other intellectuals, Godard suffered deeply for his engagement on its behalf. Where others simply continued their careers under a new banner, Godard had profoundly, even recklessly and enduringly, altered his way of working. Where others drew from their political enthusiasms a newfound currency, a newfound identity, or simply shed them with no ill effects, Godard suffered something like nonexistence, having risked and to some extent lost his art for his political commitment. Describing his life in that doctrinaire time, Godard later explained, “I think that in those years, I stopped doing lots of things without even realizing it: reading, going to the movies. Music must have been a forbidden pleasure but I had already listened to so much of it that I had stocked up.”
¹⁸⁴
Referring to that era in terms of Eric Rohmer’s famous description of the abstemious years of ciné-fanaticism during the 1950s, Godard said, “I would say, like Rohmer: in those years, one did not live.”
¹⁸⁵

seventeen.

RESTORATION (1973–1977)

“A film about myself”

I
N
J
ANUARY 1973, WITH NO OTHER PROJECTS BEFORE HIM
, Godard submitted to the CNC a written outline for a film, in the hope of receiving an advance on receipts.
¹
He called it
Moi je
—the same title as the recently published political memoir by the ex-rightist and ex-Communist Claude Roy.
²
In that book, Roy, born in 1915, studied his personal development through his political engagements; he had been a right-wing anarchist in the 1930s before signing up with the Communist Party during wartime and leaving it after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Roy’s political path was, with several decades’ head start, similar to Godard’s, and Godard sought to accomplish in his cinematic
Moi je
a political self-investigation similar to Roy’s in literature. In his proposal, he made clear his intention of shooting his project on videotape, and sought at length to justify doing so. Indeed, rather than an outline of an autobiography, the application was largely an essay on the need to use video technology to create a new kind of cinema.