Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (113 page)

The book of
For Ever Mozart
was issued in November 1996, concurrent with the film’s theatrical release, making it available as a souvenir or libretto
of the film.
²⁶
Godard managed the film’s theatrical release, in October 1996, with his usual flair for publicity. He offered a typically generous range of interviews to the media and appeared on the cultural talk show
Le Cercle de minuit
(The Midnight Circle), to which he invited an imposing list of co-panelists: the writer Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the novelist and essayist Philippe Sollers, and the film critic Jean-Claude Biette. During the broadcast discussion, Godard repeated his notion of the villainy of Moses in the “great conflict between the seen and the said”:

I think that Moses cheated; that he saw, then translated—since he wrote—the tables of the law, and then, at that moment, everything got fucked up, because what he had seen, even the burning bush, was finished. It always went through a translation, by an anchorman or an anchorwoman, by a writer or something.

The reviews of
For Ever Mozart
were respectful if uncomprehending. Many critics limited themselves to describing the film, as if in fear of appearing not to understand its intellectual intricacies. Its blend of melodrama and melancholy, its call for the self-sacrifice of the idealistic young, its depiction of disdain for the wisdom of the elders—for the wisdom of Godard’s directorial stand-in, Vicky Vitalis, and its mockery of youthful ignorance induced by pop culture—offered younger viewers little but despair and self-loathing. Lacking stars, the film had no hook but Godard himself; the public stayed away. The film’s rapid disappearance meant that it did not succeed in turning Allaux into a popular actress. Godard himself attributed the film’s failure to its composite nature, his inability to get the four disparate elements from which he had composed it to coalesce into a dramatic unity. This was a less painful thing to believe than that he was unable to endow Allaux with a star-like allure—or perhaps that she herself was unable to attain it.

The failure of
For Ever Mozart
heralded a breakdown of relations with Allaux. In December, Godard withdrew from his role in Tregenza’s film, which had been retitled
Inside/Out
. On January 7, 1997, with the shoot already under way, Godard declared that Tregenza could not use his name or that of the company Peripheria in connection with the film. Several days later, Godard came to Maryland, where Tregenza was shooting, to watch dailies. He also discussed with Tregenza a plan for the ending of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, where he and Allaux and the crew of
Inside/Out
would be filmed “in Maryland with a 35mm Steenbeck table in the middle of a muddy cow field,” the younger filmmaker recalled. But Godard returned to Rolle and did not come back. After Allaux’s own return to France, Tregenza sensed that Godard’s attitude toward him had changed.
²⁷

Now, only two outstanding projects with Allaux remained. The actress had spoken glowingly to Godard of her classmates at the Ecole nationale de l’art dramatique in Strasbourg and had suggested that he make a film there, at the school, with her and them.
²⁸
In the fall of 1996, Godard had invited them to work with him on a film about the theater, which, Allaux said, was “his way of being together” with her. Jean-Louis Martinelli, the school’s director, welcomed the idea. First, Godard brought the students to Rolle and showed them
JLG/JLG
and
Les Enfants jouent à la Russie
. As one student, Delphine Chuillot, later recalled, he told them, “I don’t know the theater, it’s up to you to show me what it is,” and expressed his willingness to take up a three-month residence at the school to work with the actors at length on a film, but he first wanted their input.
²⁹
Godard sent them copies of
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
, by Goethe, and asked them to write to him about it; he sent them a video camera and requested that they tape their rehearsals for him.

Yet most of the students seemed uninterested in the project. According to Martinelli, they said, in effect, “Jean-Luc Godard may be important for your generation, but we don’t give a shit about him.”
³⁰
Martinelli implored them not to pass up this opportunity, but he also suspected the students understood that the project did not truly belong to them collectively but was centered on Allaux. For her part, Allaux sensed the resentment of her peers at her status as first-among-equals. She heard excuses from her classmates for their indifference to Godard’s film: some claimed to want to do theater and not cinema; “others said that they didn’t want to do a film by Godard but a film by Tarantino.” Godard urged her to “break away from the group” and told her “that they were jealous.”
³¹
However, Allaux remained in school, the students did not videotape their acting classes for Godard, and the film was never made.

Godard’s final project with Allaux was called
Eloge de l’amour
(In Praise of Love). He described the first version of the script as a film in which “an older man leaves a younger woman for an older one and is happier.”
³²
The story would take place over the course of seven or eight years, and its action was recursive, working backward in time. The man drives a taxi, and both women are prostitutes. The story featured explicit sex scenes and scenes of horrific sexual violence.

For the role of the man, Godard thought of Jacques Bonnaffé, who had played Joseph in
First Name: Carmen
, and who was now thirty-five years old. As the actor later recalled, Godard told him, “It’s good to see you having aged a bit, you can really do something now.” Godard described the film to him as “something different. Others call it hard core; I call it hardy.”
³³
In early 1997, he asked Bonnaffé and Allaux to come to the Peripheria office in
Paris to read scenes together from the synopsis. After the two had read, Godard told them, as Allaux reported, “I need to see your skin, to see whether your skins go together.” Both performers were uncomfortable with Godard’s request, but they exchanged uneasy glances and complied with it, completely undressing in the office. Allaux remembered: “We said nothing, we stood still, side by side, for a moment, then we got dressed again.” Allaux decided then and there not to participate in
Eloge de l’amour
. “I went to have a coffee with Jacques in the café next door, and we agreed that we wouldn’t do the film.”
³⁴

Bonnaffé was particularly shocked by a scripted scene in which his character is tortured by a Russian mafioso who rams his hand high into his rectum, takes out a handful of feces, and smears them on the young woman. He let Godard know that he could not do the role; he had children now and did not want to appear in anything that “hard.”

When Allaux told Godard that she too refused to do the film, they argued. The two did not see each other again. And yet she continued to inspire his work: after much rethinking, rewriting, and recasting, Godard went on to make
Eloge de l’amour
, which bore even stronger and more personal traces of the relationship than those on display in
For Ever Mozart
. So did a short film that he made immediately after the connection was severed.

I
N THE MID-1990S
, a young Parisian writer, Philippe Loyrette, made a film in which a friend videotaped him chanting, in psalmodic incantation, the poetic “testament” written by the fanatically anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi French writer Robert Brasillach in 1945 while awaiting execution, for collaboration, in a prison cell near Paris. Loyrette sent a copy of the tape to Godard.

The performance made a strong impression on Godard and he used it as the basis for a videotaped recitation of his own, in 1997, after Allaux ended their personal and working relationship. He called it
Adieu au TNS
. Like Loyrette, Godard used accordion music as the background to his chant. Like Loyrette, Godard intoned a text by himself, standing alone in a bare room. He filmed alone, setting up his camera and beginning each shot by walking to it, turning it on, and then taking his place before the lens. Godard, however, composed his own text, a poem in a classical form of twelve five-line stanzas, in which he lamented having “pursued a princess into a theatre—heavens, what misfortune!”
³⁵

He never showed the tape publicly. The critic Alain Bergala, to whom he did show it, asked him why not, and, as he later recalled, Godard explained, “I made it on the basis of this other actor and his music, I lost the cassette, so I can’t cite the source, it would bother me.”
³⁶
Bergala considered this to be a
ruse: several years later, Godard found Loyrette’s tape, but he still did not show his film.

T
HE FINAL TWO
episodes of
Histoire(s) du cinéma—
4A,
Le Contrôle de l’univers
(The Control of the Universe), which Godard had shown in Toronto in 1996, and 4B,
Les Signes parmi nous
(The Signs Among Us), which was shown at the Cannes festival in May 1997—completed Godard’s theoretical reflections on the fallen cinema and on his personal identification with it, while also expressing his undiminished faith in the cinema and submission to its power. Both films are even more intensely personal than the prior episodes.

Le Contrôle de l’univers
is focused on Alfred Hitchcock, the exemplary figure of the New Wave’s devotion to the American cinema. Godard overlays his voice and Hitchcock’s on the sound track: as the classical director is heard describing his conception of montage, Godard explains his principal thesis regarding Hitchcock:

We have forgotten why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of a cliff and why Joel McCrea went to Holland. We have forgotten what Montgomery Clift swore to be eternally silent about and why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel and why Teresa Wright is still in love with Uncle Charlie. We forgot what Henry Fonda is not completely guilty of and exactly why the American government hired Ingrid Bergman. But we remember a handbag. But we remember a bus in the desert. But we remember a glass of milk, the blades of a windmill, a hairbrush. But we remember a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a music score, a clutch of keys. Because, through them, and with them, Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon failed: he took control of the universe.

Hitchcock’s genius, in Godard’s view, was not the ability to sustain narrative suspense but to make images that imprint themselves on the mind. Godard calls him simply “the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century,” and explains that his own devotion to—or seduction by—these forms was the source of inspiration and infatuation in his own artistic youth, when he was first drawn to the cinema. He makes clear that the essence of this artistic faith, and of the power of Hitchcock’s and the cinema’s forms, is connected to the most deeply intimate of experiences, as indicated in the episode’s grand paean to the cinema, recited in the grave and gravelly diction of Alain Cuny:

The cinema does not weep for us, does not weep over us, because it is with us, because it is us. It is there when the cradle brightens, it is there when the young girl appears to us at the window with her unknowing eyes and a pearl between her breasts, it is there when we have undressed her, when her naked body trembles with the flutter of our fever, it is there when the woman opens her legs to us with the same maternal emotion with which she opens her arms to a child… and it is there when we are dead and our corpse offers the shroud to the arms of our children.

Godard concludes with a tribute to the irresistible power that the cinema, the American cinema, the cinema of Hitchcock, held over him in his youth, the site of his primal possession. On the sound track Godard includes Bérangère Allaux’s voice (reading from Jean Genet’s text
Le Funambule
) and shows a clip of her crucial scene from
For Ever Mozart
, where she shrieks into the wind. The video breaks the words
Histoire(s) du cinéma
down to the two words
toi né
(you born) and then just
né
. It was from Hitchcock’s control of the universe that Godard was born, and with the cinema that he continued, even to doom: among its last images is one of Allaux, in her flouncy red dress from
For Ever Mozart
, running away on the sand dunes, as the title says, “à suivre”—“continued” or “to be followed.” By joining images of Allaux (and the need to follow her) to an episode about Hitchcock, Godard likened his own unguarded attachment to the actress to Hitchcock’s famously pathetic infatuations with his own actresses. His own possession by the forms of the American cinema, of Hitchcock’s cinema, led him, he suggested, down the same path of vain obsession.

The deeply personal aspect of the episode that followed, 4B, is suggested already in its title,
Les Signes parmi nous
(the name of a novel by the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz that Godard had considered filming in 1962) and confirmed by Godard’s dedication, “To Anne-Marie Miéville and to myself.” It begins with Godard’s praise of love—“I now well know which voice I would want to precede my own, to carry me, to invite me to speak, to inhabit my own discourse.” It is Miéville’s voice, echoing Godard’s on the sound track as if they were speaking together from the beyond. Godard then tells the story from the Ramuz novel:

One day a peddler came to a village by the Rhône and he became friends with everyone because he knew how to tell a thousand and one stories, and then a storm broke out and lasted for days and days and the peddler told them that it’s the end of the world, but the sun finally came out again and the residents of the village chased the peddler away. This peddler was the cinema. Was the cinema. Was, was, was.