Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (108 page)

During the shoot of
Hélas pour moi
, he said to me: “You are so bad that I can’t even call you by your name, I’ll say ‘it.’ When I say ‘it,’ you’ll know that it’s you.” Obviously, I got rather upset, and Gérard intervened. He got hold of him and said, “If you talk like that again to Roland, I’ll hang you up on that tree.” I told him, “Lay off, I’ll do it myself.”
²⁶

According to Godard, Depardieu left the film before the end of his contract, approximately halfway through the planned six-week shoot. For his part, Depardieu refused to promote
Hélas pour moi
and would not speak of it publicly, except to joke that in 1992 he had appeared in two commercials: one for Barilla pasta, and Godard’s film.
²⁷

At the end of the shoot, Godard was so displeased with the footage that, after editing it, he was left with just an hourlong film. To fill it out, he decided to shoot additional scenes for a framing story, about a book publisher named Abraham Klimt, who, after receiving an unfinished manuscript concerning
an appearance of God on Earth, goes to the village where the event was said to have occurred and conducts an investigation into the incident. This material turned the Amphitryon story into long flashbacks depicting the events about which Klimt inquires. To play the publisher, Godard cast, from the Strauss production in Geneva, the veteran actor Bernard Verley, who understood that the character was actually a stand-in for Godard as a filmmaker “who seeks to understand the reasons for the non-completion of the film.”
²⁸

This second shoot, at the end of the summer, was the latest of Godard’s artistic afterthoughts, from the LP version of
A Woman Is a Woman
to the cinematic cosmogony of
Scénario du film Passion:
when he had problems with the shoot of a film, Godard made a new work in which he commented on the project and reworked its main ideas more explicitly and personally. But with
Hélas pour moi
, the analysis became an essential part of the film itself. As a result,
Hélas pour moi
is simultaneously a film and a reflection on a film—and the second, late-summer shoot of the investigative publisher Abraham Klimt provided the cinematic material that made the whole film both a testament and a meditation on the nature of artistic transmission.

H
ÉLAS POUR MOI
is set in a legendary village of craftsmen and merchants, a small town of Protestant piety and petty venality. The couple at the story’s center, played by Depardieu and Masliah, are called Simon and Rachel, both biblical names, and, like the apostle whom Jesus renamed Peter, Simon rowed a small boat. (Rachel was also the name of Godard’s older sister, who had died in 1991.) Unlike Amphitryon and Alcmene, they are already married, and their family name is Donnadieu (Give to God), which also happened to be Marguerite Duras’s actual name. The great event for which Simon will spend his first night away from Rachel is a voyage to Italy to buy a small hotel from a man named Paul (the name of Godard’s father). There is a pastor and a schoolteacher in the village, who are also married; their name is Monod, that of Godard’s mother. And, in homage to the crucial role that Godard’s mother played in his literary awakening, Madame Anne Monod’s adolescent students visit her during summer vacation to ask, “What is the novelistic [le romanesque]?”

The story dramatizes nothing less than humanity’s rise from paganism to Christian monotheism. Several of the old, diverse, humanoid gods (including one who speaks with a croak like that of the computer Alpha 60 in
Alphaville
) come to town in order to find a woman for the one God. It is this invisible God who lusts after the faithful Rachel and who comes in the form of Simon in order to sleep with her. This God identifies himself as the Christian God, the lusting God who did not come to Earth in
Hail Mary
but nonetheless took carnal possession of Mary. As this God, speaking in Simon’s
voice, says to Rachel, “I had a little boy once. He died for all of you.” God the Father has taken Simon’s place in bed with Rachel.

The material that Godard added in the reshoot, however—the story of Abraham Klimt—turns
Hélas pour moi
into a Jewish story. The film begins with Klimt on a country road, as, in a long voice-over narration, he recites the parable that concludes Gershom Scholem’s
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
. Godard removed its many references to the Baal Shem Tov, other rabbis, and Judaism:

When my father’s father’s father had a difficult task to accomplish, he went to a certain place in the forest, lit a fire, and immersed himself in silent prayer. And what he had to do came to pass. When, later, my father’s father was faced with the same task, he went to the same place in the forest and said: “We no longer know how to light the fire, but we still know how to say the prayer,” and what he had to accomplish came to pass. Later, my father too went into the forest and said, “We no longer know how to light the fire, we no longer know the mysteries of prayer, but we still know the exact place in the forest where it happened, and that must suffice.” And it was sufficient. But when, in turn, I had to confront the same task, I stayed home and said, “We no longer know how to light the fire, we no longer know how to say the prayers, we don’t even know the place in the forest, but we still know how to tell the story.”

Thus from the beginning, Godard frames the film in terms of transmission, the handing-down of knowledge, by a man named Abraham. The publisher’s investigation later leads him to a video store, the owner of which is named Benjamin, who rents out mechanically reproduced works of art.

The central scene in Klimt’s inquiry regarding the events behind the report of an appearance of God on Earth is a long discussion with a young woman, Aude (played by the young actress Aude Amiot), who turns out to be his best source of information. She tells him that she is very good friends with Benjamin (of the video store) and then mentions Scholem: “Sir, do you know the ten historical propositions about the Old Testament?” she asks. Abraham does not. She continues: “Scholem’s text affirms that there exists a tradition regarding the truth, and that this tradition can be transmissible. I laugh, because the truth in question between us has all sorts of properties, but certainly not that of being transmissible.”

Klimt responds, “I don’t see what you’re talking about,” and Aude counters, “You said it just right: ‘I don’t see’; and yet I saw it. Or rather, heard it. That’s how I’d say it.” She begins to describe what she heard—the story of Simon and Rachel, which is seen in flashback. And after it is seen, on-screen, Aude rests her head on Abraham’s shoulder and says—in a line that confirms the proximity of Godard’s film to mystical theology—“Seeing the invisible is tiring.”

To show the invisible, Godard relies on an array of visual effects: an assistant to the gods walking toward the camera and putting his hand on the lens; a shot of one young townswoman in the water which starts brightly overexposed, but then, as the aperture is slowly stopped down, the image turns dark and the woman falls into silhouette against a darkly luminous sea; a close-up of the red-haired Rachel’s pubic zone superimposed on the orange reflections of the lake in sunset and followed by rapid flashes of a knife, in black-and-white. These low-tech optical effects, which have nothing of the elaborate technical inventions that Godard had foreseen in the script, nonetheless suggest his sense of the inadequacy of regular photography for the transcendent tasks at hand, and his frustration—expressed directly in the film—with what could and could not be achieved by realistic means.

In
Hélas pour moi
, the possibility of knowledge is its transmission through the words of a prophet—a young Cassandra-like acolyte of Jewish mysticism—as seen in the images of another prophet, Godard, whose borrowings from mystical Judaism are connected to the film’s element of visual striving, of straining against the conventions of naturalism in order to achieve a metaphysical cinema. The subject of Aude’s prophecy is living history, the news of the day, which—as in Benjamin’s philosophy of history—Godard presented as a metaphysical disaster. In
Hélas pour moi
, he raises to a new level the devotion to history through and as cinema that had characterized, in a variety of ways, all of his work since
Sauve qui peut
.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, and the nominally Yugoslav but predominantly Serbian army attacked both of those breakaway republics. The war on Slovenia ended after just nine days, but Croatia was subjected to fierce and prolonged attack. In March 1992, the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence. Bosnian Serbs who did not want to become a minority in an independent Bosnia attacked police stations and other government offices in Sarajevo. The Yugoslav army joined them in attacking towns throughout Bosnia and, in April, began bombarding Sarajevo. This new European war quickly devolved into a massacre; the Soviet Union was collapsing, the so-called New World Order was settling into place, and the first major event of this new era was one of persecution, destruction, and murder. Godard was outraged by the horrific spectacle, which prompted his renewed political engagement, as evinced in
Hélas pour moi
.

During a conversation in the film, one local tells another, “Communism fell: other things fell with it.” Aude explains to Abraham, “In the word ‘Yugoslavie’ [French for Yugoslavia] there is ‘vie’ [life] and ‘gosse’ [child, kid].” One of the young men from the video store, Ludovic, goes off to war in the former Yugoslavia, marching down a country road as a fiddler plays and a
voice-over cites the opening line from the naive yet rueful text of Stravinsky’s
L’Histoire du soldat
by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.
²⁹
Later, Aude reports to Abraham that Ludovic was killed in Dubrovnik.

By film’s end, Simon is brought back to Rachel, and he reclaims her for himself by lifting her skyward in the same gesture with which John Wayne lifts Natalie Wood in
The Searchers
. Abraham Klimt leaves town after having seen, through the words of Aude, what could not be seen in the manuscript: that God had indeed come to Earth and that he had departed, leaving it no better than he found it.

B
UT WHY
J
EWS
? Why Abraham, Benjamin, and Scholem? Because their tradition had indeed been transmitted, whereas in Godard’s view, the tradition of the image—of seeing the invisible—had failed to be transmitted. The cinema, as Godard understood it, had ended with its failures during World War II, and specifically, with its failures in relation to Jews and the genocide to which they were subjected. The tradition of the image that Godard had inherited could not be transmitted, because of the insurmountable obstacles of television and material comfort, the psychic oblivion of mass culture or culturelessness, the broken thread of artistic and cultural achievement that had run from Homer to Godard himself (a lineage that Godard himself asserted). And yet Godard felt compelled to transmit it.
Hélas pour moi
is a restatement of Godard’s own cinematic testament: he had taken on the cinema as a personal responsibility and burden, and was also taking on the impossible task of transmitting it by means of his films, his
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, his attempt at teaching, and his own media presence as a representative and an embodiment of the lost tradition.

Hélas pour moi
was released in September 1993 to appreciative, even over-awed, reviews. In
Libération
, a pair of writers, Gérard Lefort and Olivier Séguret, expressly sought to avoid the “rave or pan?” dialectic and “to evaluate it from the point of view of the scientific disciplines that it invokes.”
³⁰
The philosopher Régis Debray enthused in
Le Monde:
“A collage of naïve mosaic, with rays of light between the facets…With the sense of history collapsed, there emerges from the ruins a nostalgia for the origins.”
³¹
Le Monde
’s critic Jean-Michel Frodon also wrote rhapsodically about the film and its philosophical and literary speculations, praising its “beauty,” “happiness,” and “innocence,” but also mentioning a “sadness” that “pervades the film which, with its strange chemistry of fragments, manages to produce melancholy by means of energy. Melancholy it is to know that all this won’t be of interest to many people…”
³²

Frodon’s intuition was right; though Godard did extensive publicity for the film, traveling to the southwest of France to present it in an art house there, appearing on television (including Bernard Pivot’s popular talk show
Apostrophes
), and doing a wide range of interviews in the press, the film did poorly, drawing approximately 80,000 viewers in first run. Depardieu did not promote it and his usual audience stayed away.

Godard’s philosophical and theological meditations were cast into a marketplace where patience for them was short. In interviews at the time of the release of
Hélas pour moi
, in September 1993, he discussed his sense of isolation. Little had come of his plans to teach at La fémis. He saw few films by others, whether by young filmmakers or by his peers.
³³
He admitted to having little contact with his former associates.
³⁴
Godard was working in a painful solitude, exacerbated by the demands of the project that he was far from completing,
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, for which he had to deliver eight episodes in all, in four groups of two—work which took place largely in the isolation of the editing room.