Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (14 page)

The film’s autobiographical aspect is not found primarily in the plot, which does not depict (except in scattered details) incidents from Godard’s own life. Instead,
Breathless
is autobiographical at a higher level of abstraction: the concerns of the “boy” reflect Godard’s own. In making the film, Godard would find further, more radical, ways to redefine cinematic autobiography, but replacing autobiographical action with an autobiographical “subject” or idea was the first step.

The story of
Breathless
is centered on Michel Poiccard, who, with the help of a female accomplice whom he leaves behind, steals a car in Marseille from an American army officer and drives toward Paris where he plans to meet up with a woman named Patricia. He finds a pistol in the glove compartment. When a police officer on a motorcycle pulls Michel over for speeding, Michel—knowing that he will be arrested—shoots him and then flees on foot through open fields. Arriving in Paris, Michel finds Patricia selling the
New York Herald Tribune
on the Champs-Elysées; she is unsure whether she wants to see him again. He visits another woman, from whom he steals
money, and proceeds in vain to a travel office in search of an underworld friend who owes him money. Making his way to Patricia’s hotel, he sneaks into her room and waits for her in bed. In a twenty-six-minute sequence that takes place in the room and mainly in bed, they make love, fall asleep, wake up, and talk about love and life. There, Patricia reveals that she is pregnant by him. By the time they go out to the street, newspaper headlines blare that Michel is wanted for murder. Patricia helps him stay a step ahead of the police, and considers accepting Michel’s offer to flee with him to Italy as soon as he collects the money he is owed. But when detectives find her at the
Herald Tribune
office and threaten her with criminal charges and deportation, she has misgivings. A friend finds Michel and Patricia an overnight hideout in a photographer’s studio in Montparnasse; they install themselves there but when Michel goes out to buy food, Patricia calls the police and denounces him, then goes back and warns him. He flees, but, pursued by the police, he is shot in the back. He dies in the street, under Patricia’s blank gaze.

The story resembles a classic American film noir, and indeed in a scene where Michel hides in a movie theater, the sound track plays a clip from Joseph H. Lewis’s
Gun Crazy
, an American film from 1949 with a similar theme. But Godard approached the story in ways that departed radically from its genre models, and did so foremost by the methods with which he filmed it. His years as a critic and the philosophical inclinations that informed them bore fruit: despite his relative inexperience as a filmmaker, and his scant familiarity with the practical aspects of the cinema, he applied his ideas to the aesthetic and the technical elements of his film, and the results were revolutionary.

The shooting of
Breathless
took place in conditions that were in many respects unprecedented in the history of cinema. Godard was aware of their peculiarity; indeed, he would make sure that his way of making the film would be as much a part of its public identity as the story and the actors. Godard’s novel method was not only the practical springboard for his formal and intellectual inventions, it was a part of them.
Breathless
would be an “action film” in the sense of “action painting”: the act and the moment of making the film were as much a part of the work’s meaning as its specific content and style. As such, it would be the first existentialist film.

T
HE CAMERAMAN
, R
AOUL
Coutard, had worked on Beauregard’s earlier productions. Michel Latouche had done the camera work on Godard’s short films, and Godard had planned to ask him to shoot
Breathless
, but Coutard was Beauregard’s choice. Coutard was gallantly prepared to feign a prior commitment so as not to compel Godard to work with him, but Godard asked Coutard to shoot test footage and was pleased with the results.
²⁰
Prior
to working with Beauregard, Coutard had been a documentary cameraman for the French army’s information service in Indochina during the war, and Godard decided to rely on this aspect of Coutard’s experience in conceiving the visual schema for the film.

Godard wanted
Breathless
to be shot, as much as possible, like a documentary, with a handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting. This decision had both an aesthetic component, making the film look newsreel-like, and a practical one, saving the time usually spent setting up lights and a tripod. For several sequences that featured tracking shots, Godard avoided the use of cumbersome tracking rails (on which a wheeled dolly rolls, bearing the camera). Instead, Coutard filmed from a wheelchair pushed by Godard; and for the first sequence with Belmondo and Seberg on the Champs-Elysées, Godard, planning to film unnoticed by passersby, put Coutard inside a deliveryman’s pushcart into which two small viewing holes were cut in the front. An assistant pushed the cart and followed the unrecognized actors while Godard followed the action at a distance.

In order to film at night without added lighting, Godard drew on Coutard’s earlier experience as a still photographer and asked him to name his favorite kind of film for low-light still photography. Coutard chose a film produced by the British firm of Ilford, but Ilford did not manufacture it in the 400-foot rolls that were standard movie stock—it was sold only in small canisters of 17.5 meters (approximately 46 feet), which fit 35mm still cameras.
²¹
Godard went to a photography supply store to buy out the store’s inventory. He and Coutard extracted the rolls from their containers, and on location, two assistants were employed to load and unload the movie camera’s film magazines with the tiny spools (which could be used for approximately thirty seconds’ worth of filming).
²²
After the shoot, Godard and Coutard used lightproof changing bags to splice the many short rolls together into longer ones so that they could be processed by the film laboratory.

Even film processing became an adventure of invention. Godard wanted to push-process the film, to develop it in a special chemical bath that would increase its sensitivity to light, further compensating for the absence of additional lighting. Laboratories, however, customarily processed film in far larger batches than the quantity Godard produced for
Breathless
. He persuaded the laboratory used by Beauregard to set aside a small and rarely used developing machine for the special chemical bath.

The choice of a lightweight handheld newsreel camera and an appropriate film stock and laboratory treatment allowed him to work more rapidly and casually than the norm. A letter that Godard wrote to the producer
Pierre Braunberger while the shoot was in progress is an invaluable record of his distinctive methods and his awareness of their significance. He told the producer:

At the rushes, the whole crew, including the cameraman, finds the photography disgusting. I like it. The important thing is not that things be filmed in this or that way, but simply that they be filmed and not be out of focus.
²³

Godard’s indifference to the specific image was no pretense but an accurate reflection of his conduct on the set. He habitually gave Coutard obscure, elliptical orders, as when he confusingly requested a close-up by asking that nothing be seen from the shoulders to the hips; when Coutard filmed something else, Godard said, “That’s all right,” and told him to move on to the next shot. As Coutard recalled, Godard often gave such negative instructions: “He said: ‘I want this and that not to be seen,’ and so you could pretty well figure it out… For instance, when he wanted a close-up, he said, ‘I don’t want to see the breast pocket on his shirt.’”
²⁴
On another occasion, Godard asked Coutard where the “best place” for the camera was, and then, after getting Coutard’s response, ordered that the camera be placed elsewhere. As Godard wrote to Braunberger: “My biggest job consists of keeping the technical crew away from the shoot. I am in a very bizarre state of mind, absolutely not crazed, and lazier than ever. I’m not thinking of anything.”
²⁵

Godard kept the technical crew to the scant minimum, but nonetheless found their presence cumbersome. Union regulations required him to hire a makeup artist, but Godard prevented her from doing any makeup, though Seberg said that the makeup artist sometimes slipped her a powder puff.
²⁶
The script supervisor was unable to keep track of continuity because Godard kept her away from the shoot; when the crew filmed the hotel room scenes, he made sure she stayed in the hallway. Godard’s state of “not thinking of anything” made him utterly indifferent to continuity or planning; the result was a rare cinematic spontaneity, an “action cinema” akin to the “action painting” for which Abstract Expressionists were already famous. He was aware that the film would reflect the conditions under which it was made, and that his methods were inseparable from his aesthetic.

Wednesday, we shot a scene in direct sunlight with Geva 36. Everyone found it awful. I find it fairly extraordinary. It is the first time that one obliges the film stock to give the maximum of itself by making it do that for which it is not made. It is as if it were suffering by being exploited to the outer limit of its possibilities. Even the film stock, you see, will be out of breath.

The movie and the film stock are, in this view, one; if the movie stock suffers, the film will reflect suffering; if the film stock is ô
bout de souffle
, the movie will fulfill its title as well. Godard’s notion of correspondence between the movie and life behind the camera is a stern aesthetic that unifies the film and the work that went into it, the film and its maker: it is as if the camera were turned as surely on the director and his crew as on his actors, as if the camera were running as much between takes as during them. This idea, which renders film technique personal and renders the personal a product of technique, would prove to be the most lasting effect of
Breathless
on Godard’s work to come and a defining element of his contribution to cinema.

Godard included his friends in the film. He asked Jean-Pierre Melville—an independent filmmaker (born in 1917) who owned his own studio and made French crime movies with an American flair, including the legendary
Bob le flambeur
²⁷
—to play a voluble novelist whom Patricia would interview at Orly Airport for the
New York Herald Tribune
, and he named this character Parvulesco, after his Geneva friend, the right-wing philosopher. Godard wanted the scene to play like a real interview, and he asked Melville to improvise his answers—“to talk about women or anything I wanted, the way we did when we drove around at night.”
²⁸
Roland Tolmatchoff was supposed to come to Paris to play a gangster named Balducci (the last name of the film’s publicist, Richard Balducci); when Tolmatchoff was unable to come on the appointed day, Godard asked Balducci to play a gangster named Tolmatchoff. He cast Jacques Rivette in a cameo role.

But the most unusual aspect of Godard’s technique concerned the script, or rather, the lack of one. As Godard wrote to Braunberger, “At the moment we really are shooting from day to day. I write the scenes while having breakfast at the Dupont Montparnasse.” He was not exaggerating. Before the shoot, Godard had begun to write a traditional screenplay, filling in dialogue for each scene (starting with the scene that occurs on the Champs-Elysées, where Belmondo finds Seberg selling the
New York Herald Tribune
). He attempted to write more dialogue (some of which he passed along to Seberg), but was dissatisfied with the results. In early August 1959, Seberg wrote to a friend, “Day by day, the scenario seems to be getting bigger and worse in every way.”
²⁹
Godard did not like the script either, so he got rid of it and decided to write the dialogue day by day as the production went along. Of course, the actors found this procedure odd. They hardly had time to learn their lines. The film, however, was shot without direct sound (the entire sound track, including the dialogue, was to be post-synchronized, i.e., dubbed), and so, when the actors’ memory failed, Godard called their lines out to them while the camera was rolling. He wrote to Braunberger, “Seberg is crazed, and regrets doing the film. I start with her
tomorrow. I’ll say goodbye to you because I have to find what is going to be filmed tomorrow.”

Having worked on Hollywood shoots, Seberg was shocked.
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Belmondo was able to take the proceedings as something of a joke. Seeing himself at rushes in a hat and with a Boyard cigarette dangling from his mouth (Godard’s brand, cheap, thick, yellow corn-paper cigarettes renowned for the pungency of their smoke), Belmondo feared for his career. Eventually, he felt reassured by the chaos of the shoot: Belmondo was sure that the film could not be edited into anything coherent and figured that it would never be released.

This idiosyncratic scripting produced a particular on-screen result. Godard’s spontaneous method deliberately frustrated the actors’ attempts to compose their characters in any naturalistic or psychologically motivated way. And to make sure of the spontaneity, Godard told Belmondo, “Don’t think about the film tonight. We’ll lose two hours tomorrow making you forget whatever you were imagining off by yourself.”
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In effect, Godard’s actors were quoting Godard. Rather than becoming their characters, they were imitating them.