Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (24 page)

Karina was “thrilled” to be chosen by Godard for the lead in
A Woman Is a Woman
,
⁹
yet the unflattering correlation to her personal life with Godard seems too conspicuous to miss. Like Godard and Karina, the film’s main characters, a man who is something of an intellectual and a woman who is an entertainer, a person of the body, formed a yet-unmarried couple.

Godard had sketched out the original version of
A Woman Is a Woman
long before he had met Karina, and had intended it to be a comic spectacle, not a film of confession and revelation. But the incidental adjustments to which he subjected the story rendered it autobiographical, specifically in regard to his relationship with Anna Karina. In the film, Godard revealed the emotional and artistic fault lines that threatened their relationship, and his diagnosis would prove painfully prophetic.

The subject of
A Woman Is a Woman
became Godard’s own effort to make a film starring Anna Karina about their life together. The film’s enduring importance is due to its peculiar reflexivity and the new aesthetic devices by which Godard realized it.

T
HE SHOOT WAS
originally to have begun on November 21 on location in an apartment on the rue St.-Martin. Godard had offered the tenants, an elderly couple, ten thousand francs and lodging in a luxury hotel for permission to shoot there for approximately one month.
¹⁰
Days before the shoot was due to begin, the couple, hearing Godard describe the changes he was going to make to their apartment, withdrew their consent. Godard had mentally mapped out the film in relation to that particular apartment, and instead of looking for another, he decided to shoot those scenes on a studio set that replicated the apartment. Raoul Coutard, the cameraman, was pleased to have at his disposal a studio’s technical resources—walls that could be shifted to facilitate camera moves, rafters from which lights could be hung. But Godard would have none of it; he specified that the apartment be reconstructed precisely, down to its inconveniences, with its walls and pillars fixed in place. As Anna Karina later recalled: “Every night, he locked the door behind him. Nobody could enter the apartment until he arrived in the morning to open it. He filmed in the studio as if he were on location. The others”—Coutard and the rest of the crew—“protested.”
¹¹

The shoot began at the studio on November 28, 1960. But after several days of filming, Godard was dissatisfied; in particular, he said he did not like the way that Karina climbed into bed for a scene with Brialy. He attempted the gesture himself and, as Coutard recalled, declared: “It’s crazy. We’re trying to film Anna going to bed in her room and there’s no ceiling. Anna has never slept in a room that hasn’t got a ceiling.”
¹²
Godard had a ceiling built, at great expense, telling Beauregard, “If there isn’t a ceiling, Anna can’t do the scene.” But he admitted to a journalist a more practical reason for putting a ceiling in place: “Just to prevent the technicians from lighting the set from above. The lighting men were rather startled to have to work this way, but the effect was more natural.”
¹³
Godard’s pretext about Karina’s performance in a ceilingless room and his simpler, more practical rationale boiled down to the same idea: Godard wanted the film to be not realistic but real. He was not interested in constructing a set that
resembled
an apartment; rather, he wanted to film in a place that
was
an apartment (or a replica of one). Whether the setting actually affected Karina’s performance was beside the point; if Godard was satisfied with the authenticity of the space, he would be satisfied that whatever performance she rendered in it would be validated as authentic as well.

Godard’s intentional allusions to his private life were imprinted in the film’s first dramatic scene. When Angela brings lunch to Emile in his shop and peruses some magazines concerning pregnancy and childbirth, she takes them from a rack that prominently features a magazine called
Le Cinéma Chez Soi
(The Cinema at One’s Home, or Home Movies). The ambition that Godard asserted in
Le Petit Soldat
—to film his own voice, his own look, and his own situation, albeit represented by another person—was now set forth in its ultimate form: what Godard wanted, ideally, was to make home movies in the guise of a fictional feature film, and to make a feature film that would fulfill the intimate function of a home movie.

T
HE SHOOT OF
A Woman Is a Woman
differed from that of Godard’s first two films in one crucial respect: because the principal location (whether the apartment or the studio) would be available only for a brief period of time, Godard had to film the scenes in clusters, and the story out of sequence, as was typical for the industry. Yet Godard again wrote the dialogue at the last minute (as he said, “in the studio, while the actors were getting made up”).
¹⁴
(To find out the day’s agenda, the production manager, Philippe Dussart, fished Godard’s notes from the garbage can.) But this time, because of the direct sound, Godard could not call the lines out to the actors without rendering the live sound unusable. The actors therefore had to learn their lines
immediately. This made for a very demanding shoot—and not least, for Godard himself. Brialy admitted,

I had complete confidence in Godard, but still, not to know anything a minute ahead of what one is going to shoot, it’s stressful. And Godard doesn’t say a word. He paces around on the set, looking off into space, his face blank, hermetic. The first three days, I don’t know how I stood it.
¹⁵

Moreover, the pressure of limited studio time did not allow Godard absolute freedom and caprice: for the most part, Godard stayed in the studio from noon until 8:00
PM
and almost every day shot the three minutes of screen time that he needed to complete. It was the compulsion to push ahead, on the grounds of budgetary constraints, regardless of inspiration or the lack of it, that made Godard describe the film as having been directed “in a single brushstroke” and his work on it as “almost automatic writing.”
¹⁶

The stress of the shoot coalesced with the drama of one of the film’s key moments: when Angela cries in despair over Emile’s unwillingness to get her pregnant, she stumbles over her lines as she laments in close-up, “I think women who don’t cry are stupid, trying to limit—no, that’s not right, is it? No. I think that women who don’t cry are stupid. Modern women just want to imitate men.” Karina’s tears fall all the more copiously as she struggles with her lines. In the editing room, Godard used both takes, the one where Karina blows the line tearfully and the one where she gets it right.

In the context of the story, the flub and the tears dramatize Angela’s frustration with Emile, but in the context of the shoot, they lay bare Karina’s frustrations with Godard’s demands that she perform complicated scenes in direct sound with minimal preparation—a demand that was all the more difficult for Karina because she was an untrained and inexperienced actress. The shoot was stormy: on one occasion, Karina ran off the set and Godard ran after her. Brialy reported that the actress “began to assail our dear Godard with very crude words.” He described their tormented union throughout the shoot: “They tore each other apart, argued, loved each other, hated each other, screamed at each other.”
¹⁷
Godard was nonetheless especially solicitous of Karina on the set, and Brialy and Belmondo resented his exclusive attention to his lead actress, criticizing him for not even acknowledging them when he arrived at the set. The next day, Godard sarcastically greeted the actors with two bouquets of flowers.

G
ODARD’S FRIEND JEAN-PIERRE
Laubscher reported for a Swiss newspaper on a day’s shooting in a café on the rue du Faubourg-St.-Denis, where
he elicited Godard’s delicate yet precise judgment of the work at hand: “Ultimately, the moral of this story lacks cheerfulness.”
¹⁸
Yet Godard filmed the scenes in a cheerful, overtly comic Punch-and-Judy manner that amplified the antic tone of the published synopsis. In the very first shot, Anna Karina enters and leaves a café and winks at the camera, the first of many occasions when the actors look into the camera and address the audience (Alfred watches Angela leave, for example, and tells the camera, “She leaves”; elsewhere, Angela orders Emile—or rather, Karina orders Brialy—to bow to the audience before playing a scene). The actors mug at the camera exactly as people do in home movies, and when they revert to their roles, they play them with the conspicuous theatricality of nonactors calling attention to the fact that they are performing. During the shoot, Brialy described to a journalist this mixture of tones: “We have to play the false situations truly, and the true ones falsely.”
¹⁹

This breaking of the fourth wall aptly joined with the chipper, exaggerated acting to convey a style appropriate to that of the music hall or the popular comic theater; in fact, the most significant change that Godard made to the story as written was to turn it into a musical comedy. Nothing in Godard’s script treatment suggested that the film would be what Godard called “a musical comedy in the classical sense of the term, with dialogue scenes and then all of a sudden, scenes with songs.”
²⁰

As he approached the shoot, however, Godard changed his ideas drastically—instead of filming a musical, he decided to make a film about the musical that he would not make.

For me, it’s a film on the nostalgia for musical comedy, as when Anna says: “Ah! I’d like to be in a musical comedy,” it was rather in that vein. I had thought of it afterward, so I did the dialogue and then after, with [Michel] Legrand, we made music that gave the impression that the people were often singing. I mean, which is placed at the same time as, and under, the words in order to give them the tone of opera. It isn’t a musical comedy, but it isn’t just a talking film either. It’s a regret that life is not lived in music.
²¹

The film contains a great deal of music and a wealth of references and borrowings from musical comedies such as
The Pajama Game
(which Godard had praised at length in
Cahiers
in 1958). But instead of having his characters sing songs composed for the movie, Godard took advantage of every situation—music hall, café, jukebox, and radio—to bring music into the action, by having the actors hum, whistle, and sing, even a line or a phrase. There isn’t very much singing in the film. Most of the music in the film was applied by Godard to the sound track in the editing room.

Indeed, the editing room is the principal site of Godard’s innovation and invention on
A Woman Is a Woman
. The editing works against the conventional purpose of the process, which is to overcome any disparities in the footage, to emphasize the continuities and efface the discontinuities, to advance the illusion of a unified fiction.
A Woman Is a Woman
is constructed on exactly the opposite principle: it is constructed as a collage of its footage. Even in
Breathless
, Godard papered over many of his most audacious jump cuts with a continuous sound track.
A Woman Is a Woman
, on the other hand, features images that are not so much disconnected as simply unconnected, as well as breaks and jumps in sound that are as essential as those of the image. The editor Agnès Guillemot recalled that Godard “came up with the idea of alternating… shots with direct sound and shots dubbed with music underneath. And quite systematically. So there was always a shot dubbed with music followed by a shot with direct sound.”
²²
Godard edited the film precisely to call attention to the disparate places and times in which (and of which) the film was constructed, systematically unraveling the strands of image and sound that weave the cinematic illusion.

T
HE ODD PATHOS
of
A Woman Is a Woman
is due to the contradiction on which it was constructed: originally a simple comedy, Godard ended up using the comic framework to express difficult truths about his incipient relationship with Anna Karina. Godard expressed a great deal, very early and very publicly, about their life together, but he did this by way of devices so distancing, distracting, and self-inhibiting as to doom the film in advance.

And yet it was in this failure that Godard succeeded, disturbingly, in putting on the screen his painfully intimate, confessional, and accusatory view of his home life with Anna Karina as he experienced it. The comic posturing of the actors in the film, the antic effort to simulate gaiety in this atmosphere, was Godard’s way of conveying his frustrations. The central shot in
A Woman Is a Woman
is the one in which Emile comes home and finds Angela after she has made love with Alfred. He follows her through the apartment and around the dining-room table, and the camera watches him pursue her, until Emile disappears from view and Angela looks into the camera as she retreats from it, attempting to elude its gaze like a hunted animal. Godard’s view through camera, which starts the shot in objective balance between Emile and Angela, comes to identify with Emile, and Anna Karina shrinks from its inquisitorial stare as does Angela from Emile’s. In the shot’s shifting point of view, Godard tips his hand in assimilating Emile’s scrutiny of Angela to his own of Karina. The subtle device makes the stress of their work and life together apparent.

A Woman Is a Woman
offers a Cinemascope spectacle that reveals the confinement within four walls of domestic life. In the street, the wide screen is full; at home, it is empty, the apartment’s whitewashed, bare-walled breadth indicative of the dead living space that cried out for a joint activity to fill the couple’s time together. Angela and Emile suffer a domestic void that, in this film as in all of Godard’s films, is the curse of all couples who do not have a project of work together. Though the film has a conventionally happy ending, it foretells doom for the relationship of the professional performer and the bookish intellectual who lack a shared project of work, and predicts problems for Godard and Karina unless she put aside her desire to be a regular actress and continued to work with him toward a common end.