Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (118 page)

Berthe’s last name, Samuel, a conspicuously Jewish one, is the actual family name of Raymond Aubrac and the married name of Lucie Aubrac, before the war. In the film, the young woman’s last name is revealed only when she asks her grandmother why she kept her nom de guerre, Bayard. Though the grandmother does not answer, Godard himself posed the same question during interviews: why did many French Jews, such as Marcel Bloch, the French aviation pioneer, who took the name Dassault during the war, or Jean-Pierre Grumbach, who called himself Melville in the Resistance, keep their new names after the Liberation?

Berthe’s explanation for her grandmother’s name is that Madame Bayard is attempting to keep the war going, at least for herself, since the Resistance provided the most meaningful years of her life. In interviews, Godard offered another answer, that for people who lived through such persecution, perhaps, the war never really ended—(“No doubt because the war didn’t change anything at the time for those who had a Jewish name”).
⁴⁴
But he also had a more invidious explanation in mind, which he expressed at the time of the film’s release, in May 2001:

Many French Jews who came back from the camps thought of themselves as French first, then of the Jewish religion, like me—I’m of the Protestant religion. It’s afterwards that the singularity of Judeity was constructed and they didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, which explains why they made use of their nom de guerre. The idea of the Holocaust came much later. Then Claude Lanzmann launched the name of the Shoah, so to speak.
⁴⁵

Godard’s interpretation suggests that, despite having been deported to concentration camps because they were Jewish, some French Jews took the high moral and political ground by not “making a big deal out of it.” He reproached Jews who instead claimed the “singularity” of their background and experience by assigning to the German program of extermination the names “Holocaust” and “Shoah.” In the specific case of Madame Bayard, his suggestion is, in effect, that being a resister takes moral primacy over being Jewish as the cause of deportation to a concentration camp—and indeed he showed her repenting for having been, shortly after the war, in effect a “too dreadful martyr” for having “babbled always the same memories.”

The Jews of
Eloge de l’amour
are not enlightened or ennobled by historical memory, but burdened and scourged by it, as with Jean Bayard’s self-justifications regarding his wartime conduct, his wife’s unwillingness to let go of her wartime of adventure and sacrifice, Edgar’s indecisive artistic dilettantism, and the dark vortex of Berthe’s solitary martyrdom. These complexities of character mirror the film’s political ambiguities: Brasillach’s text is read alongside tributes to the Resistance, and discussions with Jean Bayard and Jean Lacouture in Brittany suggest that the Communist resistance was in cahoots with the German occupiers.

Yet,
Eloge de l’amour
is both Godard’s cinematic tribute and rebuttal to
Shoah
, and at the same time his refutation of
Schindler’s List:
he rejects naturalistic reconstructions of the Holocaust and instead sees history, as Lanzmann does, in its present-day traces—but not in terms of testimony.
Eloge de l’amour
, made in the aura of the ongoing discussion, actual and virtual, with Lanzmann, seeks to uncover the Holocaust, in its historical specificity, as a contemporary presence. By the time of the editing of
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard was able to say of Lanzmann and
Shoah:
“He made a very great film,” but Godard shifted his admiration away from its most distinctive element, its first-person survivor accounts: “Especially when he shows himself with the Germans, he is very hard on them, he did a very important thing.”
⁴⁶

Godard, in
Eloge de l’amour
, approached the situation of Jews in the present day as one marked, scarred, determined by their sufferings at the hands of Germans and French collaborators, as a result of crimes that continue to stain humanity as a whole—but about which they do best not to speak. They should rather let the images of the cinema testify mutely for them.

Throughout the film, Godard managed not to say the words
Israel
and
Palestine
. Although the film was possibly his lacunary tribute to the Jewish experience—he held his tongue on a matter regarding which he would not be able to avoid blaming Jews—he also avoided mentioning Israel in a context that could have served to justify its existence.

T
HE FILM IS
marked by aspects and forms of the past that live in the present. When Rosenthal tells Forlani of having been in love with Edgar’s mother, the sound track features, at that moment, a snippet of the sound track of
American Beauty
, from the moment when an adult man (Kevin Spacey) meets the young girl who becomes the object of his obsession. This citation, indicating the desire of an older man for a young girl, suggests that Rosenthal has preserved Edgar’s mother in memory as a similarly young girl, whereas he, who still loves her, is not the young man he was but the old man he now is.

The shots of
Eloge de l’amour
are neither monumental like those of
Nouvelle Vagu
e nor highly inflected like those of
Hail Mary, Soigne ta droite
, or
King Lear
. Rather, its black-and-white images are infused with a nostalgia for the present: they embody history in each moment while instantly transforming each moment into a part of history, as if the present not only slips into the immediate past but is absorbed as well by the distant past.

The texts from which
Eloge de l’amour
is composed are more exposed than in Godard’s other films; they are less overwhelmed by music and less obscured by other texts or other sounds. The dominance of text marks a significant application of the hard-won method of
Histoire(s) du cinéma. Eloge de l’amour
is, principally, the setting of texts in images and performances and situations that reveal the full extent of their emotional power and intellectual significance. The film’s script is not richer than in
For Ever Mozart
or in
Hélas pour moi
; it is clearer, simpler, and more direct. The film is purified of complications, as if to bring to the fore the historical elements and artifacts, the controlled chains of associations and the layers of time, of which it is comprised.

I
N THE SECOND
part of the film, shot in Brittany, Godard used a new piece of equipment, mini-DV cameras. Albert, his assistant, recalled that Godard had originally intended to do all of the DV camerawork himself, together with her. He then asked the cameraman Christophe Pollock to join them (along with a sound recordist)—but instructed him to “film the landscape like a Japanese tourist.” According to Albert, “His idea was that with the little video camera it would be like an amateur personal archive, a family archive, like images that Berthe herself would have made or could have made.”
⁴⁷

The shots with the little digital video cameras indeed came out casual
and playful, and Godard did playful things with them. For instance, he used his little DV camera like a spy camera; when riding in a car with his actors, he refused the proffered courtesy of sitting in the front seat and insisted on sitting in the back, in order to videotape his actors as the car rolled. He occasionally filmed others from behind, such as Pollock and a passerby, and used Putzulu’s voice-over to create the illusion that the actor himself was in the shot.

And yet, in
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard used video more like film than he had before. He used few video-editing effects such as superimposition or slow motion—though he shifted the color of the video images to harsh and bright tones that he likened to Fauvist paintings. The similarity of the DV shoot to a film shoot is not coincidental: Godard’s first choice of equipment for the Brittany sequence was the 70mm camera, which offers a hyper-vivid image and extraordinary detail. However, that equipment was too expensive, so he went in the opposite direction, toward simplicity.

Here, too, Godard imbued the film with memory: the film’s color scheme, with the present shot in black and white and the flashback in color, is derived from Otto Preminger’s
Bonjour Tristesse
, from 1958 , the film that Godard had taken as his principal model for
Breathless
. In making
Eloge de l’amour
, he had come full circle.

E
LOGE DE L’AMOUR
aroused, in advance, unusual curiosity. Expectations ran high. Significantly,
Eloge
had been invited to premiere, in competition, at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001. It was Godard’s first new feature film since
For Ever Mozart
, which had been released in October 1996. Its distributor, ARP (the company of Michèle Halberstadt, the journalist who had played herself in
King Lear
), had big plans for the film’s release: it would open in eight theaters in Paris on May 16 (the day after its Cannes screening), ranging from small art houses to mall-like multiplexes.

With its wide release and young star, and with much of the film having been shot in Paris,
Eloge de l’amour
was anticipated by many as something of a return (which is, of course, what many of Godard’s fans had been hoping for ever since
Breathless
). The high expectations were stoked by an intense press campaign; in advance of the release, Godard submitted to an astonishing number of interviews. He appeared on the cover of many publications in the week of the film’s release, from
Télérama
to
Epok
(published by the book chain FNAC), and he spoke to the major newspapers and magazines as well as to many minor ones. Godard, who was seventy years old, went to the task like a person invigorated, responding with inspired literary
expatiations that went on for spoken paragraphs. Indeed, he did most of the talking.

When
Eloge de l’amour
went to Cannes, Godard went with it. Putzulu and Camp came to help promote the film. Putzulu was also interviewed by a wide range of journalists; Camp, whose extraordinary but unusually composed performance was so crucial to the film, was interviewed by none.

The reviews came in, and they were generally favorable, but ineffectually so. Most of the leading French critics admired the film but did not discuss it as a love story; they lauded Godard’s interest in history but neglected its web of historical references. One critic, Serge Kaganski, writing in the youth-oriented
Les Inrockuptibles
, dismissed
Eloge:
“Despite its spare beauties,
Eloge de l’amour
is a film that doesn’t really get it up, that is dominated by a sensation of fatigued recycling, in which the artist serves up to us again all his old numbers, but without splendor, without vigor.”
⁴⁸

Even with Putzulu’s increasing prominence as an actor, and despite the romantic promise of the title, which the film richly fulfilled, the theaters were, for the most part, nearly empty.
⁴⁹
Several months later, when Jean-Marie Straub’s new film,
Operai, contadini
(Workers, Peasants), opened in Paris, Godard commiserated with him: “I hope your film is doing better than mine.”
⁵⁰

Meanwhile, in Paris, two theaters in the Latin Quarter ran Godard retrospectives to accompany the release of
Eloge:
one showed his films of the 1960s; the other offered those of the 1980s and’ 90s. Screenings at both theaters were sparsely attended.
⁵¹
Yet in June, he was photographed attending the French Open, where his presence made news.
⁵²

Some years after the release of
Eloge de l’amour
, a journalist, François Gorin, ruefully recalled its opening:

[There were] several good reviews, the ritual press conference, a handful of spectators, and silence. It’s a film by Jean-Luc Godard that, for practical purposes, did not exist… It’s as if Godard, between an excess of praise and a lack of love, had disappeared.
⁵³

Godard’s first first film,
Breathless
, and his second first film,
Sauve qui peut
, were successful with the public and won well-deserved acknowledgment and, occasionally, even thoughtful exegesis from the critics.
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard’s third first film, found him on the highest of pinnacles—and, as he had foreseen in his many dire diagnoses of the state of the world, there were fewer and fewer people to seek out his rarefied view. Exalted,
Godard resembled a sort of holy survivor, a living treasure, a symbol of the miraculous endurance of a grand and ancient artistic tradition. Yet Godard had passed through the other side of the cinema, so to speak, and as he had become sacred, his work, with its complexities, demands, and ambiguities, had acquired the aura of something taboo.

thirty.

NOTRE MUSIQUE

“Today I have fallen from that margin”

W
HEN
E
LOGE DE L’AMOUR
CAME OUT, IT WENT
largely unrecognized, both for its intrinsic artistic importance and its significance in Godard’s oeuvre. The work that reflected the self-surpassing creative renewal of one of the century’s leading artists instead fell into oblivion; although Godard was willing to take the high road of posthumous honor, he nonetheless had been recognized in his time and was aware of the energy and the opportunities that recognition had brought him. On the threshold of old age, Godard had changed directions audaciously, yet his tour de force went unnoticed. The effect on Godard of the short-term failure of his third first film was rapidly apparent in his new work.