Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (105 page)

Goupil found the process difficult: “We go to a place that has been reserved, we look around, he searches, we look around, then when nobody expects it, he says, ‘Let’s shoot.’ It’s very hard. There was a great deal of tension.” Often, Godard went to the location but chose not to shoot. Sometimes, he sent crew members off on their own, telling them, “Go try.” Goupil and the crew brought back footage of the stadium where the 1936 Berlin Olympics were played, to invoke its having been filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. “Afterward, [Godard] looked at the shots and we had a violent argument,” Goupil recounted. “‘You say you’re anti-Fascist,’” Godard told him, “‘but you were unable to retransmit the past with these images.’” In other words, Godard thought that in Goupil’s shots, the stadium looked merely like a stadium, not like Hitler’s stadium; these shots are not in the film.

On another such occasion, Godard accused Goupil of working “too much by illustration”—of making images that merely illustrated an idea from the script—and Goupil responded, “If you don’t show up, we run that
risk.” Yet Godard was just as harsh in his criticism of his own rushes. He shot an enormous amount of footage of a Russian character (played by Anton Mossine), a sailor who was making his way East, through a Germany where he was no longer at home. Dissatisfied with the material, Godard edited the sailor’s role down to a bit part. He considered his indecision and divagations to be a consequence of the conditions of the shoot—namely, working in a foreign country where he had never lived and which he did not know well (“When one knows nothing, why go here rather than there?”). The migratory shoot was truncated when Godard became sick, for which he sarcastically declared himself grateful because otherwise he “would never have stopped.”
¹⁴
He completed the film with the footage on hand.

G
OUPIL OBSERVED THAT
in the diverse aspects of the film, “music, sound, cinema, text—each image arouses references.” The organizing principle of the shooting and editing was to construct a web of references that were at once historical and personal. Goupil described Godard’s creative process on the film: “We discussed a lot, he wrote a lot, he had all of his ideas, and the images came afterwards to concretize them—it’s almost a film that was dreamed into existence.” Asked whether he had chosen to film in “sites of memory,” Godard answered, “Everything is a site of memory,” and explained his chain of associations.

I wanted to go up north, that’s the Baltic, the sailors of the Baltic. I remembered the story of the [German] revolutionary unions [of 1920], and we added Russia into the film. And then we certainly had to go see Weimar, the tree of Goethe. So we filmed the tree, it’s at the center of Buchenwald. There’s the sign which says “Buchenwald,” I didn’t make it up. That’s how we did it. Then we ended up in Berlin.
¹⁵

The travels of Lemmy Caution through a recently liberated East Germany—where “corpses,” played by extras, were theatrically scattered at the base of the Berlin Wall’s remaining sections—featured such artifacts and events as a philosopher working on a French translation of Hegel’s
Reason in History;
a young woman transformed into Freud’s Dora; the statue of Schiller in Leipzig; the statue of Pushkin in Weimar; Goethe’s oak in Buchenwald; a knight on horseback, reminiscent of Don Quixote; a man pushing a Trabant; and the crumbling remains of Germany’s legendary Babelsberg studios, with Marlene Dietrich’s voice on the sound track reminiscing about its past glories.

What Godard added of Russia was the brief remaining footage of the young sailor, Dmitri, who comes to say good-bye to a violist (Kim Kashkashian) while she is rehearsing the last composition, the Viola Sonata, of another Dmitri—Shostakovich.

As a sort of visual punctuation, he used clips of classic German films; for instance, as a doorman helps people out of a hotel with his umbrella, the voice-over commentary makes reference to “the last man” (the German title of the 1925 film by F. W. Murnau,
The Last Laugh
); then a clip from that film is seen, in which a doorman, played by Emil Jannings, similarly helps two women into a car. The clips offered Godard a kind of visual shorthand by which to condense his scenes into brief clusters of few but highly composed images, to break the continuity of shots without breaking the flow of ideas and emotions.

T
HE DIALOGUE AND
voice-over commentary, which was spoken by the critic and television director André S. Labarthe (who had played the abandoned husband in
Vivre sa vie
), was comprised of literary references, mainly from German literature and from writings about Germany (Tacitus, Christopher Isherwood). But the film’s principal literary reference was to an author whose work had haunted Godard since the 1950s, and whose example had haunted France since 1939: Jean Giraudoux.

Though opposed to German occupation and an unreproachable anti-fascist, Giraudoux offered, shortly before the German invasion of France, a scathing indictment of the French national situation, in a book called
Pleins Pouvoirs
(Full Authority). He decried the growing influence of America and the increasing presence of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. Though he expressed no love for Nazi Germany, the principal targets of his diatribe were the same as those of the Nazis. Giraudoux was not a collaborator in deed, but by sharing enemies with the German ideology, he implied that Nazi Germany might hold valuable political lessons for France.

In his earlier novel
Siegfried et le Limousin
(published in 1922), Giraudoux had expressed similar views; this novel, which had loomed in the background of
Le Petit Soldat
, was central to
Germany Nine Zero
. The novel’s plot—about a French soldier named Jacques Forestier who, suffering from amnesia, recuperates in Germany and considers himself German—was of secondary significance to the film (though a character from the book, Count von Zelten, played by Hanns Zischler, turns up as Lemmy Caution’s occasional fellow traveler). Rather,
Germany Nine Zero
is centered on a pair of lengthy quotes taken from Giraudoux’s novel that convey the film’s governing ideas. The first is cited verbatim:

The United States imagines no other war besides a civil war. In each war it is always fighting against itself and against those faults of its own that the enemy nation embodies. It calls war a moral crisis. When it was English, it fought against the English; as soon as it became American, Americans fought among themselves; as soon as it had become sufficiently Germanized in its morés and culture, it tilted at the Germans. The first American taken prisoner in 1917 was named Meyer, and so was his captor.

The second quotation, carved sentence by sentence from a longer passage, is spoken in the film in voice-over by Labarthe:

I do not want to die before having seen Europe happy, without having seen the two words that an invincible force spreads further and further apart each day, the word “Russia” and the word “happiness,” come together on my lips once again. To be happy—I say this for those who are younger than twenty-five years old, since they aren’t aware of it—is, at the borders, not to hear people multiply by 100 or by 1,000 the contents of their wallets, like children. It is not to have the impression, when seeing someone repatriated from starving regions, that he once fought over food with a child… And so, the day when I see the world, once again robust, place side by side like two warriors’ bucklers
¹⁶
the word “Russia” and the word “happiness,” I will gladly die.
¹⁷

As these citations suggest, the real subject of
Germany Nine Zero
was Godard’s view of three countries, plus a fourth: Germany, the embodiment of the ultimate political sin, the greatest historical transgression, which rendered it taboo among the nations; the United States, which, under its guise of angelic innocence, is guilty of similarly great misdeeds; Russia, which, accused of other grave political crimes, must, as the common enemy of Nazi Germany and the United States, have been doing something right (as, for instance, shielding East Germany from American influence); and, in the shadows, France, which, caught between Germany and the United States, would do better to turn its attention to Russia.

The film concludes with Lemmy Caution’s return to the West: as he walks through woods, the first sign that he has indeed reached the West is a woman jogger in a track suit. Next, in what was West Berlin, he faces the consumerist trappings of modern life: “Well, Christmas, with all its ancient horrors, is on us again. The stores are full of useless junk, but what we really need, we can’t find.”
¹⁸
Lemmy Caution comments on “the assault of money against spiritual power,” and asserts that money “invents Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” To reinforce Godard’s implied equation of German and American wartime
deeds—and, even more decisively, Germany’s wartime dominion and America’s present-day hegemony—Lemmy Caution takes a room in a modern hotel, where he comments sardonically to the chambermaid who is preparing his bed, “So you too have chosen freedom,” and she responds, “Arbeit macht frei.”

G
ODARD’S DESIRE TO
make
Germany Nine Zero
a work of cinema rather than television is evident in the way it looks. The precisely composed static shots are carefully textured with natural light that sculpturally integrates the actors into the locations and the decor: the characters are not set in the landscape, they are a part of it. Like
Nouvelle Vague, Germany Nine Zero
is poised and monumental, yet at sixty-two minutes in length, it is a feature film condensed into epigrams, an odyssey in fragments. This odyssey, however, is missing a basic element of the classic homeward trip after wartime: a love story. Lemmy Caution plays an Odysseus without a Penelope. This lack turns
Germany Nine Zero
into a condensation of a possible feature film rather than a fully realized feature: its brevity is due in part to its lack of inner motive, of romantic adventure. The lived experience to which it bore testimony was not intimate, but purely historical, cinematic, literary, and political.
Germany Nine Zero
is less a film than the idea for a film that Godard might have made were its subject more completely derived from his own experience.

To emphasize his view of
Germany Nine Zero
as a work of cinema, Godard insisted on showing it at the Venice Film Festival in September 1991. The movie was awarded a gold medal from the presidency of the Senate, and was hailed by
Cahiers du cinéma
and
Le Monde
as an important addition to Godard’s body of work. Jean-Michel Frodon, in
Le Monde
, praised him for including “all the memory which not one journalist, not one ‘leftist’ politician, uttered in the month that followed the liquefaction of the Soviet mummies.”
¹⁹
The film’s television broadcast, on November 8, 1991, was heralded as an event not to be missed—all the more so since, despite Godard’s intentions, the film was not scheduled to open theatrically. The series to which it was supposed to belong had never been made:
Germany Nine Zero
was its only production.

The project’s extended and open-ended development had come at a price: Godard admitted to having gone over budget by 1.5 million francs and accepted personal responsibility for that sum. To pay off his debts, he announced, at the time of the Venice festival, that he had accepted “a very burdensome project, of filmed memories, for the cinema’s centenary in 1995.”
²⁰
He also pushed ahead with
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which continued in the
same political vein as
Germany Nine Zero
. He drew inspiration for that series from his newfound devotion to Russia—an intellectual devotion, which soon became a practical one.

T
HE CULTURAL SERVICES
of the French government had long been planning a retrospective of Godard’s films in the Soviet Union and had hoped that he would accompany it. While working on
Germany Nine Zero
, Godard received an offer to go to the Soviet Union, and he accepted. The retrospective was planned for February 1992, but it took the French and Swiss governments more than a year of negotiations with the Soviet authorities to organize the trip, and by the time it took place, the Soviet Union no longer existed.

For the retrospective, which was to take place at the Moscow Kino-Center, or cinémathèque, Godard had selected the fifteen films to be shown, including his first,
Breathless
, and his most recent,
Germany Nine Zero
. To verify that the films which featured a stereo sound track would be shown under appropriate conditions, Godard dispatched his sound engineer, François Musy, to Moscow to test the equipment. Musy returned with an unfavorable report. Godard then declared that the films could not be shown if the projection and the sound were not adequate. The Swiss government agreed to finance the installation of new equipment, but its commitment was insufficient, and Godard decided to pay for the sound system himself—with money, he said, that he made from TV commercials.

While working with Goupil on
Germany Nine Zero
, Godard was commissioned to create two commercials for Nike sneakers. One featured young people in a field, successfully fleeing the Grim Reaper thanks to their Nikes. (For this, Godard asked Goupil to do iconographic research on the changing image of the figure of Death, from medieval to modern art.)
²¹
Godard also filmed a variation on this theme, in which a wolf chases Little Red Riding Hood and catches her because he was wearing Nikes.
²²
The sneaker company paid Godard for these spots but never showed them.