Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (110 page)

“We saluted idols of trumpery, starry thrones of luminous baubles, elaborate palaces the fairy-tale pomp of which would be a ruinous dream for your bankers, costumes which intoxicate the eye, women with painted teeth and nails, and clever jugglers caressed by snakes.” And yet, the memory of such deceptions is still, late in life, a wonder: “Oh, Death, let us set sail! If the sky and the sea are as black as ink, our hearts, which you know, are filled with beams of light!” Godard still had sixteen rows of American films in his library; he had been deceived, but the illusions were beautiful ones, beautiful to believe in, even after their fraud was revealed.

In New York, Godard was a model guest: he calmly answered questions from the MOMA audience, telling a spectator who had asked about his use of video that the medium was more like music because it allowed the contrapuntal layering of images in the editing. He reacted with disdain only when another viewer asked whether he had ever made a film without the right to final cut. He was interviewed by the young director Hal Hartley for
Film-maker
magazine and by a wide range of journalists from other publications, including Andrew Sarris of the
Village Voice
.

Godard’s enthusiastic reception in New York had been primed by MOMA’s major retrospective in late 1993 of his video work. The retrospective had received a great deal of favorable attention, had been well attended, and generated a catalogue,
Son
+
Image
, which was the most important English-language publication about Godard since the 1972 translation of his critical writings and early interviews,
Godard on Godard
.
⁴³

However, in January 1995, Godard refused an invitation from the New York Film Critics Circle to attend an awards ceremony. The group had voted Godard a special prize, which he declined by fax. The first of his many
“incomplete reasons” was that “JLG was never able through his whole movie-maker/goer career to: Prevent M. Spielberg from rebuilding Auschwitz.”
⁴⁴

S
TEVEN
S
PIELBERG’S
S
CHINDLER’S
List
(released in December 1993) had gotten under Godard’s skin: it had entered the public arena in the guise of the legitimate fictional successor to
Shoah
. Godard did not immediately expand, cinematically, on his specific charges against Spielberg’s film, but he, together with Miéville, soon returned to the theme of the cinema’s representation of the Holocaust. They were commissioned by the British Film Institute to make a film about the centennial of the French cinema, which was officially set for 1995, the one-hundredth anniversary of the first public display of the Lumière brothers’ films. Godard and Miéville decided to make a quasi-documentary sketch, and invited Michel Piccoli, the head of France’s own commission for the centennial, to Rolle, where he was filmed in conversation with Godard in the dining room of a hotel, the Hostellerie du château.

Godard asks Piccoli why they should bother to commemorate the cinema, since nobody remembers it anyway, and challenges the actor to interview people at the hotel about what they remember of the cinema. Piccoli goes to his room and, as chambermaids, bellhops, and other staff (actually, actors) come in, he puts them to the test. One does not know Albert Préjean but knows Arnold Schwarzenegger, not
La Grande Illusion
but Madonna; another doesn’t know Jacques Becker but knows Boris Becker (“He serves well, and so do I”). The centerpiece of the scene, and of the film, is an extreme close-up of a young chambermaid at whom Piccoli recites dozens of names of classic French actors that she does not recognize—Odile Versois, Jules Berry, Marcel Dalio, Tilda Thamar, Jean Servais, Jany Holt, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Hessling, Eddie Constantine, Julien Carette, Gaston Modot, Simone Simon, among others—while she listens with a quiet, blank calm. With her face framed in a luminous intimacy, this unnamed actress, as she listens to the parade of notables, instantly takes her place as the newest among them. This shot is Godard’s lesson, a tenacious act of faith: even now, a filmmaker can use an ordinary video camera to extend the history of cinema by a few heartbeats.

But the film’s crucial idea, the one that exemplifies Godard’s overarching historical thesis, is contained in its title. He and Miéville did not call the film, as per the commission, “One Hundred Years of French Cinema,” but rather, 2 ×
50 ans de cinéma français
(2 × 50 Years of French Cinema). The first fifty years ran from 1895 to 1945. The dividing line set down was the same one defined in
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, the line between the innocent prewar cinema and tainted postwar cinema.

That year, Godard found two more ways to extend this argument through cinema and art, in episodes 3A and 3B of
Histoire(s) du cinéma, La
Monnaie de l’absolu
(The Coin of the Absolute), and
Une Vague nouvelle
(A New Wave, or A Vague Piece of News).

La Monnaie de l’absolu
is principally a paean to Italian postwar, “neorealist” cinema—and thus about the war. The episode begins with a condemnation of contemporary European governments for allowing the massacres in the former Yugoslavia to take place without intervention. Godard asserts that the cinema is capable of recording such events, and thus, of doing “something.”
⁴⁵
He adds that this is the crucial and historic role of the cinema, which is, “to begin with, made for thinking. This is forgotten immediately, but that’s another story. The flame will go out definitively at Auschwitz.” Citing the readiness of the French cinema to collaborate with the occupying Germans during World War II, Godard says that there was no cinema of resistance, except for one film—but he redefines “resistance” in terms that elide the actual German occupation and turn the argument against his real nemesis: “The only film, in the sense of cinema, which resisted the occupation of the cinema by America, which resisted a certain uniform way of doing cinema, was the Italian cinema”—specifically, Rossellini’s
Open City
, made in 1945.

Episode 3B,
Une Vague nouvelle
, is Godard’s summation of the New Wave. It begins with Aude Amiot’s voice from
Hélas pour moi
citing Gershom Scholem’s assertion of the transmissibility of tradition, as intertitles state, “What we wanted was to have the right to film boys and girls in a real world and who, in seeing the film, are themselves astonished to be themselves and in the world.” Godard added, in voice-over, “One night we showed up chez Henri Langlois, and there was light.” Yet in his voice there is accusation and regret: “We were without a past, and the man from the avenue de Messine [Langlois] made us a gift of this past, metamorphosed into the present, in the midst of the wars in Indochina and Algeria, and when he projected
L’espoir
for the first time, it was not the Spanish war that astonished us, but the fraternity of metaphors.” The New Wave directors saw metaphors instead of wars, he argued, because the fallen postwar cinema was, for them, an art that had lost the ability to project history and instead concealed it.

Godard concludes the episode sentimentally, with clips from his own films, including
Alphaville, King Lear, Germany Nine Zero, Passion
, and
Nouvelle Vague
, images of Marguerite Duras (who had died in February 1995), and his own discussion with a young man and woman who are leaving a house that is, she says, a “museum of T-shirts” (the young man corrects her: “New Wave”). She complains that it shows pictures of works but not of people, and the young man explains to her, “That’s what the New Wave was:
la politique des auteurs
, not the
auteurs
but the works.” Godard agrees with him: “First the works, then the men.” She then asks Godard directly, “And yet, Becker, Rossellini, Melville, Franju, Jacques Demy, Truffaut, you knew
them?” With images of these men and their films on-screen, Godard answers, “Yes, they were my friends.”

“F
IRST THE WORKS
, then the men,” Godard exhorted, and yet, as ever, he put himself in the fore of his
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and, as he had long understood, got attention for his work through his personal involvement in its public presentation, through his skillful reliance on his celebrity. His New York junket to present new work at MOMA in May 1994 was major film news in France, as was his presentation, in August 1995, of the first six episodes, 1A through 3B, of
Histoire(s)
at the Locarno Film Festival. There, he received an award, the Golden Leopard, with its prize of twenty thousand Swiss francs (which, he declared, he would donate to Amnesty International), and participated in a public roundtable discussion about the
Histoire(s)
. Godard displayed his displeasure with the proceedings, casting doubt on whether anything true and useful was being said by anyone: “If we were doctors, we would have already operated on five thousand sick people in an hour. But would they be cured? I don’t know.”
⁴⁶

Although Godard’s films were on the margin of the European movie business, the man himself came in for more honors. In September 1995, Godard went to Frankfurt to accept the city’s philosophy prize, named for Theodor Adorno and offered only every three years. In his acceptance speech, he reprised his theses from the
Histoire(s) du cinéma
: “The concentration camps have never been shown. Basically, they have been talked about, but nothing has been shown… No one wanted to show them. They preferred talking, saying: ‘Never again.’ And it started again, so to speak, Vietnam, Algeria—it’s not finished—Biafra, Afghanistan, Palestine.” At the end of the Second World War, as a result of not showing the concentration camps, the cinema—or what Godard called the
cinématographe
, Robert Bresson’s term for the art of the cinema—“disappeared at that moment.”
⁴⁷

Godard may have won the Adorno prize, but unlike Adorno, he did not think it impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. For Godard, the cinema after Auschwitz would be a funerary art, an art of the ever-too-late which, as he said of himself in
JLG/JLG
, is in mourning for itself. It remained nonetheless necessary to recover what could be recovered, to reclaim what could be reclaimed—of what had existed before the war. This, however, also entailed the reclamation of writers and artists who had led the way to Auschwitz, such as Brasillach. For Godard, the cinema had retained the ability to tell the story, but the story that he chose to tell, the story of the cinema itself, was far more ambiguous than that of the history it had ostensibly failed to reflect. His funerary art was, in human terms, a lament at arm’s length. For the time being, Godard was obsessively telling a Jewish story from which Jews were kept out.

twenty-eight.

FOR EVER MOZART, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
, PART 4

“How can you do this to me?”

T
HE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF
D-D
AY, IN
1994,
WAS
commemorated in France with countless reports, broadcasts, and diverse audiovisual memorabilia. The occasion inspired Godard to plan a film that would be about the war, in its way, but also about Manfred Eicher and his company, ECM Records, and music itself. The story concerned the present-day return to Vienna of an American soldier who “on a day of drunkenness in 1945 had killed Anton Webern,” the composer.
¹
Godard decided to call the film
For Ever Mozart
, because the aging American veteran would “be recognized by a critic at a given moment during the performance of a piece by Mozart.”
²

The film would ultimately be hijacked by Godard’s consuming obsession with an actress forty-five years his junior, Bérangère Allaux. For well over a year, Godard’s filmmaking would be driven by the frantic efforts to give cinematic expression and remain in proximity to the object of his longing. But even as
For Ever Mozart
gravitated around her presence, it nonetheless bore the conspicuous imprint of Godard’s philosophical, political, and cinematic concerns.

Through the story of Webern’s death, Godard wanted to bring together Germany and the United States, classical music, the persistence of history in the present, and the year 1945, which he had defined as the great divide in the history of cinema. Before he could get to work on it, however, the Portuguese producer Paulo Branco offered him the chance to make a low-budget film in Portugal. Godard proposed a film called
The Return of Columbus
, featuring a boat arriving in port and a very long tracking shot (“maybe three or four kilometers”) that would show “hands setting down everything that has come