Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (18 page)

Now, while planning
Le Petit Soldat
, Godard sent the model a telegram asking to speak with her about a different role in a different film, possibly the lead. Given her experience with the director in Beauregard’s office, she had some idea of what the role would, she thought, likely entail, so she ignored the message. But when she told two actor friends (Claude Brasseur and Sady Rebbot, both of whom would later work with Godard) about the note, they told her to respond at once, because they had heard rumors that Godard’s yet-unreleased film was remarkable.

She met Godard at Beauregard’s small office on the rue de Cérisoles. She took a seat. He walked around her several times and told her to come back the next day to sign a contract. She asked whether she would have to get undressed. He said, “No, it’s a political film.” She said that she wouldn’t know how to give a political speech; he said, in a colossal deception, “There aren’t any speeches, so come sign tomorrow.” She could not sign, however, because the actress, Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer, known professionally as Anna Karina (a name bestowed upon her two years earlier, at the beginning of her modeling career in Paris, shortly after her arrival from Denmark, by Coco Chanel in the offices of
Elle
), was only nineteen, and a minor under French law regarding contracts. (Her mother promptly traveled from Denmark to Paris to sign on her behalf.)

Shortly after Karina’s contract was signed, Godard’s handwritten ad appeared in
La Cinématographie française
. The effect of this publicity stunt was to make her casting appear to be the result of a response to the ad. Unaware of the ad, Karina was returning to her apartment when her concierge reported the contents of an article in
France-Soir
, to the effect that Godard had met Karina through a want ad placed in the trade journal, looking for (as she said) his “actress and soul mate.” Karina asked the concierge what this meant. To the concierge, it meant that the actress had slept with the director to get her role. The young actress, who was furious at what she considered a humiliating insinuation, returned to Beauregard’s office in tears, ready to repudiate the contract and face the consequences. The next day, Godard sent her a telegram making poetic reference to her Danish nationality—“A character from Hans Christian Andersen has no right to cry”—which also suggested that through her association with him, she had embarked on a fairy-tale destiny. She ignored the telegram; the director
appeared at her door with an enormous bouquet of roses to make amends, and apologized for the ad, which, he said, was Balducci’s idea.
⁶⁶

Though Karina had already signed her contract, Godard began his effort to win her over to his cause. Karina recalled, “He invited me to a screening of
Breathless
. I didn’t like it at all. Then we had dinner together. None of this appealed to me in the least. I was basically a little suspicious.”
⁶⁷
Nonetheless, she accepted Godard’s request that she do a screen test:

One week later, during the screen test, he interrogated me.

Do you like to read?

Which books?

Which music?

And what about boys. Do you like boys?

What kind of boys?

Good Lord, what does he want from me? I didn’t want to answer. First of all, I thought it was none of his business and besides, it seemed very strange. I was on the verge of tears.

I said to him: Listen, this really is none of your business!

He didn’t insist.
⁶⁸

But of course, since Godard sought to eliminate the barrier between the personal and the artistic, between life on-camera and off, he would soon make it his business.

Anna Karina, during the shoot of
Le Petit Soldat (The Kobal Collection / Films Beauregard / SNC)

four.

LE PETIT SOLDAT

“The sound of one’s own voice”

T
HE “POLITICAL” FILM THAT
G
ODARD PLANNED TO MAKE
after
Breathless
, the film that would have to do with torture, concerned France’s war in Algeria.

That country, a French colony since 1830, had been fighting a guerrilla war for independence since 1955. The position of French citizens and troops in Algeria was growing untenable; they were coming under ever more violent attack from an increasingly organized Algerian resistance, and the army responded with escalating brutality. France had a half-million troops in Algeria and had widened the war to target Algerian militants across the border in Tunisia. Extrajudicial killings of Algerian activists by French agents had become commonplace, as had the assassination of French officials and notables in Algeria by Algerian militants.

As the war in Algeria grew more difficult, the French government seemed to hint at the possibility of autonomy for Algeria. In response, on May 13, 1958, French military leaders in Algeria took over the French government in Algiers, and were attempting to carry out a military takeover of France itself. The plotters demanded that General Charles de Gaulle, who had resigned the French presidency in 1946 after parliamentary maneuvers had limited his authority and who had been out of politics since then, return to power. He and the National Assembly agreed; the result was the end of the Fourth Republic, the unstable parliamentary regime that had yielded twenty-two prime ministers between 1946 and 1958.

The sixty-eight-year-old general used force to put down the coup attempt and governed with plenipotentiary powers for six months. In September
1958, the new French constitution, establishing the Fifth Republic (the current regime, which accords the president great powers), was voted in by a large majority, and de Gaulle himself was elected president (unopposed in a plebiscite) three months later. He was a paradoxical figure: though the army had imposed him on France as a bulwark against autonomy for Algeria, he had privately been advocating its independence for years. Nonetheless, de Gaulle was received by most French intellectuals and by the left as the instrument of the military insurrection and thus as the agent of a soft fascism.

He took over at a moment of crisis. Not only was the war itself going terribly for France, but in de Gaulle’s first months in office, metropolitan France endured a campaign of terrorism by Algerian independence fighters: in August 1958, several policemen were ambushed, fuel stocks throughout France were destroyed, a police station was attacked; on September 15, 1958, an attempt was made on the life of Minister of Information Jacques Soustelle.

Some French citizens, especially intellectuals, had begun to collaborate secretly with the violent Algerian resistance and its campaign, in France and throughout Western Europe, against the French government. These activists, nicknamed the
porteurs de valises
(the baggage carriers), were organized and led, starting in 1957, by Francis Jeanson, a professor of philosophy and a colleague of Sartre’s at
Les Temps modernes
. Jeanson’s loosely assembled network hid and helped to finance agents of Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Within France and indeed elsewhere in Europe, the French secret police, aided by militant rightists, carried on their own dirty war to combat the FLN; targeted assassinations were carried out by the Red Hand, a clandestine group of vigilantes.

It was against this violent backdrop that de Gaulle gave a speech on French television on September 16, 1959, the day after the end of shooting on
Breathless
, in which he raised the possibility of Algerian self-determination. His extended time frame, however, which was intended to improve France’s negotiating position regarding oil fields, military bases, and the status of French citizens in an independent Algeria, instead provoked greater violence from Algeria’s independence fighters (who thought the pace too slow) and the defenders of the colony (who saw it slipping away). Despite his intention of setting Algeria free, de Gaulle intensified the fight against Algerian nationalists in the hope of establishing there a pacified and tractable state.

G
ODARD’S ABSORPTION IN
the cinema to the exclusion of current politics was exemplified in his admission that during the attempted coup by the French military in May 1958, he was at the Cannes festival, oblivious to the
crisis.
¹
This remark paralleled the criticism that was widely leveled, particularly by the intellectual left, at the early films of the New Wave for their narrow concern with private and intimate subjects. At the very least, the Hitchcocko-Hawksians had done their best to maintain an apolitical stance—the war in Algeria was mentioned in
Cahiers du cinéma
only once, in passing—though the critics did not avoid politics in their personal lives. François Truffaut frequented the writer and convicted collaborator Lucien Rebatet (who had been an esteemed film critic under the nom de plume François Vinneuil); in
Breathless
Godard alludes to his friend on the far right, Jean Parvulesco; the
Cahiers
group included among its friends the rightist provocateur Paul Gégauff. The appearance of the actor Jean-Claude Brialy repeating Gégauff’s stunt and turning up in a German military uniform in Claude Chabrol’s
Les Cousins
—which, at the time of its release in March 1959, was the New Wave’s biggest commercial success to date—prompted charges that the cinematic movement was a bastion of extreme rightism.

Godard himself had been attacked for what some saw as the politics implicit in
Breathless;
one Parisian critic had gone so far as to denounce “the type of anarcho-fascist ideal that is unleashed by the film.”
²
Others paired it with Chabrol’s films to suggest a connection in suspect political affiliations. Left-wing critics took Godard to task for Michel Poiccard’s remark that he is “one of the few guys in France who really likes” the police; one likened Poiccard to “a paratrooper on leave”;
³
another called him “one of those guys who writes ‘Death to Jews!’ on the walls of the métro and spells it wrong.”
⁴
From Switzerland, the critic (and Cinémathèque Suisse founder) Freddy Buache claimed that “
Breathless
poses the first unambiguous prototype of the Fascist arrogance that is hiding in the hollow of the New Wave.”
⁵

Although Godard claimed that
Breathless
was “a film on the necessity of engagement,” he also could not deny its lack of overt engagement with the politics of the day. Since he and the New Wave were so casually and widely charged with promoting political noncommitment, Godard self-consciously took on the most pressing contemporary political subject in order to show that the New Wave could also be openly political. Yet he would do so in a way that was so personal, and so independent of any prevailing orthodoxy, that his will to engagement would merely succeed in infuriating almost everybody and satisfying almost nobody. More than proof of an expressly political engagement, Godard’s second film,
Le Petit Soldat
, was above all a revision, and a correction, of the autobiographical constructions of
Breathless
.

G
ODARD’S DECLARATION THAT
he was planning to make a film that would be “something about torture” carefully omitted any allusion to Algeria,
though the implication was difficult to miss. A book published two years earlier made clear what was at stake. In June 1957, Henri Alleg, a French journalist in Algeria who had gone into hiding after writing in favor of Algerian independence, was arrested by the French army and tortured in order to compel him to divulge the names of Algerian fighters with whom he was presumed to associate. Remanded to prison, he wrote a detailed account of his experience of torture. His book,
La Question
(
The Question
), was published in January 1958 and posed the moral problem faced by France in attempting to suppress resistance to its colonization of Algeria. The book was seized in the name of government censorship, as were most objective accounts of French actions in Algeria. It was a scantly publicized but well-known fact that the French army practiced torture there, and did so not as an aberration or as a violation of procedure, but under orders from top officers and with the knowledge and approval of civilian authorities. However, during World War II, many members of the French Resistance had been tortured under German occupation, and many French people found it intolerable that liberated France would also engage in torture. The revelations of torture by the French government now made many French citizens question the cost of holding on to Algeria.