Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (117 page)

Berthe goes back to see her grandmother and brings a book from Jean Lacouture (“Godfather Jean”): Robert Bresson’s
Notes on Cinematography
, from which Berthe reads aloud. She then asks her grandmother about her wartime experiences; the grandmother says that when she was a young girl traveling in the United States and was asked about the concentration camps, she “babbled always the same memories, and people reacted as they do now, before their television screens,” but, she adds, “I didn’t inhabit my words.” Berthe then asks why she herself has her father’s family name, Samuel, whereas her grandmother still calls herself by her nom de guerre, Bayard. The grandmother does not answer.

After two children in folkloric costumes come to the hotel door with a petition “seeking signatures to get
The Matrix
shown in Breton,” Berthe drives Edgar to the train station for his return to Paris. In the car, Edgar tells her that he separated recently from a woman he had been with for ten years, and adds, “It’s strange, how things take on meaning when they’re finished.” She tells him, “You know the saying of Saint Augustine, ‘The measure of love is to love without measure.’”

Edgar arrives at Montparnasse Station in Paris and remains in the
train with a copy of Chateaubriand’s
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
open in front of him, and says, “This is how everything in my story vanishes, how I am left only with images of what happened so quickly. I will go down the Champs-Elysées with more shadows than any man ever brought along.” As he crosses the platform, words spoken at the beginning of the film, taken from Edgar’s audition with a candidate for a role in his “project,” are heard in voice-over: “Do you remember the names? Perhaps we didn’t say it. Perhaps we didn’t say it. Perhaps we didn’t say it. Perhaps we didn’t say it.”

W
ITH THE FILM
’s casting, a crucial element of its emotional and historical import, Godard initiates his elaborate play of associations. The only professional actors are Bruno Putzulu, Cécile Camp, and Jean Davy (the grandfather). The grandmother is played by Françoise Verny, a venerable editor at Gallimard, who was ill and struggling for breath. Godard said of Verny, “She’d been one of the queens of Paris literary production, a bit like Lucie Aubrac was a queen of the Resistance.”
²⁹

Jean Lacouture, who plays himself, had known Godard since 1967, when the writer served as what he called a “political adviser” on the collective project
Far from Vietnam
, but they had not seen each other for many years. In mid-1999, Godard invited Lacouture to his office, explained that an important aspect of his new film concerned the relations of Catholics and Communists during the Resistance, and asked Lacouture to appear on-camera and talk on the subject, in his own name. Lacouture agreed, on the condition that he speak in his own words. Godard agreed, and then, after telling him the story of the film, added that there would be a scene in which Lacouture would have to take a stand on whether the pair of aged Resistance heroes had the “right” to sell their story to Steven Spielberg. Lacouture told Godard at once that he would advise them to do it—he admired
Schindler’s List
and considered Spielberg “a great artist”—provided that the couple had the right to approve the screenplay.
³⁰

Lacouture had obviously given the wrong answer, as he discovered when he arrived for the shoot in Brittany with his text in favor of Spielberg. First, Godard induced him to play a short scripted scene with Davy; then Godard filmed Lacouture saying his speech on behalf of Spielberg, which, of course, ended up on the cutting-room floor. Then Godard videotaped an hourlong interview with Lacouture about Simone Weil’s request to General de Gaulle that he let her parachute into France for the Resistance. De Gaulle had refused; soon thereafter, Weil died of hunger in London, and, as Lacouture later said, “Godard considers de Gaulle guilty of that.”
³¹

The rest of the cast was filled out with non-actors who were of both historical and personal significance to Godard. Philippe Loyrette, Jean-Henri Roger, and Lemmy Constantine were all connected to his past. Rosenthal was played by Claude Baignères, the longtime film critic for
Le Figaro
.
³²
Rémo Forlani, who played Rosenthal’s attorney, had written the faux script for
Pierrot le fou
. In a scene in the passageway to the Montparnasse bookstore, a crowd gathers around a magician: Bruno Mesrine, the son of the legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, about whom Godard had wanted to make a film with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the late 1970s. Outside a movie theater in the same arcade, two people are on line to see Bresson’s
Pick-pocket:
Noël Simsolo, the critic who had done fifteen radio interviews with Godard concerning
Histoire(s) du cinéma
in 1989 and 1998; and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, whom Godard had known for decades
³³
and who was herself a survivor of Auschwitz.
³⁴

These personal relations produced an unusual degree of calm during the shoot. When Godard called Roger about a role in the film, they hadn’t spoken since 1990, when, shortly after the death of Roger’s wife, Juliet Berto (whom Godard had “discovered” as an actress in 1966), he invited the grieving man to visit him. At the time, Godard told Roger, “I don’t have the desire to make films anymore; it takes the crew, the people, the money.” Roger thought that Godard preferred “to tinker with video” in a studio that seemed to him to resemble in its isolation “a submarine.” While casting
Eloge
, Godard called Roger to suggest that they “talk together again.” Roger found him more open than before and the working environment in Brittany conducive to “a rapport of discussion.” Roger attributed this openness to the fruitful exchange that took place between Godard and Putzulu: “It’s been a long time since he had an actor with whom he could speak. He speaks with Putzulu.”
³⁵

Indeed, Putzulu (born in 1967) and Godard had an extraordinarily frank working relationship. Some on the set wondered how the two would get along, given Godard’s intellectual inclinations and Putzulu’s reputation as a man’s man of an actor. Superficially, their point of contact was sports: the athletic Putzulu had played soccer and boxed, and the two often discussed sports when they had a free moment. But, more important, Putzulu is a serious, thoughtful, and dedicated actor, whose great admiration for Godard’s films translated into an intense devotion to the practical and contemplative demands of the text and the situations his performance involved. The two often exchanged letters, before and after the shoot, and had long conversations about acting.

Prior to the beginning of the shoot, Godard had expressed his respect for Putzulu, seeking the actor’s input regarding the six actresses
who were candidates to take over the lead female role.
³⁶
Moreover, Godard drew upon the substance of his discussions with the actor for the film’s dialogue. As Putzulu later recalled: “One day, he asked me, ‘How are you?’ I said, ‘Not very well.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I separated from a woman with whom I had been together for ten years. It’s only afterwards, when things are finished, that they take on sense.’ And he put that in the film.”
³⁷

Putzulu approached his work with Godard not only with a deep respect for the filmmaker, but also with a craftsmanlike pride in his own performance, which prompted him to speak to Godard with an unusual directness. The concrete result of this was Godard’s air of controlled calm during the shoot. During the first scene with Putzulu and Cécile Camp, Godard, according to the actor, “did not really know what to do.” The scene, which was set on a train in the yard, involved extras, and Godard had trouble organizing it. As Putzulu later recalled:

He yelled, and so I yelled too: “If that’s how it’s going to be, I don’t see how I’m going to put up with it!” The next day, he asked me to come to his office. I thought he was going to fire me. He said, “You yelled.” I said, “You yelled too.” He laughed and said, “But
why
did you yell?” I told him, “Conflict is natural in the cinema, on a shoot, it comes by itself and one deals with it, but I had the impression that you created conflict and were working against the film.” And afterward, he didn’t yell.
³⁸

Despite the collegial atmosphere, however, the familiar tensions of a Godard shoot flared with one performer—Camp, who played Berthe.

Camp has a commanding, oracular voice that seemed to rise from deep in her chest yet also as if from outside her. She knew that Godard had chosen her mainly for her voice, and thought that the lines in the film about Berthe, such as “She’s not very attractive” and “She was a disappointment,” were meant for her personally. As she recalled: “During the shoot, he told me, ‘I don’t want people to say that I change actors all the time, but if I had had more money, I might have changed.’” Camp also took the fact of her having been filmed almost exclusively in shadow as proof that Godard found her unattractive.
³⁹
Moreover, Camp is visibly taller than Putzulu and, as she recalled, Godard told her that “it’s important. That’s how it’s clear that it isn’t physical or carnal love, that you aren’t a couple.”

Both Putzulu and Fleur Albert observed the tension between Godard and Camp. Albert thought that Camp was paying the price for Godard’s frustrations with Marie Desgranges; Putzulu thought that it had to do with Godard’s “woman problem” as such.
⁴⁰
In practical terms, Camp had done
overtime work in Brittany for which she was supposed to be paid, and Godard told her, “But you worked badly, so I can’t do it.”
⁴¹

Indeed, Camp’s performance has little of what usually constitutes, in a film by Godard or anyone else, an actor’s accomplishment: she has no closeups and is almost always seen at oblique angles or in obscuring shadows. Yet in one crucial respect—the intellectual and moral power with which she infuses her character—Camp is the strongest female performer in Godard’s cinema. For the first time, in
Eloge de l’amour
, he filmed a female character in supreme command of her intellect, a woman of exceptional determination and philosophical insight. The only woman of comparable strength in Godard’s work is Anne-Marie Miéville herself.

T
HE ENTIRE SHOOT
of
Eloge
took place under the sign of memory. For Godard, merely filming in black and white on the streets of Paris was a plunge into memory, an active reminiscence of the early days of the New Wave. Godard chose locations that held personal significance, places where he had lived or filmed, including Montparnasse and the place de la Concorde (which figures in
Breathless
), yet to get them on film, Godard sent the crew without him—as if to find images that were not only his own recollections but also derived from a shared or collective memory.

The café where Edgar meets Berthe’s grandfather and Jean-Henri Roger, La Favorite, on the boulevard St.-Michel, was where Godard and Roger had coffee every morning during the Maoist years.
⁴²
Another café that features in the film, La Liberté, is the one that Sartre frequented in his last years (at the moment that the café appears, Forlani says, “Tout va bien”—the name of the film Godard made at a time when he joined Sartre in militant activity). The next shot shows the café L’Odessa, across the boulevard Edgar-Quinet from La Liberté, at the intersection of the rue du Montparnasse, the rue Delambre, the rue d’Odessa, and the rue de la Gaîté; this intersection is known as the “crossroads of Erostratus,” from Sartre’s story “Erostratus” (in the collection
The Wall
, published in 1939), in which a young man named Paul Hilbert plots random murders around the possibility of escape from that very junction.

Godard gives himself a cameo in Montparnasse, showing himself sitting on a bench at night and reading a book as a lighthearted young couple sits back-to-back with him and the busy nocturnal circulation of people and traffic swirls behind him; overhead, a large neon sign for a Gaumont movie theater dominates the opposite corner. This cameo of near-immobility is actually a pointed exposition of Godard’s method and of his mode of self-presentation, which turns on a small moment of urban life and a keen attention to details that, once noticed, alters perception forever: a Parisian film critic erroneously
described Godard filming himself in the “Place Montparnasse,” when in fact the official name for the great and fabled crossroads is the place du 18 juin 1940. June 18, 1940, is the date of General Charles de Gaulle’s epochal speech on the BBC, popularly titled L’Appel, the Call, exhorting the French people to resist German rule. Godard places himself in the spot of the date of the call; his preferred form of resistance is to read—and to film himself doing so.

T
HE FIRST LINE
of
Eloge
, spoken to a young woman being interviewed for a project, is: “Do you remember the names? Perhaps we didn’t mention it.” The film is constructed around the significance of a young woman’s name, which is mentioned so casually that viewers of the film often fail to identify it. While the granddaughter’s name is Berthe Samuel, she is never actually called that. Her first name is said only twice, in passing.
⁴³
At first, Godard told Cécile Camp that her character was called Iphigenia—who is prepared for sacrifice by her father, Agamemnon. That name was replaced simply by “she,” and only later by Berthe. The name had appeared in a book published in September 1999 (just as the shoot was getting under way) by the French historian Annette Wieviorka,
Auschwitz expliqué
à
ma fille
(Auschwitz Explained to My Daughter), in which the survivor of Auschwitz who recounts her experiences is an elderly woman named Berthe.