Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (19 page)

Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Alleg’s book in
L’Express
for March 6, 1958; though the government seized the magazine from the newsstands, the review—in which Sartre fiercely denounced France’s practice of torture and the colonial policy that gave rise to it—was quickly reprinted in a succession of forms to stay a step ahead of the censors: first, according to the historian Ronald Aronson, “as a pamphlet, confiscated, then appearing as a scroll that could only be read with a magnifying glass, and finally being published in Switzerland as a foreword to a reprinting of Alleg’s text.”
⁶
When Godard took up the question of torture, and the question of Algeria, he was once again following in Sartre’s footsteps. Having made
Breathless
, which exemplified existential engagement minus the politics, Godard would now make a film on the subject of political engagement itself—and would contrast it negatively to a more subjective, personal form of engagement.

Godard was familiar with Alleg’s book (and quoted from it on the sound track of
Le Petit Soldat
), but he claimed to have had the subject in mind even before the book’s publication: “The film is born of an old idea. I wanted to treat the theme of ‘brainwashing’ which I got from reading Koestler.”
⁷
Godard acknowledged his debt to the anti-totalitarian writer even more explicitly, claiming that the film was “
Zero and Infinity
[the French title for
Darkness at Noon
] in the milieu of secret agents.”
⁸
Godard planned a film that would treat the subject of freedom in the face of violent constraint,
⁹
and
he spoke of the question not in terms of the war in Algeria but in broader abstract terms of pure freedom:

My prisoner is someone who is asked to do a thing and who doesn’t want to do it. Just doesn’t want to, and he resists, on principle. That’s how I see liberty: from a practical point of view. Being free is being able to do what you want, when you want.
¹⁰

Godard’s political film was born of an attempt to illustrate a philosophical point of crucial importance to Sartre’s project; in taking on the question and nature of freedom, he was approaching the existential question par excellence. Indeed, he declared that the story’s particular political context was incidental to the film: “It could as easily have been Hungarians continuing their fight on neutral terrain… I would have been able just as well to make it a story of drug trafficking.”
¹¹
He also said, “It’s an adventure film. I could also have made a story around the theft of Sophia Loren’s jewels. But why not choose what’s going on, why consider current events taboo?”
¹²

Of course, this rhetorical question was barbed: it was not filmmakers but the French government that considered current events taboo. His denial of the film’s relation to the politics of the day served a practical purpose: a film about the war in Algeria would almost certainly be subject to government censorship. The decision by Godard and Beauregard to make the film in Switzerland was also no coincidence: they did not need to get authorization from France’s CNC, a government agency, to shoot it. At the time, a film about the war in Algeria, especially one that had anything to do with torture, could never have gotten made in France.

As early as April 3, 1955, the French government had used the pretext of the Algerian uprising to justify wide-ranging censorship in all domains, including newspapers, books, magazines, and films. Issues of many prestigious national publications, such as
L’Express, France-Observateur
, and
Les Temps modernes
, were seized and destroyed. In the week in which
Breathless
was released, the French government seized the German newsweekly
Der Spiegel
at border crossings for an investigative report on the Red Hand.
L’Humanité
described the seizure of their issue of March 19, 1960: “In the early morning, under orders from the government, teams of policemen made the rounds of bookstores, depots, train stations, to remove the issue that had just come out.”
¹³

The CNC, which had refused authorization to shoot films that touched on contemporary politics in general, was implacable regarding the Algerian war in particular. As Jacques Doniol-Valcroze wrote in
France-Observateur
, “On the political scene, French censorship is
very
severe. We hardly notice it because,
this state of mind being known, there is a preliminary auto-censorship and almost all French films are devoid of political audacity.”
¹⁴
Le Petit Soldat
would be the first film by a recognized producer to deal explicitly with the war in Algeria. Godard complained that “young directors, those less than forty years old, have the idea of censorship in their heads the moment that they make a film”;
¹⁵
he said that “they shouldn’t worry about it,” and set out to show why not.

T
HE ACTION OF
Le Petit Soldat
begins on May 13, 1958, the date of the attempted putsch in Algeria, and ends later that month.
¹⁶
The story, set in and around Geneva, concerns a photojournalist, Bruno Forestier, who is involved with a right-wing paramilitary group working for the French government, which targets proponents of Algerian independence. The young man wants to leave the group and take refuge in Brazil; he falls in love with a young woman, Veronica Dreyer, who has worked with the Algerian freedom fighters, and he would like her to go with him. His comrades order him to murder a professor accused of aiding the Algerian resistance. He at first refuses, but is soon blackmailed and agrees to commit the crime. Before he can do so, he is captured by Algerian militants and tortured. He escapes to Veronica’s apartment and, while preparing to flee with her, is pressed by his old friends to carry out the murder in exchange for diplomatic passports for himself and for her. He shoots the professor in the street, in broad daylight; in the meantime, his organization kidnaps, tortures, and kills the woman he loves.

Godard filmed
Le Petit Soldat
in and around Geneva over a period of approximately six weeks, beginning on April 4, 1960. The shoot had been scheduled to begin on March 21, but was delayed due to the opening of
Breathless
the previous week, which required Godard’s presence for promotional purposes. This in turn rendered the shoot of
Le Petit Soldat
instantly and intrinsically newsworthy. Even before the shoot began, interviewers wanted to talk to Godard about his new project, and he obliged with several sweeping pronouncements. In an interview that appeared in
Arts
on March 23, Godard told Luc Moullet (a younger critic from the
Cahiers
group):

One always does the opposite of what one says, yet it turns out the same way. I am for classical montage and I’ve done the most unorthodox montage. My next film,
Le Petit Soldat
, will be on the contrary very respectful of the conventions. It will displease those who admire
Breathless
and vice versa.

However, the “conventions” to which Godard’s second film hewed were not those of technique but of narrative form. Where, in
Breathless
, Godard detaches the characters from the dramatic context to put forth an idea, put over a gag, or execute a gesture, in
Le Petit Soldat
he does not break with
dramatic naturalism or deliver disruptive or digressive jokes. It maintains a unified tone of earnestness, romance, and adventure, and is far more of a classic film noir than
Breathless
. The political action of the story inclined Godard to work with aesthetic sobriety; the dazzlingly iconoclastic patchwork of his first film was altogether too brilliant and self-aggrandizing for a subject of such moral gravity.

During the shoot, Godard told a journalist, “I want to make a film even more stripped-down than
Breathless
.”
¹⁷
Regarding
Le Petit Soldat
, Godard said, “I preferred to tell my story and to do fewer exercises of style.”
¹⁸
Godard’s seeming indifference to composition in
Breathless
was of course a studied indifference, in which the casualness belied a precise intention and became a sort of reverse aesthetic, an artifice of the anti-artificial. In the shooting of
Le Petit Soldat
, simplicity and sincerity were all: the film’s audacity was built into the story.

And yet,
Le Petit Soldat
contrasted with
Breathless
in an aspect even more crucial than the film’s politically sensitive context—namely, in Godard’s heightened personal identification with the main character.
Le Petit Soldat
proved to be a far-reaching revision of the concept of cinematic autobiography.

G
ODARD AGAIN WORKED
with Raoul Coutard, whose deft handheld camerawork, audacity with available light, and game willingness to abet Godard’s quest for a personal cinematic technique had contributed much to the style and the tone of
Breathless
. A crucial addition to the crew was the new script supervisor, Suzanne Schiffman. She and Godard had known each other since 1949, when they were enrolled in a class on “filmology” at the Sorbonne. She had helped Rivette and Rohmer with their short films and, after working as the script supervisor on Rivette’s first, desperate attempt to film
Paris Belongs to Us
, Truffaut hired her to do the same job on
Shoot the Piano Player
(filmed from November 1959 through January 1960). For years to come, Schiffman worked almost exclusively with Godard and Truffaut. With Truffaut, she learned the professional norms; for Godard, who was unconstrained by the usual notions of continuity, Schiffman instead served as something of a recording secretary, keeping “minutes” of the proceedings to help Godard and his editor complete the film.

Cécile Decugis, Godard’s editor for
Breathless
, was unavailable: she had been arrested in July 1958 and charged with harboring a member of the FLN. While awaiting trial, she worked on
Breathless
and Truffaut’s
Shoot the Piano Player
. On Wednesday, March 10, 1960, a military tribunal rejected her claim that she was unaware of her guest’s political activities and sentenced her to five years in prison.
¹⁹
Godard sought a replacement as open to his methods as
were Coutard and Schiffman, and asked the assistant editor, Lila Herman, whether she knew somebody, as Godard had put it, “who did not have too much experience, who had not been mistrained by feature films.”
²⁰
The young editor he chose to cut the film, and especially, to supervise the dubbing and edit the sound track, was Agnès Guillemot; like Coutard and Schiffman, she continued to work with Godard for years to come.

Godard cast as the eponymous little soldier a twenty-six-year-old actor named Michel Subor, after seeing him in Sartre’s 1959 play,
Les Séquestrés d’Altona
(
The Prisoners of Altona
). Distributing his headshot door to door, Subor met Godard by chance in the corridor of the building that housed Beauregard’s office. Godard invited him on the spot to do a screen test, which took place several days later on the set where Truffaut was filming
Shoot the Piano Player
.

Anna Karina played the role of Veronica Dreyer,
²¹
a young woman from Denmark of Russian extraction. Other parts were played by Roland Tolmatchoff, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, and Hugues Fontana,
²²
as well as by Henri-Jacques Huet (who had a role in
Breathless
), Godard’s friend László Szabó, a local professor of chemistry, a local car dealer, Beauregard himself (painfully nervous before the camera), and journalists who happened to be present at the shoot.

Godard had a great deal of trouble getting started on the film. As Schiffman later recalled, “The first week he went off to shoot with Coutard, an assistant, and Subor. I wasn’t allowed to be at the shoot, so I could only ask, ‘You shot how much?’ and write down, ‘45 seconds.’”
²³
Every day for a week, Godard and company had driven out to film the passage to Switzerland through a rural border crossing; every day, they came back having shot almost nothing. Like the rest of the crew, Schiffman had nothing else to do, she recalled. “But at 2 o’clock he came back to the office, or at 4 pm, we ate at 5 pm. He reshot the same shot for the whole week—but he convened us every day to make sure that we didn’t think we were on vacation. Beauregard didn’t understand.”
²⁴
Beauregard did not, however, attempt to call Godard to order as he had done on the shoot of
Breathless
, now that the director had made the producer’s name and fortune.

As with
Breathless
, Godard wrote the dialogue every day. A Swiss journalist following the shoot explained, “For more than three weeks, Godard has been getting up each day at 6 am. He no longer even has time to read
L’Equipe
,” the sports daily. “He has to get right to his desk to sketch out the day’s work.”
²⁵
Laubscher, who also worked as one of Godard’s assistants, made a similar observation: “I went to pick him up at the Hôtel des Berges at six in the morning. He said,‘I’m not coming down, I don’t have any ideas.’ Coutard waited with his camera while Jean-Luc wrote the dialogue.”
²⁶