Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (15 page)

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UGUST 17, 1959
, the first day of the shoot, the crew gathered at 6:00 am at a café across from Notre-Dame. The action involved Belmondo, who in the story had just returned to Paris after killing the police officer on the rural highway. Godard asked him to enter a phone booth, say whatever he wanted, and leave the phone booth; Godard asked him to enter a café, place an order, and leave without paying. These brief sequences were the sole work of the day; such short work days would prove not atypical for Godard and his crew. The absence of additional lighting, the handheld camera, the lack of makeup, permitted the crew to work very rapidly. There were no cables or other equipment to limit the actors’ freedom of movement; there was no crowd control, no attempt to modify the life on the street around the filming. Godard had calculated the rapidity of his methods, and counted on being able to fill a significant amount of screen time quickly, leaving the rest of his time free so that he could figure out the next day’s program. He often discharged his crew after what was officially only a half-day’s work, and on days when he did not feel inspired, he cancelled the shoot altogether. Beauregard assumed that Godard was slacking off and wasting money. One day when Godard called off the shoot on the pretext of illness, Beauregard found him at a café near the production office; a physical altercation resulted, and Coutard himself had to separate producer and director.

On September 3, 1959, four days into the third week of the shoot, Beauregard wrote to Godard complaining that “there have been eight half-days of
work and of these half-days, the work has sometimes been only two hours.” He threatened to report Godard to the CNC (which regulated contracts and employment in the industry) and to withhold his wages if he continued to work short days or to cancel shoot days. However, there was a method to Godard’s apparent caprices, as he later explained: “I was also sort of the producer because I very quickly recognized that what’s important in a film is to control the money; the money, meaning the time, meaning having the money and being able to spend it according to one’s rhythm and one’s pleasure.”
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Godard’s way of working not only contributed to the film’s distinctiveness—but also proved to be the best kind of advertising. Months before the movie was even completed,
Breathless
was the talk of Paris, thanks to a magnificent publicity campaign orchestrated by the press agent, Richard Balducci, who had been hired by Beauregard. The usual puffery would not do for a first-time director working with a struggling producer and a fading starlet among a cast of unknowns. Instead, taking advantage of Godard’s singular methods and the unique atmosphere that they generated on location, Balducci made them the subject of his campaign. In the process, Godard’s way of working became, locally, as familiar as Jackson Pollock’s method of drip painting. Balducci skillfully leaked information about the film, making a virtue of its peculiarities.

While shooting the film, Godard made sure that he would be recognized. He gave himself a crucial, albeit minor, role, something far richer than a Hitchcockian cameo: he plays a passerby who recognizes the nearby Michel Poiccard from his picture in the paper and shows detectives which way the accused criminal went.

The movie was publicized in three substantial articles that appeared in the mainstream press in the months following the shoot and before its release: first, an interview in
Radio-Cinéma-Télévision
with Truffaut, who put his celebrity to work on the film’s behalf; second, a long and detailed report from location that ran in
France-Observateur
, written by a journalist who was “embedded” in the crew; and third, an interview in
L’Express
with Godard himself. All three played a role in the birth of a legend. The calculated methods of publicity had the effect of canonizing Godard as an auteur before he even had something to show.

On October 4, 1959,
Radio-Cinéma-Télévision
printed its article about Truffaut’s involvement with the film (he had often written for the publication). Truffaut said that he had given Godard “about thirty” pages of a script treatment, and described its story as a sequel to
The 400 Blows:
“Imagine Antoine four years after the end of the film. After he runs away, he goes from reform school to reform school. He volunteers before he’s drafted and, when he returns from a dreary war in Indochina, he becomes a car thief.”

The association of
Breathless
with Truffaut’s famous film was, of course, helpful to Godard, but as Truffaut told the interviewer, Claude-Marie Trémois, “The pretext is unimportant. What counts—and what is stunning—is what Godard has done with it.” He spoke glowingly, if with a hint of ironic ambiguity, about the film-in-progress: “Godard is overflowing with ideas. The projection of rushes, which is usually so boring, is here exhilarating because he rarely does two takes of the same scene and when he does, it isn’t really the same scene. It is a succession of discoveries.” Indeed, Coutard later recalled, “Truffaut found it rather funny, the way we were shooting,”
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yet in the interest of Godard’s film, Truffaut mostly withheld his doubts from the press.

For the second article, Balducci had arranged for a journalist, Marc Pier-ret, to be planted with the crew as an assistant, with Godard’s knowledge and consent, so that he could write about the experience. In a report that took two full pages in
France-Observateur
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of October 29, 1959, Pierret guided readers into the universe of Godard’s production methods, and through Pierret, the public was also introduced to Godard’s voice. The process that the
Cahiers
writers had helped to crystallize—the celebration of the director’s personality through the recognition of its distinctive imprint on his films—was turned around by Godard. With other filmmakers, the film came first, followed by the recognition of the auteur’s personality; with Godard, the person came first.

This process would serve as a template for Godard’s career: interviews have provided him with a parallel sound track on the public record and a vehicle for the intellectual profusion that spilled beyond the confines of his films. In the 1950s, Godard had used criticism to pour forth his ideas with an arch and allusive brilliance; now that he was a professional filmmaker, interviews would play that role, and would do so even better—for Godard had long been recognized, by those who knew him, as a brilliant talker. And Pier-ret was merely the first of a long list of journalists who would adorn their pages with Godard’s scintillating verbal sallies.

Pierret’s questions teased out Godard’s iconoclastic approach to the cinema. In one exchange, Pierret asks, “Do you love the cinema?”

I have contempt for it. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it and at the same time I have contempt for it. A little like the way I have contempt for, and as I love, the actors who do cinema, who lend their face to all the caprices and obscure desires of the director.

While Bazin praised the cinema for its neutral fidelity to reality, Godard saw the medium’s neutrality—its dependence on external reality—
equivocally. Godard had turned to the cinema by default, after painting and writing, and he did not only hold it in contempt—he held himself in contempt for not creating from scratch, as do writers, painters, composers, for having turned to a medium that by its nature is parasitic. Yet as he told Pierret, this medium that “does not exist” allowed Godard himself to exist: “I like to observe people in cafés, in the street. I don’t do anything. I watch them. Then, I can re-create with actors the expressions, the mystery, which a sort of passivity or maladjustment helped me to discover.”

Godard also spoke to Pierret of his unusual methods and alluded to the strain they were placing on his relation with Beauregard:

I need a certain freedom. I get it by sowing a certain confusion. By playing around with the familiar ways. The producer thinks that I’m improvising, whereas I’m only adapting myself to his conditions in order to create a greater possibility of invention.

The journalist described Godard’s “possibility of invention” as he observed the director at work late at night in a Latin Quarter pizzeria, near the end of the shoot, composing the film’s crucial last scene: “The St.-Germain Pizza, 11 pm. J. L. Godard dines alone. Pieces of paper scattered around his plate of crudités. …It is not certain that Belmondo will be put to death. Godard is keeping it for the last days of the shoot.”

In Truffaut’s original idea, the ending follows the true-life story: the criminal is arrested; in Truffaut’s sketch for Godard, the criminal commits suicide in police custody. In Godard’s outline, the criminal tries to get away, taking money from his underworld friends and borrowing a car for his escape as Patricia looks on blankly. Now, during the shoot, Godard could not decide whether to follow the laws of genre (the criminal is punished) or to yield to the desire to grant him a light-footed escape.

Death, of course, won out; but rather than letting Poiccard expire blood-lessly, Godard put Belmondo through an agony that he filmed as something of a slapstick dance: Belmondo stumbles down the middle of the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse with blood oozing onto his white shirt.

In the long take, passersby, some bewildered, others bemused, can be seen on the sidewalk as they watch the action or gawk at the camera that trails the actor down the street as his overdone death canter tips the anguish of the moment into a comic theatrical approximation. Godard directed Belmondo quite vaguely, merely instructing him to run and to fall down; Belmondo chose to land poetically between the crosswalk markers—
although not for poetic reasons, but simply to avoid landing in the middle of oncoming traffic in the boulevard Raspail. So little attention was paid to crowd control that, as Belmondo completed the first take with his tumble, a policeman on duty reportedly leaped off a passing bus to aid the “victim,” and exclaimed with surprise: “Oh, it’s a movie?”
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According to Pierret, when Godard came in for a close-up of Belmondo at the moment of Poiccard’s death, the director told the actor, “Try to die well: each second of this shot is worth a week in first run.” This scene too was realized without crowd control, as crowds formed and pressed up against the director and the cameraman while filming proceeded.

Pierret’s
France-Observateur
coverage was followed in late December 1959 with an interview of Godard by the journalist Michèle Manceaux that was published in
L’Express
. The interviewer encouraged the director to affect the role of the young outlaw. Manceaux remarked that Godard had also had his “four hundred blows”
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: “He broke into a safe, got himself locked in an insane asylum, and even took off with the cash box at
Cahiers
.” She asked Godard point-blank: “Why all this?”

A need for liberty. I don’t really know why. I broke into the safe because I was waiting for a girl who didn’t show up and I really had to do something. Rebellion without a cause, as they say in America. I broke off with my whole family at that time. There are still moments where I need to be in contradiction: for example, I haven’t insured my car. I get a kind of kick out of that.
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Godard’s glamorized “rebellion” was patently relevant to his practice of film; the press had already made much of Godard’s readiness to break the rules in directing, to do whatever wasn’t allowed, and to sow a risky disorder on the set, as well as his willingness—or even desire—to endure the veiled disdain of those closest to him, such as Truffaut, as a result of it. The reports of his youthful delinquency reinforced the image of an artistic rebel with an ongoing need “to be in contradiction” with the way that others made films.

The
L’Express
interview also provided the occasion for Godard’s first, and definitive, theoretical exposition of his idea of montage as the key element of the cinema: “I read three books a day. I didn’t do anything else. As a freshman,
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I started to go to the movies. But one day, I took off. I was twenty years old.” Manceaux asked Godard whether he had ever considered becoming awriter.

Yes, of course. But I wrote, “The weather is nice. The train enters the station,” and I sat there for hours wondering why I couldn’t have just as well written the opposite: “The train enters the station. The weather is nice” or “it is raining.” In the cinema, it’s simpler. At the same time, the weather is nice and the train enters the station. There is something ineluctable about it. You have to go along with it.

Godard would repeat and rework this idea, in a variety of forms, for decades to come. Despite sounding like a joke or an incidental anecdote, this concept of the cinema formed the basis for a grand theory. Godard here laid out, minimally and powerfully, the notion he already asserted in his important writings of the 1950s, his view of montage as central to the cinema, indeed constitutive of it. His idea is to define montage as the simultaneous recording of disparate elements in a single image, the simultaneity in one image of two things that would happen sequentially on the page—the train entering the station, the rain falling. In his view, the cinema does automatically what literature wants to do and cannot: it connects two ideas in one time. Yet the organic montage that Godard considered inherent to the cinema mirrored his contempt for it: he depended upon the cinema’s second-order or parasitic status in relation to reality, and upon the camera as a passive recording device. This device made him an artist, but, at least in principle, less of one than is a writer or a painter. Thus the cinema, for Godard, is at once a deliverance and a curse. In the cinema he would be both an artist and a slacker, a hero and a bad boy.