Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (87 page)

Conflict dominated the shoot even before it began. After months of preparatory work with Jean-Luc Bideau, who was to play the factory owner, Godard fired him—over the telephone—and replaced him with Michel Piccoli. Marin Karmitz was also treated in a way that he found “very aggressive,” and he quit the film, leaving its production to Alain Sarde.
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I
N
P
ASSION
, as it was shot, Jerzy is a Polish film director trying to make a film in a studio in a small roadside town in Switzerland. The production is going badly. Although he has a large crew and an army of extras working on setting up scenes—
tableaux vivants
of classic paintings—he films very little and merely erects and dismantles sets, stages and restages
tableaux
, and rides the crane that holds a heavy television camera, but hardly shoots at all.

Isabelle, a worker in a small nearby factory, is trying to organize a strike. Having been fired for her militancy, she goes to the factory to demand that the boss, Michel (Piccoli), reinstate her. Following him to the motel that Hanna (Schygulla), his wife, owns, Isabelle finds the film crew gathered there, and meets Jerzy. They become lovers.

Meanwhile, Hanna—who was one of Michel’s former employees at the factory—meets the members of the crew and becomes interested in Jerzy, who persuades her to do a screen test with him. The videotape of her audition is the one that Godard had made prior to filming, of Schygulla singing while Radziwilowicz guides her head with his hands. The scene in which they watch the audition tape together is the emotional center of the film, the critical moment where work and love intersect.

Passion
concludes with Jerzy’s film unfinished. He decides that he needs to return to Poland; both women, as well as a third woman from the hotel, accompany him. Life takes precedence over the film, but the conclusion is nonetheless calmly confident: Jerzy’s departure does not suggest his artistic impotence, despair, or collapse, but rather, his hope that a more appropriate film will arise from his new relationships, his departure, his new journey, and his imminent homecoming.

Just as the ending of
Sauve qui peut
refers to the ending of Truffaut’s
The Man Who Loved Women
, so the ending of
Passion
alludes to that of Truffaut’s
Day for Night
, in which the members of the film crew hitch rides to leave the set at the end of the shoot. For Truffaut, the film was finished and the crew returns to life; for Godard, the film is unfinished and cannot be finished until Jerzy returns to life—to home, to Poland, where he has a family—and incorporates his life into the film.

T
HE ENDING OF
Passion
, in which Jerzy abandons the “superproduction” and the studio enclosure, suggests Godard’s own dissatisfaction with his production of the film. His frustrations with the producers, with money problems, with the apparatus of the large crew, resembled Jerzy’s; yet Godard also bore the small businessman’s practical burdens, akin to Michel’s. Jerzy’s film studio, supposedly located in the same Swiss border town as the motel and the factory, was in fact a film studio in the suburbs of Paris. As a result, Godard could not shoot the story sequentially, and had to engage in the sort of narrative engineering that had always been inimical to him: he had to film in Switzerland with an eye toward the later studio shoot, which in turn had to cohere with what had already been completed.

Coutard found Godard “more indecisive” than before: “He no longer had the certainty he had before that things should be made in this or that way… It is a film that he could have made in six weeks and he needed four months.”
²⁵
Huppert was aware of Godard’s unhappiness and uncertainty with his production of
Passion
, and recognized that Godard found the shoot “painful”: “The film was very complicated for him, and he held us quite responsible for his difficulties.”
²⁶

When
Passion
was shown at Cannes on May 25, 1982—and went into
commercial release the next day—the critic for
Le Monde
, Louis Marcorelles, called it “the profoundly discouraging film of a solitary man, jealously closed in on himself, whom unconditional praise risks pressing further ahead into his solitude.”
²⁷
Despite copious and favorable attention from Godard’s familiar outlets,
Cahiers du cinéma
and
Libération
, the film did poorly in relation to its high budget and to the expectations aroused by its stars. Shortly after its release, Godard, speaking on television, blamed the cast and crew for its failure, ascribing it to their detachment while it was being made: “Since my film isn’t doing well, I sometimes say to myself, ‘Nobody talked to me about it, about this film’… I asked people: ‘This one or that one?’ Silence. ‘It’s up to you to decide, Jean-Luc.’”
²⁸

Godard wanted his cast and crew to offer their views and help him make decisions. But in this film, the decisions that he was making were atypical for them: his quandaries concerned the substance of the film, Delacroix and Dvořàk, Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
and Mozart’s Requiem. He thought that even those who had no particular artistic education could offer useful ideas on such subjects, if only they would speak thoughtfully and honestly—indeed, if only they would speak.

His wishes were not ridiculous, harsh, unreasonable, or for that matter insincere, but they were unusual, and the people who worked with him hesitated to voice judgments on such matters in the presence of such an intellectually gifted—and critically peremptory—man, nor were they prepared to face his ridicule or his wrath in case of his dissatisfaction with their remarks. Huppert, however, had sufficient fortitude to respond to his requests, and the results showed up in the film. Godard asked her to write him a text each night and was “furious” with her when she copied out a passage from a book by Samuel Beckett. In response to his fury, she produced a line about the film’s central theme—“One must work at loving or else love to work”—which Godard put into the film through the voice of her character.
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As Huppert understood, Godard was unaware of the effect that he had on the participants in his film: “He depends on others, but he doesn’t take into account that the people with whom he works and on whom he depends are under the influence of a power relationship” with him.
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But Godard claimed, in a radio discussion with Piccoli the night of the film’s premiere, that this submission was the fault of the actors and the crew: “I always ask people to want to make the films that they want to make. And instead of that, it was: ‘We’ll do what you want, Daddy,’ or ‘We’ll do what you want, Master.’” In the face of this submission, he admitted that his only “recourse” was “to put the actors into a state of disequilibrium and of catastrophe,” but he understood the gravity of the method: “One does not play around with such catastrophes.”
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Godard knew that his artistic methods were risky, both practically and morally. He had undertaken what he called the search for “the grandeur of the ordinary,” for “the arts, and that which it transmits,”
³²
but sensed that this new quest for traditional notions of beauty was fraught with moral danger: “One must run the risk of sin as one approaches it.”
³³
The sacred and the profane, as they came into play in the personal relations which were, in his view, a prerequisite for creating a filmed story of personal relations, were the grand themes of Godard’s new approach to human reality in
Passion
. He promptly made another film, about
Passion
itself, in which to say so—in which to make these themes explicit and to explain what he had tried to do, had done, and had not been able to do.

On May 5, 1982, several weeks before the premiere of
Passion
at the Cannes festival, French television broadcast
Passion: l’amour et le travail, introduction à un scénario
(Passion: Love and Work, Introduction to a Screenplay), Godard’s own assemblage of video material that he had shot prior to the making of the film.
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Programmers at Swiss television, however, found the compilation too scrappy and disconnected, and commissioned from him a video “screenplay” of
Passion
, after the fact, which would be shown on television following the film’s Swiss commercial release.

The commission for this video,
Scénario du film Passion
, inspired Godard to return to his underlying motives for the film; without the massive industrial mechanism of the full-scale shoot, he was able to lay his ideas bare. From within his own video studio, Godard addresses the audience (“Good evening, friends and enemies”), using the monitors before him on which to project the images of
Passion
(as well as one large white blank screen) as he describes the series of associations and considerations that link them. Super-impositions done in the editing room put Godard in front of the film’s images. He raises his hands as a sort of orchestral conductor or magus and invokes the divine power that brought the film to life:

And there was light and there were soldiers, there were bosses, there were children, and there was light, and there was joy, there was war, there was the angel, and there was fear, and there was light, there was the universal wound, there was night, there was the virgin, there was grace, and there was light, and there was light, and there was light, and there was fog, and there was adventure, and there was fiction, and there was reality, and there was the documentary, and there was movement, and there was cinema, and there was the image, and there was sound, and there was cinema, there was cinema, there was cinema. Here is work.

The central idea of this invocation—the religious essence of the birth of cinema, and of a single film, in a process akin to Genesis—would inspire
Godard’s next decade of work. While
Passion
merely hinted at the transcendent aspect of the creation of cinema, the
Scénario
made for Swiss television put the hieratic and suffering figure of the creator himself at the center of the cinema. In its clarity, inventiveness, and intimacy, the
Scénario du film Passion
is superior to the feature film
Passion
.

The
Scénario
brings to light an important shift in Godard’s career that two other short films from that time hinted at—
Lettre à Freddy Buache
(Letter to Freddy Buache), a promotional short commissioned by the city of Lausanne made in the summer of 1981, and
Changer d’image
(A Change of Image), commissioned by INA for broadcast in May 1982 to commemorate the first anniversary of the election of François Mitterrand.

In
Lettre à Freddy Buache
, a commission that Godard had elicited more than a year earlier but did not fulfill until he was deep at work on
Passion
, he evoked the subject of Lausanne by emphasizing his personal relation to the city, starting out by filming himself in close-up behind his record player as he puts on the turntable a recording of Ravel’s
Boléro
. He speaks the film’s voice-over commentary throughout as he attempts to decide which images best capture the city’s essence. In
Changer d’image
, broadcast on French television in May 1982, Godard discusses the concept of change by showing himself in front of a blank film screen and a microphone, and uses the occasion to dramatize his own role in political change—through the failure of his Mozambique project—as he stages a scene of himself being beaten and left for dead by an official of an unnamed country where he had gone to make a film.

In both films, as in
Scénario du film Passion
, Godard made his own physical presence the principal subject and the pretext of the work; he did so again, to more decisive and self-revealing effect, in the feature film that followed
Passion
.

While presenting
Passion
at the Cannes festival, Godard was already pessimistic about the film’s commercial prospects. He wanted to get another project under way immediately, fearing that if he waited, the anticipated failure would make it harder to raise money. He again sought the allure of a star—this time, Isabelle Adjani, with whom Godard’s producer, Alain Sarde, had previously made two films.
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Godard was frank about his motives: he wanted to work with Adjani because he knew that, on the basis of her name, he could get financing.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried.

M
ITTERRAND’S PRESIDENCY
and his Socialist Party’s resounding victory in the parliamentary elections in June 1981 brought about a new attitude and a new policy regarding the arts in France. After his victory, Mitterrand eclared that “the Socialist enterprise is first of all a cultural project,”
³⁶
and he named as his minister of culture Jack Lang, who rivalled in ambition his
famous predecessor, André Malraux. Lang was trained as a lawyer, but his first love was theater, in which he had long been a prominent administrator.
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He had big plans and Mitterrand had given him formidable means to realize them: in their first year in power, the Socialists doubled arts funding in France.

Lang, born in 1939, was a member of the 1968 generation that had carried Mitterrand into office, the generation whose artistic values and cinematic tastes had been formed by the French New Wave, and for whom Godard was a prime cultural hero. One of the first things that Lang did after taking office was to bestow upon him the French Order of Merit. (Godard, however, refused the honor, claiming that as a Swiss citizen he would have to receive special dispensation from his home canton of Vaud).
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But Lang’s administration offered Godard more concrete benefits as well.