Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (114 page)

It was and is no more. Godard’s ambivalence—toward the beauty of art to which the cinema opened his eyes and to the agonies of the world to which
the cinema closed them—is evident when he shows stills of Sartre along with the superimposed text of his famous dismissal of
Citizen Kane:
“Citizen Kane is not an example for us to follow. Orson Welles cares nothing about history.” To show exactly which history it was that Godard had in mind, he inserts the following titles: “Israel / Ismael / If I’m not wrong, it’s German Jew, Jew Muslim.” The invidious and repugnant parallel had also become, for Godard, an indispensable part of his identity, inseparable from his cinematic faith.

The episode, and the colossal series, concludes with a self-portrait in images and words: a still close-up of Godard, in black-and-white, with a rose superimposed over it, as Godard himself recounts a parable by Jorge Luis Borges: “If a man passed through heaven in a dream and received a flower as proof of his passage, and if, on awaking, he found that flower in his hands—what to say then? I was that man.”

T
HE
H
ISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
were done, but Godard was not done with the series. When he got to the end, he went back to the beginning and re-edited all the parts to make the video effects and the overall tone of the earlier episodes consistent with the later ones. Freddy Buache saw Godard frequently and expressed some concern to Miéville.

I told Anne-Marie that it seemed to me that with the editing of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, he was on the brink of madness—he adds an image, then another image on top of it, then a sound, then he changes the first image—I told her that it was a kind of madness. She agreed. He’d get up in the middle of the night to change an image. He could go on doing that for the rest of his life.
³⁷

Godard knew that he had to stop, but he also knew that he could have gone on—“I would have added, to the six hours, two hundred hours of annexes, like little footnotes”
³⁸
—and actually imagined doing such a job for a DVD release. Though the work was complete, he was unwilling to let go, re-editing it for home video release (to his dismay, on videocassette rather than DVD) by Gau-mont. He delivered the sound track to Manfred Eicher of ECM Records, who released it in 1999 as a lavish black box of four audio CDs slipped inside four books of “libretti” featuring the entire text of each episode in French, German, and English, along with stills and a concluding essay by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Godard even considered mounting
Histoire(s) du cinéma
as a stage production in a theater (but never actually did so). The
Histoire(s) du cinéma
did allow him to achieve his lifelong goal of having a book published by the august publishing firm of Gallimard in Paris.

In conjunction with the public presentation and discussion of the first three episodes of
Histoire(s)
at Locarno in August 1995, Godard printed 150
copies of a luxury edition with images and text from the series and, the following month, contacted Gallimard about producing it as a book. Work on the project lasted more than two years; Godard was deeply involved in the layout and tirelessly reviewed the color photos that were printed from his videos.

Gallimard’s production supervisor, Jacques Maillot, later recalled, “At first he wanted a very elegant, large format. Then he preferred that it come out in a pocket edition to make it affordable for students.”
³⁹
Ultimately Godard chose a large format because, Maillot said, “the small format made it impossible to leave enough white space,” but he still worried that the books, which would cost approximately six hundred francs, would be far too expensive for students and young people. At that point, a surprise phone call altered the state of things: the CNC called Godard to ask for reimbursement of the 500,000 francs he had been paid to work with La fémis in 1990. Godard suggested that he instead deliver the money to Gallimard to subsidize the cost of the book. The CNC agreed; as a result, the four sumptuous volumes of image and text cost 490 francs at the time of their release in August 1998.
⁴⁰

With the
Histoire(s)
, Godard diversified his fields of creation; he yearned to be accepted as an intellectual among intellectuals, and pinned fond hopes on an appointment to the Collège de France. He had been nominated for a chair at the Collège by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and Jack Lang had also pressed for his admission, but to no avail: reportedly, other members, fearing that Godard would expose the institution to ridicule with his flair for provocation and destabilization, refused to admit him.
⁴¹

Upon completing
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, he invited the historians François Furet and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (separately) to view the series and discuss it privately with him. They did so, but Godard was dismayed by their curtly complimentary yet condescending responses: “I was expecting [Vidal-Naquet] to debate me, to contradict me on one point or another, some historical choice. Instead, he said to me, ‘You’re a poet.’” Furet too, as he later said, called him either a poet
⁴²
or a “great painter.”
⁴³
Godard had a fierce desire for intellectual discussion. He was the model of an intellectual film-maker in the eyes of moviegoers and critics, but for professional intellectuals, he remained an aesthete.

The end of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
found Godard at a plateau of accomplishment—and alone on a high point of Olympian contemplation. He produced three more books of “phrases” published by P.O.L., for
Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, Les Enfants jouent ô la Russie
, and
2 X 50 Years of French Cinema
. He worked with Alain Bergala on the second volume of
Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc Godard
, a collection of interviews, texts, images, and
work materials relating to films from
Detective
to unrealized projects to the preliminary synopses for the yet-unrealized
Eloge de l’amour
.

Godard was archiving himself; he was extending his brand name, but he was also extending the reach of the cinema, leaving traces of it in the many art forms and media that it encompassed. Insofar as the cinema—his cinema—was also a project to reclaim the other arts in its name, he was also dispersing the cinema, and his thoughts about it, to those other domains. Reflecting and preserving all culture, the cinema would be reflected and preserved in it as well.

twenty-nine.

ELOGE DE L’AMOUR

“I am left only with images”

I
N AN
O
CTOBER 1998 INTERVIEW
, G
ODARD AGAIN INSISTED
that a photographic record of the Holocaust must surely exist:

I have no proof of what I’m saying, but I think that if I got to work on it with a good investigative journalist, within twenty years I would find images of the gas chambers. We would see the deportees arriving and we would see in what state they left.
¹

Pursuing the issue further in this discusion, Godard rejected Claude Lanzmann’s claim that, if he found an image of the gas chambers, he would “destroy it,”
²
and also Theodor Adorno’s declaration that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz.

There’s no point to issuing prohibitions like Lanzmann or Adorno, who exaggerate, because then we find ourselves caught up in endless discussions over formulas such as, “It’s unfilmable”—one must not prevent people from filming, one must not burn books, or else one can no longer criticize them.
³

In asserting the importance of such images and such art, Godard made no distinction between archival and newly produced material, between documentary records and fictional reconstructions. As the writer Gérard Wajcman noted in a seminal article in
Le Monde
in December 1998, “‘Saint Paul’ Godard versus ‘Moses’ Lanzmann?” Godard was obsessed with Lanzmann’s
Shoah:
“For J.-L. G., it is as if
Shoah
, by its mere presence, ‘looked at’ the entire cinema,

Godard interviews the historian Jean Lacouture at a hotel in Brittany.
(Courtesy of Hugues Le Paige)

like a sort of Hugolian eye in the tomb of a cinema guilty for fifty years of being a traitor to the real.”
⁴
Wajcman rightly recognized that Lanzmann, in rejecting dramatizations and archival images, posed a formidable challenge to Godard’s aesthetic principles and artistic practice. In Wajcman’s view, if
Shoah
was a successful act of cinematic redemption through the filmed word, then Godard’s condemnation of the cinema as irredeemably fallen was cast in doubt.

The article made an impression on Godard, who agreed to participate in a public discussion with Wajcman at La fémis. The event took place, but Godard was, according to Alain Bergala, a reticent and detached interlocutor: “Godard didn’t say a thing. He said, ‘I don’t understand,’ and that was it.”
⁵
Nonetheless, the dialogue was just a warm-up: afterwards, Godard approached Bernard-Henri Lévy (to whom he had recently sent a note of consolation after the troubled release of Lévy’s 1997 film
Le Jour et la nuit
)
⁶
and asked him to arrange a meeting with Lanzmann. Lévy invited Godard and Lanzmann to his home for dinner, along with several other guests (including Alain Sarde and the Canal Plus executive Nathalie Bloch-Laîné).
⁷
There, Lanzmann told Godard: “Let’s not talk about it here, let’s have a one-on-one, just you and me. And if you want it to be filmed and shown on television, like with Duras, that’s OK.”
⁸

Just at that time, the producers of a television series on political themes,
Gauche-droite
(Left-Right), invited Godard to make an episode.
⁹
He proposed filming his discussion with Lanzmann, with Lévy as both moderator and director. Lévy later recalled:

I was to be the auteur in this film of the three of us. I was like a piece or a card in [Godard’s] game. I think that he wanted to make the film because he is an anti-Semite who is trying to be cured. Lanzmann and I were part of the cure. That’s fine; I’d like to help an anti-Semite be cured. Like epileptics who feel a seizure coming on, he felt one coming on—a seizure of anti-Semitism. He called on us so he could administer some preventive self-medication. I was ready to play this game.
¹⁰

But then the plan changed once again. Godard now proposed that he have dinner with Lanzmann and Lévy and that each of the three bring a cameraman to film the event. Each of them could then finish his own film and, after watching the others’ films, add a five- or ten-minute afterthought. All three works would be shown together as a single program called
Pas un dîner de gala
(Not a Dinner Party), a reference to Mao’s line about revolution (“Revolution is not a dinner party”), or else
Le Fameux Débat
(The Great Debate).
¹¹
Godard modeled the idea on televised electoral debates: he would represent the Party of Images and Lanzmann the Party of Words.
¹²

To prepare for the great debate at the non-gala dinner, the three men had four preliminary dinners at a location chosen by Godard, the Hôtel Crillon (a place charged with historical significance, as the German occupation headquarters during World War II and then the American headquarters after the Liberation). They ate together, and the project’s coproducer Gilles Sandoz ate at another table. “At the four dinners, none of us said a word,” Lévy recounted. “Each of us was afraid to be the idiot.”
¹³
After these nondiscussions, Lanzmann withdrew from the project. According to Lévy, Lanzmann was afraid of being “caught in a trap.”
¹⁴
For his part, Lanzmann was wary of the setup; he recalled that he was willing to do a televised debate, but not a “competition” of films with Godard and Lévy.
¹⁵

Y
ET THE GREAT
debate nonetheless continued, if one-sidedly, in
Eloge de l’amour
, the film that Godard had been planning since late 1996. Its main characters are Jewish, and the film is imbued with the memory of the Holocaust—a memory which Godard renders mainly in images and which does not depend on testimony. As such, it is Godard’s response to Lanzmann and to
Shoah
. But at the same time, in its dramatization of the Holocaust from the standpoint of the present day, without recourse to fictionalized reconstructions of wartime events,
Eloge de l’amour
is also Godard’s response to Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List
. And, finally, Godard also joins the memory of the Holocaust to that of the French Resistance, and, as such, responds to the French film
Lucie Aubrac
, the 1997 biopic of the famous resister, directed by Claude Berri.