Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (127 page)

59
. Jean-Louis Bory,
Arts
, December 27, 1963.

60
.
Paris-Presse-L’Intransigeant
, December 25, 1963.

61
.
Le Monde
, December 22–23, 1963.

62
. Gérard Legrand,
Positif
, March 1964.

63
.
France-Observateur
, December 24, 1963.

64
.
Les Lettres françaises
, December 25, 1963.

65
.
Les Lettres françaises
, February 6, 1964.

66
. Plus “143,704 in the seven key provincial cities”: Marie,
Le Mépris
, p. 21.

67
.
Cinématographie française
, January 4, 1964.

68
. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins,
The New Yorker
, September 16, 1967.

Chapter Eight:
Montparnasse et Levallois, Band of Outsiders

1
.
La Cinématographie française
, October 12, 1963.

2
. Albert Maysles, interview by author, May 31, 2000.

3
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, October 1965;
G par G
, vol. 1, p. 259.

4
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, December 1963–January 1964, p. 19.

5
. Godard had been paid fifty thousand dollars to make
Contempt
, a high-budget film.

6
. Jean-Luc Godard,
Interviews
, David Sterritt, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 17; from
Los Angeles Free Press
, March 15, 1968.

7
.
Télérama
, August 16, 1964.

8
. Anouchka, a Russian nickname for Anna, is pronounced “Anoushka.”

9
. Barthélemy Amengual,
Bande à Part de Jean-Luc Godard
(Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 1993), p. 115.

10
. BiFi archives.

11
. Sami Frey, interview by author, March 8, 2002.

12
. Raoul Coutard, in
Bande à Part
, ed. Yellow Now, p. 114.

13
. Ibid.

14
.
Télérama
, August 16, 1964.

15
. Karina, interview by author, June 18, 2001.

16
.
Le Nouvel Observateur
, December 3, 1964.

17
.
Télérama
, August 16, 1964.

18
.
Paris-Match
, June 13, 1964.

19
.
Cinéma 65
, March 1965.

20
. Unifrance Film, no. 268 (Cinémathèque Suisse).

21
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, June 1964.

22
. Ibid., October 1964.

23
.
L’Express
, August 22, 1964.

24
.
Les Lettres françaises
, August 20, 1964.

25
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, October 1965;
G par G
, vol. 1, p. 263.

26
. Literally,
The Eleven O’Clock Demon
.

27
. Unifrance Film, no. 268, p. 148.

28
. Jean-Luc Godard, interview by Gérard Guégan and Michel Pétris,
Les Lettres françaises
, November 19, 1964.

Chapter Nine:
A Married Woman

1
.
La Cinématographie française
, “Rendez-vous de Cannes” (1964), CS clipping.

2
. In another account, Chiarini decided not to premiere the film.

3
.
France-Soir
, June 16, 1964.

4
. Letter from Godard to François Truffaut, undated. Courtesy of Madeleine Morgenstern.

5
. Godard,
Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma
, p. 129.

6
.
Ch
in French is pronounced like
sh
in English; thus the actress’s first name is pronounced “Masha.”

7
.
Cinémonde
, August 1964.

8
. Macha Méril, interview by Aimé Patri,
Preuves
, April 1965.

9
.
L’Express
, September 7, 1964.

10
. The camera pans down the sign, which is arranged vertically to end on the word
main
and then pans left to the word
de
—rather than “demain,” it reads, “main de,” “hand of,” making the title read: “Yesterday, Today, Hand of…”—signifying what is learned a few minutes later in the film: that the actor, Robert, is not the married woman’s first lover. (Indeed, three months earlier her husband had had her followed by a detective and learned of that previous infidelity, which is why she now takes such extraordinary precautions about seeing her lover.)

11
.
Arts
, May 5, 1965.

12
.
Les Lettres françaises
, September 17–23, 1964.

13
. Gaston Bounoure,
Alain Resnais
(Paris: Seghers, 1974). (Resnais used watercolor to paint over it.)

14
. Macha Méril, interview by author, March 27, 2002.

15
. Roud,
A Passion for Films
, p. 95.

16
. Georges Langlois and Glenn Myrent,
Henri Langlois
(Paris: Denoël, 1986), p. 234.

17
. Roud,
A Passion for Films
, p. 101.

18
. Langlois and Myrent,
Henri Langlois
, p. 289.

19
. “And about 800 in 1976”: but of course this is another part of the story. René Bonnell,
Le Cinéma exploité
(Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 292.

20
.
Cinématographie française
, June–July 1964.

21
.
France-Observateur
, March 1, 1962.

22
. Ibid., July 25, 1963 (italics in original).

22
.
Les Lettres françaises
, September 17–23, 1964.

24
.
France-Soir
, September 10, 1964.

25
.
Lire
, November 1998.

26
.
Le Temps
(Geneva), June 7, 2001.

27
. Sterritt,
Godard Interviews
, p. 46.

28
.
L’Express
, September 14, 1964.

29
.
Le Monde
, September 10, 1964.

30
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, October 1964.

31
.
France-Observateur
, October 8, 1964.

32
. Ibid.

33
.
France-Soir
, October 15, 1964.

34
. Ibid.

35
. Ibid.

36
.
New York Times
, December 4, 1964.

37
. Ibid.

38
. Méril, interview by author, March 27, 2002.

39
. Cendrars,
La Gazette de Lausanne
, January 16, 1965.

40
.
New Yorker
, October 9, 1965.

41
.
Les Lettres françaises
, December 10, 1964.

42
. Gérard Guégan, interview by author, March 14, 2002.

43
. Godard, interview by Gérard Guégan and Michel Pétris,
Les Lettres françaises
, November 19, 1964.

44
. Guégan, interview by author, March 14, 2002.

45
. Ibid.

46
. Ibid.

47
. Jean Daniel,
Oeuvres autobiographiques
, (Paris: Grasset, 2002), p. 249.

48
. Ibid.

49
. Ibid., p. 429.

50
. “Les copains” was the code word by which the young French rock generation referred to each other.

51
. Guégan, interview by author, March 14, 2002.

52
. Daniel,
Oeuvres autobiographiques
, p. 942.

53
. Ibid., p. 942.

54
. The first British translation of the book was
Words;
the second, American, was
The Words;
I favor the former on the grounds of meaning: the book is not about particular words but about the author’s youthful and lifelong obsession with words.

55
. Claude Lévi-Strauss,
La Pensée sauvage
(Paris: Plon, 1962).

56
.
Les Lettres françaises
, November 19, 1964.

57
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, December 1962;
G par G
, vol. 1, p. 233.

58
.
Le Monde
, April 18, 1964.

59
.
Cinéma 65
, March 1965.

Chapter Ten: The American Business

1
.
Cahiers du cinéma
, December 1962, p. 90.

2
. In an unpublished essay, “The American Critical Reception of Jean-Luc Godard, 1959–1968,” Rafael Vela also argues that Godard’s films in the United States depended upon the importation of auteurism through the work of Andrew Sarris. Rafael Vela, interview by author, 2004.

3
.
DGA Magazine
25, no. 5 (January–March 2001).

4
. Ibid.

5
. Sarris is often unjustly maligned for having adapted the
politique des auteurs
as the auteur
theory
, as if a theory were any less heuristic or malleable than a policy or a politics.

6
. Such films would eventually come, but they would be not his; rather they were those of such American neoclassicists as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Bogdanovich himself.

7
. A British auteurist publication.

8
. “Incredible Shrinking Hollywood,”
Holiday
, March 1966, p. 86; in Louis Menand, “Finding It at the Movies,”
New York Review of Books
, March 23, 1995.

9
. Pauline Kael,
I Lost It at the Movies
(Boston: Little Brown, 1965), pp. 14–15.

10
. She “would not recommend” Godard’s 1965
Pierrot le fou
either. Pauline Kael,
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
(Boston: Little Brown, 1968), pp. 17 and 130.

11
. “The Perils of Being Pauline, Francis Davis Interviews Pauline Kael,”
The New Yorker
, October 22, 2001.

12
.
New York Times
, September 27, 1964.

13
. No. 2 (Summer–Autumn 1964), p. 9.

14
.
New Republic
, September 11, 1965.

15
.
The New Yorker
, August 21, 1965.

16
. David Newman, National Film School of Denmark, EuroScreenwriters 1998–1999, Conversation at Hotel Chelsea, New York, October 1, 1998.

17
. Robert Benton, interview by author, September 17, 2004.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Truffaut,
Correspondence
, pp. 251–52.

20
. Collection of Madeleine Morgenstern.

21
. Robert Benton, interview by author, September 17, 2004.

22
. Ibid.

23
.
The Bonnie and Clyde Book
, ed. Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden, eds. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 23.

24
. Godard, interview by author, June 9, 2000.

25
. Benton, interview by author, September 17, 2004.

26
. Louis Menand, “Paris, Texas,”
The New Yorker
, February 17, 2003;
The Bonnie and Clyde Book
, p. 23.

27
. Ibid.

28
. Louis Menand, “Paris, Texas,”
The New Yorker
, February 17, 2003.

Chapter Eleven:
Alphaville

1
. Interview with André Michelin by P. G., undated and unreferenced, from file at Bibliothèque André-Malraux, Paris.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Bitsch, interview by author, September 19, 2001.

4
. As Bitsch recalled, when the film was done, “Michelin had to reimburse the Germans because they said that it wasn’t what was in the screenplay.”

5
.
Les Alphabètes:
the Alphabets (the Literates).

6
.
Analphabète: An-Alphabet
(Illiterate).

7
.
Le Nouvel Observateur
, December 3, 1964.

8
.
Cinématographe
, December 1980.

9
. The title is a nod to Aldiss, whose novella
Equator
(published in French in 1963) features space travelers from the planet Alpha.

10
. Jean-Luc Godard, interview by Jean Collet (
Télérama
), from a clipping file at Bibliothèque André-Malraux, Paris.

11
. A nod to Harry Dickson, a detective from a French pulp fiction series of the 1930s.

12
. The name that Godard had scripted was Leonardo Davinci (
sic
); the change of the scientist’s and his daughter Natasha’s last name to von Braun reinforced the film’s specific references to the present day as an already alienating future.

13
.
Cinématographie française
, January 30, 1965.

14
.
Les Lettres françaises
, April 22, 1965.

15
. Ibid.

16
. Godard,
Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma
, p. 109.

17
. John Ardagh,
The New France
, 3rd edition (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 605.

18
.
Cinématographe
, December 1980.

19
.
Le Nouvel Observateur
, May 6, 1965.