Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (27 page)

The New Wave defied predictions of its early demise; in the early 1960s, when it seemed to be nearing the end, it had barely gotten started. The first burst of energy, the Big Bang from
Cahiers
into the French cinema, had been unleashed in 1959 and 1960. The rate of expansion of the New Wave’s cinematic universe did slow appreciably in the following few years, but in the process, the movement crystallized, matured, spread beyond France into an international phenomenon, and indeed advanced, both practically and artistically, for many decades and arguably to the present day.

In the fall of 1961, however, this was not self-evident, and Godard’s work too was slowed by the state of the local film industry. He had been considering the possibility of filming
La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette
by Georges Bernanos (a novel about a neglected, abused young girl who commits suicide, which would ultimately be filmed by Robert Bresson in 1966). However, under the financial and practical pressure of the moment, Godard changed his plans. On October 28, 1961, Truffaut wrote to a friend: “Godard is very dismayed by the failure of his latest film,”
A Woman Is a Woman
, and “had decided against
Mouchette
and is looking for a project for Anna Karina who in a few months has become his sole reason for living… I believe—and so does he—that it would be to his advantage to adapt a major novel.”
⁵⁶

A Woman Is a Woman
represented Karina’s coming-out, and the film’s failure was a painful augury of the couple’s life together. If Godard was hoping to make Karina a grand romantic heroine in a movie, it was to exalt her role in his life. In seeking a novel to adapt, Godard was conceiving a cinematic spectacle that would bring Karina the cultural cachet that she could never get from starring in films by more conventional, commercially successful directors.

But for the time being, Godard did not have a project in which to film
Anna Karina to her advantage, so she did not wait for more “home movies” but continued to establish herself as a professional. In line with the allegorical prognostications of
A Woman Is a Woman
, trouble resulted.

In September 1961, Karina began work on the second feature film by the director Jacques Bourdon,
Le Soleil dans l’oeil
(Sun in the Eyes). Most of the shoot took place on Corsica. The story concerned a Danish woman who goes to the island to follow a man, played by the young actor Jacques Perrin. The shoot itself was innocuous fodder for the popular press: when Godard traveled to Corsica to celebrate Karina’s twenty-first birthday on September 22,
France-Soir
ran a photo of the actress blowing out candles on a cake as he and Perrin looked on. But shortly after the actress returned to Paris, in late November 1961, reports on the film became the pretext for the public revelation of intimate agonies, because the actress was hospitalized following an attempted suicide. The story that emerged in the coming days was the following:

During the course of the shoot, Karina decided that she would leave Godard to marry Perrin. According to
France-Soir
, Karina said, “I admire Jean-Luc very much. But he’s of another generation. Whereas Jacques is my double.”
⁵⁷
On the night between November 21 and 22, Karina told Godard of her intention to leave him. In the resulting scene, Godard physically destroyed the possessions in their apartment—furniture, a tape recorder, his clothing (not hers, because, he told Jean-Pierre Melville, “it would have hurt her too much”),
⁵⁸
fixtures, Karina’s teddy bears—and left. Karina was reported to have taken an overdose of barbiturates. Perrin came to the apartment, found Karina ill, and called for an ambulance. She was hospitalized, then released on the morning of November 24 for rest and further medical attention at the apartment of the film’s producer, Eric Schlumberger. Perrin and Godard both came to the actress’s bedside (one account even has them meeting there).
⁵⁹
“While the producer Eric Schlumberger calmly saw to the care of Anna Karina, Jean-Luc Godard looked for Perrin in the bistros of boulevard Exelmans to resolve the situation with dice. They finally challenged each other to poker, but the game was interrupted by a struggle with photographers.”
⁶⁰
That day, the physician attending Karina declared the environment “unfavorable” for her recovery and ordered her to rest in a clinic in Neuilly, a wealthy suburb of Paris. A week later, Karina was able to film the last sequences of the film, in and around Paris, together with Perrin.

The papers reported that Godard and Karina would divorce and that Karina would marry Perrin.

The resolution to this marital crisis proved to be the one hinted at in
A Woman Is a Woman:
a joint project. In January 1962,
⁶¹
it was announced (with evidence attached in the form of a tender photo of the couple) that
Godard and Karina had reconciled and that he would direct her in a new film,
Vivre sa vie
(literally, “To Live Her/His Life”; released in the United States as
My Life to Live
). The producer was to be Pierre Braunberger, who had brought masterworks by Jean Renoir to the screen in the 1920s and’ 30s, produced Godard’s three short films from 1957 to 1958, and had recently made
Shoot the Piano Player
. Godard relied on a subject which he claimed to have gotten from Truffaut (and which Braunberger claimed to have proposed): the story of “a young woman who, to round off her monthly pay, takes to prostitution.” Godard submitted a “screenplay” of several paragraphs to the CNC in the hope of obtaining an advance on receipts; his request was turned down. Instead, the budget went from low to minimal: 400,000 francs, even below that of
Breathless
. Godard decided that Karina need not be paid, since they were living together.

Nana walks the streets, followed by a potential client.
(Courtesy of the Everett Collection)

six.

VIVRE SA VIE, LE NOUVEAU MONDE, LES CARABINIERS

“The definitive by chance”

A
GNÈS
V
ARDA’S ASSISTANT DIRECTOR ON
C
LÈO DE 5 À 7
, Marin Karmitz, was a recent graduate of IDHEC, the main French film school. Godard met Karmitz, who was twenty-three, on that shoot and hired him as his assistant director on the short film
La Paresse
. Later, in the tumultuous days of late 1961, Godard called on Karmitz for assistance with three other matters.

First, Godard asked Karmitz to help Jacques Rozier complete his first feature film,
Adieu Philippine
, which had been shot in 1960 but remained unfinished. The film had been produced by Georges de Beauregard, to whom Godard had introduced Rozier after the success of
Breathless
, when the producer was flush with money and looking for new directorial talent, particularly new talent recommended by Godard. When Rozier failed to meet the distributor’s completion deadline,
¹
Beauregard washed his hands of the project and literally put the reels in the street. At Godard’s request, Karmitz gathered and organized the footage, found an editing room, and helped Rozier finish the film in time for the Cannes festival in May 1962.

Then, Godard asked Karmitz to render a far more personal service: to come by his and Karina’s house after their very public marital crisis “to calm things down a little, to gather the broken things,” because, as Karmitz soon saw, the couple “had destroyed everything in the apartment.” Finally, Godard asked Karmitz to lend him technical books from his days at IDHEC, and for a very specific reason: as Karmitz later recalled, “He said, ‘I have to learn some technique.’ He thought that the camera moved too much in
Breathless
.”
²

Whatever Godard found in Karmitz’s books worked wonders. If 1961
had been a year of relative idleness, indecision, and despair, it was also a helpful year of woodshedding. Godard’s aesthetic self-criticism and his re-thinking of technique combined with his responses to new circumstances—including his marital storm and some published remarks about him by Truffaut—to lead him to a new way of filming. This breakthrough resulted in work that differed radically in content, tone, style, form, technique, and philosophical import from his first three films. His new way of working would prove in the long run to be even more influential than the heralded methods of
Breathless
.

Indeed, Godard became so immediately prolific and so inventive under the influence of these fruitful new ideas that 1962 could well be called his first annus mirabilis. In that year, Godard would not only accelerate his pace of production and juggle an extraordinary number of real or potential projects, but would also, in the process, openly define the New Wave as intellectual cinema. By championing the movement’s ideals ever more vigorously, he conspicuously pressed himself to its forefront—at the precise moment when its survival was said to be in doubt.

T
HE ANNOUNCEMENT OF
Godard’s new project with Karina,
Vivre sa vie
, was made in the first week of January 1962, and the shoot was scheduled to begin on February 19. Godard had six weeks to pull the story together. He struggled with the question of how to elaborate Truffaut’s idea. The first effort he submitted to the CNC was a nine-paragraph note of intention. It was no longer the story of a woman who turns to occasional prostitution to round out her monthly budget. (That story would become, four years later, the film
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
.) It was now the story of a young woman, Nana, who works in a record store, and whom the film “will follow for five or six months,” during which time “Nana gives herself over to prostitution, first as an amateur, then as a professional.”
³

Godard’s choice of the name Nana as the prostitute was a reference to both the novel by Emile Zola and the 1927 film produced by Braunberger, directed by Jean Renoir, and starring Renoir’s wife, Catherine Hessling. But “Nana” is also an anagram for “Anna” (an “Anna-gram,” a pun which works in French, too), and the premise of the story is an unmistakable reprise of the theme of
A Woman Is a Woman
, with its accusatory barbs at Karina. In
A Woman Is a Woman
, Godard had treated the theme of the “professional” as farce; now, in
Vivre sa vie
, he presented it as tragedy. In
Vivre sa vie
, Godard explicitly sought the grandeur that had been missing from the previous film, as well as what he expressly called “intellectual adventure,”
⁴
in the hope of establishing Karina as a serious actress.

From the outset, Godard sought to make explicit the philosophical depth and intellectual energy that would distinguish his film from whatever his competitors for Karina’s performances could offer her. Indeed, the statement of intention in his note to the CNC was no mere sales pitch but, rather, a manifesto of his new cinematic conception, an attempt to realize an idea that he had been working on for more than a decade:

Basically, I would like to try to reveal what modern philosophy calls existence in opposition to essence; but, at the same time, thanks to the cinema, to show that there is no real opposition between the two, that existence supposes essence and vice versa, and that it is beautiful that it be so.
⁵

A hallmark of Sartre’s philosophy was the idea that a person is defined by his actions, his outward reality. Sartre argued that the belief in an essence distinct from public and social phenomena was unfounded. Since the early 1950s, Godard had been arguing that Sartre’s opposition of outer existence and inner essence was fallacious because it was transcended and resolved in the cinema. Godard had long been writing in defense of classical art and in praise of its attributions of psychology and of character, asserting that the cinema, which showed images of exteriors and social relations, automatically implied inner and metaphysical qualities.

In his first three feature films, Godard had attempted to work variations on themes by Sartre. Now, Godard’s desire to make a sublimely tragic film that locates destiny in the essence of character would lead him to even more sophisticated contemplations of existential cinema.

G
ODARD WENT INTO
production of
Vivre sa vie
with the low budget of 400,000 francs, of which he put up half, making him an equity partner on equal terms with Braunberger. With this film, Godard took a practical leap as great as his aesthetic one: he became a producer. He knew that his unusual methods of production, with his erratic shoot schedule and short days, invited conflict with producers. But he had another equally practical, yet more personal, reason, as he later recalled: