Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (103 page)

With his principal associate, the director of photography William Lubtchansky, things were worse. Not long before the shoot of
Nouvelle vague
, Lubtchansky, who had finished
Sauve qui peut
in bitterness and had had no contact with Godard since 1980, happened to be in Geneva, called Godard “just to say hello,” and invited him and Miéville to dinner. As Lubtchansky later recalled, “It was marvelous, we really talked, and he asked me to do
Nouvelle Vague
—and it was the same hell.”
¹⁷
The cinematographer found Godard unbearably aggressive and nasty and vowed, yet again, never to work with him—a vow he has kept, to date.

I
N AN INTERMEDIATE
draft of the plot, Godard framed the legend-like theme of the two identical men as a flashback from the point of view of a woman, Clio, the muse of history. In her telling, the story of the two men took place during her childhood, and the woman who gets involved with them is Clio’s mother, who would be played by the same actress as Clio herself. In Godard’s allegorical scheme, the cinema was both the mother of Clio and her double—the source and the image of history. Although Godard did not in fact film this framing device, he nonetheless channeled its import, regarding the conjunction of history and legend, into the film.

Nouvelle Vague
unfolds in a mythical place in a mythical time, an isolated world of a lost refinement and formality, sheltered from the outer world. For the film’s setting, Godard chose a château that reminded him of the estate on the French side of Lake Geneva that belonged to his maternal grandparents; this was the cloistered environment where he spent his childhood in prosperous ease.

Godard’s visual schema was somewhat abstract: “It isn’t the dialogue that should be broken up into spaces, but space into blocks and series of dialogue,” he said. In practice, this meant that he planned to do long traveling shots “in the style of Ophüls,” in which he would emphasize “the comings and goings of various and sundry—servants, passers-by, technicians, waiters.” He modeled the estate on the château in Jean Renoir’s
The Rules of the Game:
“The fluid aspect of social and worldly movements, transmitted by the motion of the camera, would bring out the love relationship as a solid entity, a little as if music brought forth sculpture.” To accomplish this, Godard planned to use “the large crane of Hollywood films.”
¹⁸
Sweeping, majestic camera movements would link characters from the two worlds of the château, those of master and servant, and a very large cast would represent a
wide array of characters. Elaborate physical setups, such as coordinated entrances and exits of cars, would convey an old-fashioned order and splendor.

The rural estate, in its grace, grandeur, and self-possessed isolation—and its industry—recalls the classic movie studio, a closed-off fantasy land which made myths in its own image. Unlike the real Hollywood studio, this “studio” resembled the one Godard found in Switzerland: a distillation of natural splendors, the water, the sky, the land and the light.

D
ISCUSSING
N
OUVELLE VAGUE
, Godard likened his family background to his formative years in the cinema:

I have lived two dreams in my life. I lived my childhood in an extremely rich family, like the one we filmed here, at the same place, in these chalets, on the other side of the lake. They educated me and they left me alone. There was so much money that we didn’t notice it. That was during the war. I knew nothing of the war at that time, which has brought me lots of remorse. The result is that today, as even Sarde knows well, I don’t feel the need for a film to make money. And then, there was the New Wave: a team… It disappeared, it couldn’t last long. So after having known that, one begins to know the real and to move forward.
¹⁹

In
Nouvelle Vague
, Godard faced up to the aspect of reality that linked his comfortable family life to his cinematic fancies: these worlds of his personal mythology ran on money and, to emphasize the connection, he drew on references to money from American literature. The drowning man who is rescued by the woman industrialist says to her, “Your dirty money” (from Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”), and when Cécile, the governess, asks her mother whether the rich are really so different from them, her mother gives her a version of the famous answer: “Yes, they have more money.”
²⁰
This line conveys Godard’s revisionist view of the Fitzgerald/Hemingway repartee, as shown in the film: the money of the rich indeed makes them different, insofar as it gives them access to power, beauty, experience, and freedom that are unavailable to the poor.

Yet Godard concludes the film with the end of the sheltered idyll: when the second man is revealed to be not the first man’s brother but the same person (a metaphysical conceit with Christian implications), he and the woman dismiss the household entourage and, leaving the estate, drive off together in search of the wider world. Their departure is the end of the film, but it suggests the beginning of an intimate and contemplative adventure similar to Godard’s own in response to the cinema’s industrial tumult.

As befits a film that presents a grand allegorical schema of the history of cinema—and a filmmaker in the midst of making his
Histoire(s) du
cinéma
—
Nouvelle Vague
is replete not only with literary allusions but also with cinematic references to anchor its story: the rich and mighty woman at the story’s center is Countess Elena Torlato-Favrini—the first name from Jean Renoir’s
Eléna et les hommes
, the title and family name from Joseph Mankiewicz’s
The Barefoot Contessa
. The two characters played by Delon are Roger Lennox and Richard Lennox—the family name of a character from Raymond Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
(filmed by Robert Altman). The drowning, on which the story turns, recalls René Clément’s
Plein Soleil (Purple Noon
) (1960), in which Delon had his first major role, as well as George Stevens’s
A Place in the Sun
(1951), to which Godard made pointed mention in the first episode of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
.

The references proliferate: a recurring line, from Howard Hawks’s
To Have and Have Not
, is that of the servant who asks, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” One character is called Schpountz, after Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 satire of a country boy’s dream of movie stardom, and others are called Robert Aldrich, Dorothy Parker, and Della Street (from
Perry Mason
); one of the Countess’s lawyers is named Dorfman, like the French distributor Robert Dorfman, and one character in her entourage bears the name of the actor who plays the part, Joseph Lisbona, who directed two films in the early days of the French New Wave.

Godard himself does not appear in
Nouvelle Vague
—and would not appear in any of his feature films for the next fourteen years—and this, too, is a result of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which now siphoned off from his features the role of the subjective essay and the personal voice, and became Godard’s mode of self-identification and self-revelation. His feature films, as a result, became objects of Olympian contemplation and mythic universality. Indeed, the grandeur and solidity of the images in
Nouvelle Vague
are conceived as if in opposition to the frenetic subjectivity, the proliferating associations, the hysteria of semiological profusion of
Histoire(s) du cinéma. Nouvelle Vague
bears the imprint of Godard’s own story through its embodiment of history, of the story of the New Wave, rather than through Godard’s own mediation or self-presentation.

T
HE TEXT OF
Nouvelle Vague
is especially rich, even for Godard, thanks to Duhamel’s generous supply of quotes, and these literary citations are also used differently from the way that language figured in such films as
Soigne ta droite
and
King Lear
. In
Nouvelle Vague
, Godard sets these texts with a higher level of style. In part, this is due to the film’s setting and milieu, which lent itself to a lofty diction, a declamatory style of speech which would fill the vast halls and the open spaces with resonant words—a rhetorical manner that he also associated with his childhood lessons, which involved the mandatory recitation of poetry. But
Nouvelle Vague
presents another crucial difference which determined
the way that literary texts were used: the music is unlike any in Godard’s previous films. This, too, was the result of an unexpected collaboration.

Manfred Eicher, who had founded ECM Records in 1969 with the intention of seeking a distinctively clear and natural sound in his recordings—and who was, he claimed, inspired to do so by the sound track to
Vivre sa vie
—sent Godard some CDs of music by Arvo Pärt and David Darling in the hope that he might find it useful for a film. Godard was intrigued by the music, saying, “I had the feeling, the way he was producing sound, that we were more or less in the same country: he with sounds, me with images,”
²¹
and he wrote to Eicher to ask him for more.

Godard later recalled that, when he listened to the recordings Eicher sent him, it was “like hearing music from films that didn’t exist.”
²²
Intended as praise, Godard’s remark was, however, also on-target in an invidious way, which explained why the music appealed to him: it is reminiscent of movie scores, in that for the most part it neither requires nor bears up under repeated and concentrated listening. At a higher level of modernistic style, much of the music that Eicher recorded at ECM and sent to Godard has the same status for the cinema as the music by Paul Misraki or Georges Delerue in Godard’s earlier films.
²³

Nouvelle Vague
and almost every film Godard subsequently made features recordings of music produced by Eicher. As a result, Godard’s sound tracks—which, from
Passion
through
King Lear
, had featured samplings of classical music, along with some jazz and popular music—changed definitively. The Beethoven quartets, last featured in
King Lear
, were gone. Excerpts from Beethoven’s quartets are the musical equivalent of literary quotations: they bring with them their own history and context. The music produced by Eicher, however, is, for the most part, mood music, a set of sonic icons that induce an emotion or a sentiment rather than a specific idea or history. Eicher’s recordings shifted Godard’s attention from the music itself to its function in the film. While Beethoven was a part of Godard’s life and experience, Eicher’s productions were pure sound, free to acquire a new set of associations by way of their place in the film. Godard’s preference for these contemporary recordings rather than classical music was another mark of his return to a cinematic classicism of sorts, with “movie music” which he used to reinforce emotions rather than classical music to comment on them.

In the sound editing, the many literary texts Godard worked into
Nouvelle Vague
were set against music and ambient sounds to create a dense stereo-phonic soundscape. Godard claimed to have been particularly inspired by the music of David Darling, which, with its brief, emphatic phrases and dramatic silences, resembles punctuation awaiting a text. The composer and audio researcher Jean Schwarz, whose music Godard had also included in
Nouvelle Vague
, was invited to sit in on the sound mix. Schwarz later described what he
saw: “For him, everything was music—voices, sounds. He had a way of making it come alive like a symphony.” He likened Godard’s work on the film’s sound track to “sculpture.”
²⁴
Godard was still working on this “sculpture” three days before the film’s first screening.

Nouvelle Vague
was shown at the Cannes festival on May 18, 1990. Its presentation was a triumph: the film’s monumentality, timeless poise, and overt sensuous beauty were widely praised, with Serge Toubiana in
Cahiers du cinéma
declaring it “from the outset a great classic.”
²⁵
The film, which went into commercial release in France on May 23, was generally acknowledged to be the complex masterpiece that it is.

During his press conference at Cannes, Godard said, “If one only took the images from
Nouvelle Vague
, the film would be better. And if one only listened to the sound track it would be better still.”
²⁶
Eicher took Godard up on the suggestion: ECM released the sound track to
Nouvelle Vague
as a set of audio CDs. The liner notes were a reprint of an article by Claire Bartoli about the experience of watching
Nouvelle Vague
as a blind woman.

On September 29, 1990,
Nouvelle Vague
had its American premiere at the New York Film Festival. After the undeserved neglect of the teeming, fragmented, subjective
King Lear, Nouvelle Vague
could reasonably have been expected to win favor with art-house viewers. Indeed, it received serious attention from a wide range of writers, who welcomed it as a major addition to Godard’s oeuvre. Gilberto Perez, writing in
The Nation
, called attention to Godard’s correlation of natural splendor with the dubious business that buys access to it, arguing that the film is “a thing of beauty and at the same time a critique of that beauty, of the conditions of that beauty” and that it calls attention to “a contradiction between stirring beauty and the ugly privilege enabling that beauty.”
²⁷