Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (25 page)

A
FTER THE SHOOT
ended in January 1961, Godard went to New York to promote
Breathless
, which would open there on February 8. He did interviews with the local press, in which he discussed his next project, a film on “French politics” that he decided to put off because of what he called “preventive censorship.”
²³

When Godard returned to France, he received word that the brothers Hakim, producers of note since the 1930s, had bought the rights to James Hadley Chase’s novel
Eva
and had signed Jeanne Moreau to play the lead role. The novel tells the story of a blocked writer who is both inspired and destroyed by a prostitute. Moreau, who was about to begin work on Truffaut’s
Jules and Jim
—and who had done a droll cameo in
A Woman Is a Woman
—was asked to recommend a director. She recommended Godard.

The shoot of
Eva
was initially scheduled to begin in March; but first, life followed art: Anna Karina discovered that she was pregnant, and she and Godard decided to marry.

G
ODARD POSTED NOTICE
of the impending marriage at the city hall of the Swiss town of Gland on February 4, 1961, just after his return from New York. The ceremony took place on March 3, 1961, in Begnins, Switzerland. The witnesses were Godard’s friends Tolmatchoff and Fontana. The bride wore a wide dress to conceal her pregnancy, and the groom wore a bright green suit.
²⁴
The exercise was repeated, three weeks later, in Paris, for the benefit of the press and the couple’s Parisian friends; there the witnesses were Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges de Beauregard; the flower girl was Rosalie, the daughter of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda.

In their brief time together, Godard and Karina had developed a couple’s regular social habits, frequently meeting Demy and Varda to play cards on Sundays,
²⁵
regularly joining Beauregard and his wife for Saturday lunch at an Italian restaurant (though according to the producer, Godard rarely
spoke at these gatherings).
²⁶
Godard and Karina partook of Parisian night life together, often in the company of Karina’s friends, but he appeared uneasy with his new role.

Yet Godard’s domestication was somewhat incomplete, as he had also developed the unusual habit of leaving home unannounced for such destinations as New York and not returning for days or even weeks. Karina tried to accommodate herself to Godard’s habits, but they soon exacted a deep emotional cost. Karina was told by her doctors that her pregnancy was precarious and, on their advice, she took to bed. One night in the spring of 1961, Godard returned home to find her in great distress and covered in blood. She had miscarried, and her health was in danger: the fetus had been dead for three weeks. After a stay in the hospital, Karina recuperated at home.

Jean-Luc was almost never there… Jean-Luc couldn’t stay in one place, he left, sometimes he fled, and yet he loved me. Everyone called: “Where is Jean-Luc?” I received the tax collector, his friends Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Demy, Varda… who asked me, “Where is your husband?”

I was embarrassed.

“I don’t know, when he left three weeks ago, he said that he was going out to get a pack of Boyards, I haven’t seen him since.” I was ashamed to say it.
²⁷

Upon his return—without a word of explanation—he attempted to make amends by borrowing money from Beauregard, renting a villa in the south of France, and inviting Karina’s mother and stepfather to join her there. (Godard met them there shortly thereafter, bearing an emerald ring from Cartier for his bride.)

In the meantime, Godard’s new project,
Eva
, had evaporated—or rather, Godard himself had evaporated it. He had asked the brothers Hakim to hire Richard Burton to play opposite Jeanne Moreau: “They said, ‘We’ll call him.’ I said: ‘There’s the telephone.’ ‘Oh, yes, but it’s not so simple, he may not be there.’ I understood that they didn’t want him.”
²⁸

As for Moreau herself, Godard’s unease with her was apparent. He had wanted the role to be played “like Rita Hayworth five or six years ago,” in other words, as a brassy, streetwise seductress. But Moreau, a former member of the Comédie-Française, belonged to the artistic beau monde, and had worked with such directors as Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Since, with Moreau playing the lead role, Godard couldn’t make
Eva
as he had planned, he completely reconceived the project.

Coutard, whom the brothers Hakim had wanted as Godard’s cameraman,
witnessed the shift that Godard was planning: “Then Godard proposed something else to them which was not
Eva
, it was something else, so they didn’t do the film with him, and I didn’t do it with them.”
²⁹
This “something else” that Godard proposed was to make the entire film in the office of the Hakim brothers, turning it into what he described as

the story of a guy who was asked by a producer to write a screenplay about a woman, to find out whether he was really a writer. It becomes the story of a man who tries to write about a woman, but who doesn’t manage to do it. Or maybe he manages, I don’t know; in any case, that’s the story that had to be told. I wanted to show the poem he wrote, and the analysis of the poem. He writes, for example, “I went out, the weather is nice, I met her, she had blue eyes,” then he asks himself why he wrote that. Finally I think that he doesn’t manage to do anything.
³⁰

An intriguing thought experiment in cinematic form, it was also an idea that would give Moreau nothing to do. Small wonder that the brothers Hakim were unwilling to produce it. Officially, the shoot was pushed back a month, then to September;
³¹
then Godard’s name was removed from the project. In 1962, Joseph Losey directed the film, starring Moreau and Stanley Baker, with its novelistic structure intact.

Godard did not, however, abandon the underlying inspiration of the reconfigured story, and now anticipated filming it as a project of his own, minus any explicit relation to
Eva
. In an interview that appeared in
L’Express
in July 1961, Godard declared his intention to make a film about the “guy” who needed to prove his ability to write about a woman:

What I also like is the idea of a journal. I would like, for example, to make a film about me, which would recount my life for, let’s say, fifteen days, in which I would look for an idea, the idea for a novel. I think that’s it. I would try to write a novel. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do it or not. It would be my life in the process of trying to write a novel. The people I see, the ones with whom I talk. And then me, in the process of trying to write a novel. I will ask Sartre how one goes about writing a novel, so there will be the interview, etc.
³²

Godard’s films to date had evinced the tension between cinematic form and direct address. The intended first-person transformation of
Eva
was Godard’s attempt to do what he didn’t with
A Woman Is a Woman
—to address his situation and to express himself in his own voice. He was unable to film
his subverted version of
Eva
, but he found a way to rework
A Woman Is a Woman
, retrospectively, along the same lines .

After
A Woman Is a Woman
was finished, Godard made a phonograph record to promote it. Instead of simply copying the film’s sound track, he made an original recording, interspersing brief clips from the film’s dialogue and music with his own reflective, self-deprecating, punning, and revealing monologues, which he performed in an archly theatrical tone of voice.

Angela thinks that death justifies men. But that life justifies women… Because she does not separate documentary from fiction. Exactly like me. And that’s how Angela finally gets the impression that Alfred… Angela has the impression that Emile… In short, Angela has the impression that she’s being taken for a ride. I mean: in a coach. And in fact, a little like Camille in the sublime film by Renoir,
³³
Angela will wonder where theater begins and where life begins.

The record, which was never released commercially,
³⁴
was Godard’s vision of a cinematic utopia in which this hybrid form of narrative and direct address, art and criticism, documentary and fiction, would be an industrial possibility. It signalled his ongoing quest to bring these two strains of creation together. But most important, Godard’s revision of the film was his own quietly devastating self-criticism, his admission of artistic failure. And indeed, the record is a more satisfyingly complete experience than is the film.

I
N THE SPRING OF 1961
, Godard awaited the release of
A Woman Is a Woman
. It was scheduled to be premièred at the Berlin Film Festival in June 1961, and to open in France in September, a prime season for the industry’s major releases. But in the meantime, for the first time since he started to make feature films, almost two years earlier, Godard was at a loss for what to do next. For the moment, at least, the void would be filled by two short films—one in which he acted, the other which he directed.

Agnès Varda started to shoot her second feature film,
Cléo de 5 à 7
, on June 21. She planned an interlude toward the end of the film in which the main character would go to a theater’s projection booth, where she would watch a movie. Varda derived her plans for the short film-within-a-film, a silent-comedy pastiche, from a visit that she and Jacques Demy had made to Godard and Karina when they were vacationing in the south of France. The four decided to try their hand at painting on canvases, and when Godard spattered his dark glasses, which he wore constantly, he took them off to clean them. Varda found his eyes “beautiful.”

Thus I had furtively seen his big eyes and I wanted to see more of them. Hence my stratagem to make him act in this sketch in which he would take off his glasses.

So I turned him into a character à la Harry Langdon [the mild-mannered silent-era comedy star], running after his Anna Karina who is transformed from black to white when he removes his glasses.
³⁵

From the heights of a footbridge, Godard sees Karina carted off by ambulance. He calls out to her in anguish, chases the vehicle in vain, and at once plunges into depression, as shown by the enormous funeral wreath that he buys. Then, removing his sunglasses, he sees her return in good health to the scene of the accident, and charges at the ambulance driver, knocking him out and crowning him with the wreath before walking off into the distance arm in arm with his beloved.

This silent burlesque alluded to Karina’s medical problems as well as to the couple’s tempestuous relationship. It was as if everything that touched the couple turned to allegory.

I
N MID-1961
, to capitalize on the fame of the New Wave, the producer Joseph Bercholz commissioned Godard and six other recently launched directors (including Chabrol and Demy) to direct the seven short films in a re-make of the 1952 compilation film
The Seven Deadly Sins
.

Godard’s sin was sloth,
La Paresse
. His first idea was to film a minimalist gag featuring Eddie Constantine, an American actor famous in France for his recurring role as the detective Lemmy Caution, lying on a bench for a single ten-minute take. However, it was difficult to pull off such a stunt—a long take requires careful preparation and exacting rehearsal. In effect, the execution of such a bravura representation of sloth would have required too much work, and so Godard turned the gag on its head: he made the film slothfully. He composed a series of variations on the actor’s unwillingness to exert himself at all (such as refusing to get undressed in the company of a naked woman). The film’s conventional lighting and conventional acting and conventional framings—in short, Godard’s sloth—fulfilled his commission.

A
T THE END OF JUNE
1961, Godard and Karina traveled to Berlin, where
A Woman Is a Woman
was showing in competition. Both Karina and the film won prizes, which augured well for the film’s scheduled release in September. It was one of the more heralded releases of the
rentrée
—the new season after the monthlong August vacation—because, with the ban of
Le Petit Soldat
, it was the first film of Godard’s to appear since
Breathless
.

A Woman Is a Woman
would also be the public’s first view of Anna
Karina (Michel Deville’s
Ce Soir ou jamais
, the comedy in which Karina had performed in the fall of 1960, was still unreleased), and when it opened, on September 6, 1961, Karina became an instant star. Godard was given great credit for having discovered her and created her persona. One critic called her “an incontestable ‘natural’ who wins out over the professionalism of Brialy and of Belmondo.”
³⁶
Another called the film a “declaration of love” for the “gay, witty, ravishing” actress.
³⁷

The reviews were generally favorable. In
Le Monde
, Jean de Baroncelli exulted: “In its genre,
A Woman Is a Woman
is as original as
Breathless
could be.”
³⁸
Another critic bluntly declared that
A Woman Is a Woman
was Godard’s “most ambitious film.”
³⁹
One critic, Claude Mauriac (son of the novelist François Mauriac), perceived that the film was a record of Godard’s intensely personal allusions, and dared to say so: