Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (75 page)

They organized
Ici et ailleurs
around the “and” of the film’s title, the thing that mediates between France and Palestine, between French people and Palestinians. Godard and Miéville considered that mediating thing, that medium, to be the cinema; but in their film, they suggest that the relevant medium for ordinary French people was not cinema but television.

The Palestinian footage—of guerrillas training and talking strategy in the brush, speechmaking, chanting, a little girl’s furious declamation of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, children in military formation learning martial arts, gunmen firing rounds at unseen targets—is revolutionary boilerplate, heavy with the weight of obligation, and is also aesthetically meager, as if filmed without enthusiasm. Godard suggests as much on the sound track of
Ici et ailleurs
.

He and Miéville added to the material an array of supplemental 16mm footage, largely of three sorts. One was the “here”—a French family (a mother, a father, and their two young daughters), filmed from the point of view of the television set on which they view the kind of images from “there” that Godard and Gorin had brought back from the Middle East; another was symbolic material, including wooden letters spelling out the “ET” of the title and extras holding photographs up to a video camera; the third was analytical—a videotaped series of photographs from newspapers and magazines, which Godard then deconstructed with such editing effects as super-impositions, wipes, fades, and text graphics.

The resulting video collages reveal Godard’s point of view on the media politics of the Palestinian struggle. Through these video techniques he expresses the film’s principal historical idea: that, in a relay from Lenin to Hitler to Israel to Palestine, each element is derived from that which preceded it. Thus Hitler is a reaction to communism, Israel a result of the Holocaust, and Palestinian sufferings a rebounded result of the Holocaust. The principle is illustrated by the pairing of images of dead Palestinian fighters with a sound track of a cantorial voice intoning the words “Auschwitz, Maidanek, Treblinka.” (Indeed, Godard told an audience in 1977 that he and Miéville “use the sound of Hitler” in
Ici et ailleurs
“to show what’s going on in Israel.”)
¹⁸

In his interview with Nourdine Saïl, Godard maintained that he could no longer “sit at a table and say, ‘The Vietnamese were right to do this, they did what had to be done. The Palestinians are right.’”Yet in the film that is exactly what Godard and Miéville did. The self-critical motive that Godard asserted as the basis for
Ici et ailleurs
nonetheless resulted in a work of doctrinaire exhortation.
Ici et ailleurs
, despite its critique of the original footage for its dubious relation to its target audience, expresses the same unquestioned advocacy of the Palestinian cause and hostility to Israel that motivated the original shoot. For instance, in voice-over, Miéville criticizes the Palestinian guerrillas who took hostage and killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich—not for their actions but for their tactics: rather than demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, she said, they should have demanded that the television networks broadcasting the games transmit during each championship finale an image of Black September, and should have killed the hostages only if that demand was not met. Her 1974 words were no less tendentious than Godard and Gorin’s 1970 images.

Nonetheless,
Ici et ailleurs
departs significantly from the original hortatory venture in one significant regard: it dramatizes the personal relationship on the basis of which the film was made, that of Godard and Miéville. The film is a sharp and political lovers’ dialogue: Godard speaks at length on the sound track to apologize for having shot the original footage in the Middle East without regard to the reality of the participants and the audience, and Miéville intervenes midway through to debate with him both his earlier approach to the subject and his attempt to make good on it now. In this regard, the film is something of a return for Godard, in its explicit enactment of his off-camera relationship with Miéville. And, unlike his films of the 1960s, here both he and his partner speak their own words in their own voices rather than through the symbolic mediation of fictional characters.

As an awkward but inventive cinematic expression of philosophical and historical ideas, the film explores fundamental problems of television, of the way things are watched at home, and of the social and psychological significance of the family context. In general, it establishes the notion of the medium as mediating between two distant and remote realities. In
Ici et ailleurs
, Godard and Miéville were aware that they were working for television (even if television had not commissioned the film)—that television had taken over for the cinema as the principal mode of audiovisual communication and for the press as the prime source of information. As a first document of Godard and Miéville speaking together in the first person and representing their personal and artistic relationship, the film is an important step in
Godard’s artistic reconstruction. As a political film, it is a work of propaganda, not inquiry.

I
CI ET AILLEURS
was, however, shown in cinemas. Its first screenings, at small festivals, were unexceptional, but its commercial release, on September 15, 1976, was eventful. A militant Zionist group called Talion (An Eye for an Eye) planted a bomb in one of the two Paris theaters where it was showing. The bomb did not go off, but the theater owner canceled the booking. The other theater where it was being shown belonged to Godard’s former assistant, Marin Karmitz, who had become a distributor and exhibitor of political films. Karmitz steadfastly kept the film playing and organized a public discussion with Godard on September 20. On the evening of October 12, a showing was interrupted by members of the same Zionist group, who broke a window, released mice in the theater, and left behind a gas canister with Hebrew printing on it.
¹⁹
Again, Karmitz resolutely kept the film on view.

Louis Marcorelles, writing in
Le Monde
, praised Godard’s “very dense reflection on the play of information, on the faking of information, on the lies of information,” but avoided mention of the film’s political content. In
Libération
, Ali Akika, who had codirected a film about the Palestinian cause, enthusiastically endorsed Godard and Miéville’s views. Writing in
Le Quotidien de Paris
, Henry Chapier called the film a “cry of hatred” and a moral atrocity: “an attack by bomb is the same as an attack by film.”
²⁰

Godard, for his part, expressed indignation and a remarkable egotism as he denied that the film could have been considered in any way harmful to Israel and the well-being of Jews. He failed to see the content and the significance of the images that he had filmed: his immersion in video equipment and theory had brought him unwittingly back to the sort of unworldly aestheticism with which he had charged himself and the rest of the New Wave. Now, Godard was in thrall not to the myths and forms of the American cinema, but to advanced video editing techniques. Although he believed that he was learning to think in images rather than in words, his theoretical eye did not see clearly the actual content of these images. This failure would recur in several of the works that followed in the mid-1970s, and would be most apparent in works where his use of video technology was at its most sophisticated.

I
N NOVEMBER 1974
, the producer Georges de Beauregard went to Grenoble to visit Godard and satisfy his curiosity about the filmmaker’s life there. Beauregard had produced few films since 1968. Now he suggested to Godard the one project that seemed to be surefire for both of them: a remake of
Breathless
(though not with the same actors). Godard accepted. As with the
original, Beauregard raised the money from the distributor René Pignières (who had financed the original
Breathless
) and Pignières’s associate, Gérard Beytout. Predictably, however, Godard had no actual interest in filming a re-make .

In March 1975, Godard said as much when he broke his silence in the French press to discuss this new venture: “To the contrary of what has been announced, the film will not be called
Breathless Number Two
but rather
Number Two (Breathless)
. I am not doing a remake, but I am posing a reflection on the basis of
Breathless
.”
²¹
There were only two things he was sure would remain from the earlier film: Beauregard’s participation and the budget (600,000 francs; $120,000). But the budget was not exactly the same: “The originality consists in saying that the cost of living has increased by a factor of four, but we are making a film with… the same budget.” In other words, due to inflation, the budget was worth only one-fourth of its 1959 value—and this fact was what Godard called the actual subject of the film.

Godard spent much of the money on the purchase of additional equipment, and put some of it into the completion of
Ici et ailleurs
. It was only after finishing
Ici et ailleurs
, in the spring of 1975, that Godard and Miéville turned to
Numéro Deux
and fulfilled the commission.

Numéro Deux
is a film, but only in the most literal sense: almost every frame of the movie has one or more video monitors in it. The movie begins and ends in a video studio in which Godard is working alone; the rest of the “action” takes place on two monitors in a dark space. Thus the viewer is watching a movie in which he is either watching television, or watching television being made. As in
Ici et ailleurs
, this is the real story of
Numéro Deux:
a family awaits the images of a remake of
Breathless
, while a director is commissioned to provide them. Between the opening and closing shots, of Godard himself, a representative family—two parents, two grandparents, two young children—appears, for the most part, on other video monitors. In an interview at the time of its release, Godard said that it was an “ethnological film” that could be called “The Sexual Economy of the Inhabitants of Lower Grenoble.”
²²

Three generations of inhabitants of “Lower Grenoble”—a young couple, the man working in a modest job in a local television studio, the woman home with the two young children (a boy and a girl), one grandmother, and one grandfather—express, in long monologues and dialogue, their frustrations with each other and with society. The couple’s sexual problems are related to their problems with work or the lack of it; the grandfather is lost in tall political tales of erstwhile activism, the grandmother weighed down by her years of domestic suffering.

And where is
Breathless
in all this? The two children sit at the breakfast table and recite uncomprehendingly to each other a hackneyed pulp fiction story of violence and betrayal. Thus Godard disposes of his decades of devotion to Hollywood genres. Godard would no longer tell the story of
Breathless
, but he tried to tell the story of where such a story comes from.
Numéro Deux
would be the first in a new kind of film about the “sexual economy” within the family, about the stories that are told to compensate for unex-pressed needs: in this meta-fiction Godard would attempt to conceive—and to tell—the kind of story that would reflect the undistorted reality of those unsatisfied desires.

Desire is presented literally in
Numéro Deux
, which is sexually explicit in word and in image. The old man delivers his monologue—about his adventures as a veteran Communist international militant—while seated at a table, naked from the waist down (“Instead of watching movies, I watch my prick”). The old woman recites a text from Germaine Greer about the servitude of women as she, naked, washes herself in a bathtub. The daughter takes a bath with her mother and asks about her own body, “Is that the hole where memory comes out?” The mother is seen naked while doing housework, speaking about weeks of constipation, explaining it as an inability to express herself verbally: “It comes in one end but does not go out the other.”

The film’s sexual images are, to say the least, unarousing, but they are disturbingly manipulative, particularly in their use of children, as with the girl in the bath, her genitals exposed. Elsewhere, the two children are brought into their parents’ bedroom to observe a lesson in love, as the naked parents fondle each other and describe their genitals as lips and a mouth that engage in a conversation of love. To the extent that the film comprises a story, one of its turns involves the little girl accidentally espying her parents having anal sex, an image of which is shown, with the little girl superimposed in closeup. The implications of bringing two such images together in a single frame go past the trauma of the primal scene; the sequence becomes almost a surrealist vision of dangerous sexual suggestiveness.

Miéville is credited as the film’s producer, but Godard considered the title intentionally ambiguous. Godard explained in an interview, “This film was produced by Anne-Marie and by me. She worked on it as a technician, but she also ‘produced’ the film, in the sense of ‘producing crude oil.’”
²³
In other words, Godard drew much of the dialogue from his life with Miéville. He further explained that Miéville was “at the same time the earth and an oil well” and that he himself was “a refinery.” But in
Numéro Deux
, Godard did not do much refining: he presents his raw material in a fairly raw and undeveloped way.
Numéro Deux
has the unpleasant aspect of a medical document,
a revelation of sordid woes that reduced such extraordinary people as himself and Miéville to clinical cases.