Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (26 page)

Jean-Luc Godard’s extreme reserve lends a lighthearted tone to the most serious thing in the world for a man in love… Although he seems to make fun of himself and of us, Godard confesses his most intimate secrets.
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The positive reviews, however, did not translate into box-office success. Most reviewers unintentionally suggested the reason for this when they contrasted the popular genre with Godard’s personal, artful, willful, albeit fascinating, approach to it. Beauregard and Ponti promoted the film as a Cinemascope-spectacular musical comedy. The film, however, did not correspond to the wider audience’s notions of a musical comedy, and it attracted only 58,153 spectators in its first run, meager business for a film that cost the producers more than two million francs to make.

Godard blamed himself for having mixed the genres of musical and melodrama, the moods of artifice and realism, the tones of comedy and tragedy, and thus fostering vague expectations. He also blamed the distributor for an advertising campaign that sold the film as something it was not. Truffaut, however, offered a harsher explanation of why the film failed to please the general public:

If one plays with sound and image in a too-unconventional way, people yell, it’s an automatic reaction. They ripped up the seats in Nice because they thought that the equipment in the projection booth was bad. Of course, one can teach people in articles explaining to them what it’s all about but, in the theaters where it was shown, the people were surprised. Godard went too far for them in the sound mix. When the girl comes out of the café, suddenly no more sound, there’s silence. No problem: people think that the projector is broken…. People expected to see a nice, classical story. A girl, two boys, in a neighborhood in Paris… The very story one expects to be told classically. They were flabbergasted.
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Truffaut’s trenchant analysis highlighted essential differences between the two men. Truffaut thought of anticipating public reaction, whereas Godard thought solely of making the film as he saw fit. Truffaut’s prudence was a commercially well-founded, if artistically dubious, response to the recent fortunes of the New Wave.

The box-office failure of
A Woman Is a Woman
was only the latest in a series of commercial disappointments for producers of films associated with the New Wave.
Shoot the Piano Player
barely broke even; Chabrol’s fifth film,
Les Godelureaux
, was his third flop in a row (after
A Double Tour
and
Les Bonnes Femmes
). A spate of films by
Cahiers
critics, including Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Claude de Givray, fared poorly with the public, as did Jacques Demy’s first feature,
Lola
, and films by other less heralded and less remembered directors. The French press, which had made much of the new directors’ extraordinary early box-office successes, now trumpeted these commercial failures as proof that the New Wave had been overhyped and had already run its course.

Indeed, many in the French press seemed happy to report on the New Wave’s calamities, after having done their best to cause them. No sooner had the
Cahiers
critics started making films than they, their work, and their alliance came under furious assault from all sides. Left-wing critics accused the movement of insufficient political commitment, or worse: Michèle Firk, reviewing
Les Cousins
in
Positif
, saw an apology for fascism;
⁴²
another critic, writing in 1960 about
Les Bonnes Femmes
, was even more comically hysterical: “Some will say that Chabrol’s direction is astonishing. During the war, plenty of people looked at the soldiers of the SS and said, ‘They are so well-dressed, so well-disciplined, so polite.’”
⁴³

The right was no kinder: the editors of
Arts
, who had published Truffaut’s verbal assaults on the beloved mainstream French cinema, now turned against the New Wave. They published a screed against the movement by the Old Wave screenwriter Michel Audiard, followed by a diatribe, in the guise of a review of
Breathless
, calling the new directors “Rebels without a cause, certainly, but not without a goal. The goal is to impose themselves on this hardly-comprehending society.”
⁴⁴

As early as September 1960, Truffaut wrote that “the ‘New Wave’ is insulted more and more each week on radio, TV, and in the newspapers.”
⁴⁵
At the time, much of the hostility was due to the partisans of the old school who
kicked back. But now, in 1961, Truffaut acknowledged the practical reasons for the French film industry’s skepticism:

At the beginning there was an excessive euphoria, then a moderate euphoria, and now a certain distrust, which is not at all abnormal when you consider that the “New Wave” has not had a real financial success for a year and a half, that is, since the release of
Breathless
… For eighteen months the film industry has been awaiting an indisputable success, that is, a film that would please both the critics and the public.
⁴⁶

The excitement of the New Wave’s early days had sent producers scrambling to recruit their own young directors to make films for them, resulting in a remarkable proliferation of mediocre films by mediocre new filmmakers. As a result, in late 1961, the New Wave was in trouble, and an interviewer bluntly asked Truffaut about it:

Q: All the newspapers are saying that the “New Wave” is finished; do you agree?

A: It isn’t as simple as that. First of all, it hasn’t been said often enough: the “New Wave” is neither a movement, nor a school, nor a group, it’s a
quantity
, it’s a collective heading invented by the press to group fifty new names which have emerged in two years, in a profession which formerly accepted only three or four new names each year.
⁴⁷

Truffaut was actually conservative in his numbers: in December 1962,
Cahiers du cinéma
published an encyclopedic rundown of “One Hundred and Sixty-Two New French Directors” which listed “all filmmakers who have made their first feature film since January 1, 1959.” Such numbers suggest that, from the first heady days of Truffaut’s triumph at Cannes and the promise of artistic renewal, inflation had set in, and a shakeout was inevitable.

Most of the directors who figured on the
Cahiers
list (from Edmond Agabra to Henri Zaphiratos) soon dropped off the cinematic map. Even Beauregard had to cut back on production, shelving such promising projects as Rohmer’s
Une Femme douce
(an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella
A Gentle Creature
, which would be filmed by Robert Bresson in 1969); a political musical by Demy,
Une Chambre en ville
, which he would make in 1980; and
George Sand
, by Varda. The open door through which young aspirants could dash into the French film industry was quickly closing. Defining the New Wave by the numbers would indeed lead to the conclusion that the New Wave ended in the early 1960s.

In the midst of the polemics and the hand-wringing over the well-publicized struggles of the New Wave, an amicable subterranean debate took place, in the back-and-forth of interviews in a variety of publications, between Godard and Truffaut over what the New Wave in fact was, and what could and should be done to rescue it. Their muted conflict began to open fault lines that suggested coming tectonic shifts in French cinema, culture, and society, and that also hinted at the eventual erosion and collapse of their personal relations.

Godard, looking beyond the short-term fortunes of filmmakers contending for a place in the industry, considered the New Wave as a historical phenomenon. He deemed the New Wave to be an ideal, an exclusive group, comprising the five Hitchcocko-Hawksians of
Cahiers
—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol—who were united by their shared experiences at the CCQL and the Cinémathèque and by their critical viewpoint. He named other contemporary French directors whom he esteemed, including Resnais, Astruc, Varda, and Demy, but credited them with “their own fund of culture” which differed from the particular cinematic culture that he considered constitutive of that central New Wave “fraction,” of which “
Cahiers
was the nucleus.”
⁴⁸

For Godard, the historical and critical orientation that defined the New Wave was also marked by paradox, “by regret, nostalgia for the cinema which no longer exists. At the moment that we can do cinema, we can no longer do the cinema that gave us the desire to do it.”
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The New Wave, for Godard, was born of its distinctive relation to the history of cinema. Godard saw the Hitchcocko-Hawksian cinematic canon not as a series of models to imitate but as a source of inspiration, a point of departure—and a lost paradise.

For Truffaut as well, the
Cahiers
group was defined by its historical orientation, but in an entirely different way. He claimed that their cinematic canon provided a set of formulas to follow, and declared that the commercial prospects of the directors in his circle depended on their willingness “to continue to pretend to tell a mastered and controlled story which is meant to have the same meaning and the same interest for the filmmaker and for the spectator.”
⁵⁰

In particular, Truffaut argued that the crisis of the New Wave was a crisis of the screenplay, or rather, of the lack of one. He blamed himself for the failure of his second film,
Shoot the Piano Player
, which he attributed to its flashbacks: “By working at it a little, one could surely have told
The Piano Player
chronologically.”
⁵¹
He blamed Chabrol for the failure of his 1960 film
Les Bonnes Femmes
—specifically, for being unwilling “to imagine how Hitchcock would have undertaken a film like
Les Bonnes Femmes
”—and he described the film that Chabrol should have made, calling it
The Shopgirls Vanish
. The editors of
Cahiers
summarized Truffaut’s remarks in a telling caption: “Let’s Imitate Hitchcock.”

Truffaut argued that the application of the Hollywood formulas that he and his
Cahiers
friends had absorbed as critics was the only way for the New Wave to reach the mainstream. But for Godard, if the New Wave (as he narrowly defined it) was to fulfill its original ambitions, the general conditions by which a mainstream—of cinema and of society—was constituted would have to change. If his cinema could not become the mainstream in French society, it was France, not he, that had to change.

Godard teased Truffaut publicly about his practical orientation, referring to him as “half producer, half director—in the morning he is a business man, in the afternoon an artist.”
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But Godard had a different—and, as it turned out, accurate—sense of the future of the French New Wave, and his idea of it was not, like Truffaut’s, market-based but essentially political.

In the summer of 1961, with hopes for
A Woman Is a Woman
still high after its triumphant reception at the Berlin festival (which at the time ran from late June through early July), Godard gave an interview regarding its forthcoming release to Michèle Manceaux of
L’Express
and discussed his newfound recognition and social status.

I’m very much in favor of the word “artist.” It’s a beautiful word which has been despised. It was Alphonse Daudet, people with big hats, flowing ties, etc.

   Today, directors are almost always dressed like everyone else. But to my mind, an artist is necessarily on the left. Even Drieu La Rochelle
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was on the left. It’s a state of mind. Khrushchev and Kennedy are equally on the right, they are totalitarian.

   Being on the left does not mean showing a worker at work. A film like
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
is what I call a rightist film. Reactionary, paternalist, in the sense that it imposes on the spectator an idea that the spectator enjoys. One speculates in advance on him.
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Godard saw and voiced the new and essential connection between art and politics, and its importance for the future of the New Wave and for his own. He defined the left as an aesthetic category and predicted that he and his handful of New Wave colleagues would find their cause advanced neither by the nominal political left, the old left that had been hostile to the New Wave, nor by the equally doctrinaire right, but by a new left that would find its most authentic expression and rallying point in a new culture—in the art of the cinema. And, of course, the crystallization of this new left and its entrance on the historical stage would be May 1968, which would finally, and definitively, enshrine the New Wave as the exemplary cinematic phenomenon of the era.

Godard recognized that the cultural politics of the 1950s were no longer relevant. In 1959, he had publicly echoed Roland Barthes’s claim that “the talent is on the right.”
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Now, in 1961, Godard saw that the cinema that “speculates in advance” on the spectator, even in the name of Hitchcock, was necessarily reactionary; that art made in a spirit of aesthetic freedom and progress was inherently inclined to the left; that the right was necessarily hostile to such art; and that a new, post-Communist left would necessarily be favorably disposed to it. According to Godard, the recognition of directors as artists—the essential program of the New Wave—was indeed political in the broadest sense of the word: their program had, after all, been called the
politique des auteurs
. Before the
auteurs
and their acolytes could impose themselves on the cinema in particular, they would need to diffuse their influence through society at large.