Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (32 page)

The king does not win the war, but he signs a peace treaty with the enemy and those who fought for him are considered war criminals. Instead of collecting their wealth, the two peasants are shot. All will be very realistic, in a perspective that is purely theatrical; we will see war scenes… as in the films of Fuller, with some newsreel footage. But now that I’ve told it to you, I suddenly have less of a desire to make it.
⁷⁰

Godard’s deflation was a kind of wisdom: indeed, unlike any of Godard’s other films to date, this one exhausted its significance in the telling. This process, too, resulted from the influence of Rossellini, who, according to Godard, thought “that his underlying conception is the most important thing.” While Godard’s other films came to life during the shoot, both by way of the methods of production and the images that resulted,
Les Carabiniers
was predetermined by a script that was so strong and so thoroughly elaborated—and so allegorical and impersonal—that it dominated Godard’s direction and ultimately crowded out his own view of reality.

The Brechtian influence, which Godard had purged from
Vivre sa vie
in the interest of sincere emotional engagement, returned with a vengeance in
Les Carabiniers
. The film is blaringly crude, a calculated assault on the sensibilities of viewers. The actors, Albert Juross and Marino Masé, and the women who play opposite them, Catherine Ribeiro and Geneviàve Galéa, had little or no film experience, and Godard made sure that their performances showed it. The actors mug, cavort, gesticulate, pose, declaim, mime, and emphasize every intention with the harsh exaggeration of a puppet show. According to Charles Bitsch, who was Godard’s assistant on the film and on most of Godard’s films from the 1960s, the inexperienced actors’ difficulty with dubbing their lines heightened the artificial declamation. And yet it is this tone which is precisely the film’s lasting innovation and virtue: the blind flailing of characters venting their venality and stupidity, the raucously aggressive display of despicable and unredeemable qualities paraded before the audience with a sardonic sneer, the hectoring volume level of the sound track,
with its war sounds and its shrill conflation of church and circus music. The ending, as Godard had originally planned it, would have gone even further in expressing this aggression. As he explained to an interviewer:

I had shot another ending: when the story ends, the dead character would get up and say, in close-up: “Now go home in your little cars. Go take your tranquilizers, go dream of your paid vacations.” It was a pure insult, a slap in the face… I made the entire film in that spirit. Against socialized society.
⁷¹

He decided against this ending, but the anarchistic anger remains, and is the film’s most memorable element. It is a rage directed in particular at bourgeois life in a modern, increasingly technological society, rejoining the critique of “the new world” in Godard’s apocalyptic short film.

Les Carabiniers
connects with
Le Nouveau Monde
in another, peculiar way. In Godard’s first draft of the script, the daughter’s name was Anne, which Godard crossed out in favor of Lucrèce, and then changed, prior to filming, to Venus. The underlying point is revealed in the daughter’s name: Anne/Lucrèce loses her innocence when she exhorts her reluctant husband to fight for the king—not from belief in the cause but in order to win wealth for the family. This is the story as told in the first script: “Leonardo and Machiavelli hesitate a bit, but Lucrèce, the most rapacious, pushes them to accept the bargain, to go off to war as soon as possible.”
⁷²
Anne/Lucràce for-goes her purity by sacrificing her Leonardo to her venal dreams. Godard’s play with names serves to explain to Anna Karina why he couldn’t go fight for her in Hollywood or on big-budget mainstream productions. (While
Les Carabiniers
was being filmed, Karina, who had just returned from filming
Scheherazade
, was pursuing her dream of theatrical renown and rehearsing the lead role in Rivette’s staging of
La Religieuse
.)

I
N
L
ES
C
ARABINIERS
, Godard stands outside and above the stupidity of the world; the film’s point of view is flattering to intellectuals and contemptuous of everyone else.
Les Carabiniers
is a film of demagogy that comforts the intellectual in his sense of moral and political superiority to the willing cannon fodder from the unwashed masses. This is, perhaps, why many intellectuals defended this film with a particular vehemence. In fact, according to Bitsch,
Les Carabiniers
was the film of Godard’s that “aroused the most enthusiasm on the part of the crew.”
⁷³

The strongest moments in the film are the confrontations of the rustic brutes with the modern world around them—the documentary side of the film’s fictional premise. The bracing simplicity of the film’s first shots, of a modern highway outside Paris, with its underpasses and its monotony as
seen from the windshield of a moving car, promise far more of that confrontation than the film actually delivers.

Indeed, the film’s political didacticism introduces a deception that is central to its premise. The carabiniers pay the soldiers a visit, and explain that they will be able to claim their spoils when the war ends. Michelangelo asks them how the soldiers would know when the war has ended, since “there’s nobody here.” The bumpkins’ premedia isolation is the real subject of the film. It is the necessary context for the film’s argument and it is the crucially Rossellinian element, but it is also what makes the film seem so weirdly disconnected from the realities of modern war and its propaganda.

L
ES
C
ARABINIERS WAS
released on May 31, 1963, and was subject to a rare and near-unanimous critical savagery. Even critics who had been stalwart supporters of Godard’s work were hard on the film. Henry Chapier of
Combat
was one of the few to recognize its “thousand inventions,” to praise its “ferocious” comedy as “healthy,” and to salute Godard’s “extreme liberty.”
⁷⁴
None, however, quite understood it: most criticized Godard for incidental matters. Stung by their reproaches, Godard took the unusual step of responding to the more egregious ones in the August 1963
Cahiers
. But the damage had been done. The nonintellectual public may have taken the measure of the aggression and steered clear of the film. Bitsch recalled that when the film came out Godard was asked, “‘How did it go?’ He said, ‘About 31 people.’ Everyone had expected the film to be acclaimed as the masterpiece that it is.” One young man in Paris was the only paying customer at a theater where the owner refused to show the film unless someone else showed up. In first run, it attracted so few viewers—an estimated 2,000—that its box-office statistics went unreported.

Godard was angered by the film’s failure.

If
Les Carabiniers
had no success in Paris, it’s because people are worms. You show them worms on the screen, they get angry. What they like is a beautiful war à la Zanuck. For three hours they kill lots of Germans. Then they go home happy, heroic. Real war, they don’t want. It isn’t war that is disgusting, it’s ourselves. People are cowards.
⁷⁵

But Godard also took its failure to be a sign of his own failings, his own self-deception, telling the critic Jean Collet on September 12, 1963:

I was taking more and more distance with respect to my characters. After
Vivre sa vie
and
Les Carabiniers
, I could not go any further in that direction. I had to reduce the distance. I finally got to the point of despising the cinema, of saying to myself: it hardly matters how it’s filmed, as long as it’s true. I had lost my cinephile attitude. I was rejoining Rossellini, but what is right for Rossellini is not necessarily right for me because I was denying the cinephilia that led me to the cinema.
⁷⁶

Too much “distance,” together with “denying the cinephilia,” the Rossellinian influences, compounded by the Brechtian one, made
Les Carabiniers
a film of isolation; there was indeed almost nobody there, barely even Godard.

B
Y THE TIME
Godard endured the brickbats of critics and the indifference of the public in the spring of 1963, he had already completed the third film in his unofficial Rossellini trilogy,
Le Grand Escroc
, in which he tipped his hat to Rossellini’s ideas while leaving them behind. In October 1962, Godard agreed to make one of the short films in a compilation called
Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde
(The Greatest Swindles in the World), a French-Italian-Dutch-Japanese coproduction.
⁷⁷

The film,
Le Grand Escroc
(literally, “The Great Swindler” but also the French title for Herman Melville’s
The Confidence-Man
), is another story that exhausts itself in the telling, an anecdote that Godard stretched into a twenty-five-minute shaggy-dog story. Although Godard showed Melville’s book in the film’s first scene, the story came from a news item about a man in Israel who printed counterfeit banknotes and passed them to beggars. The story was trivial; what mattered was the frame in which Godard set it—the cinema itself. The film is concerned less with the swindler than with the efforts of a cinema-verité documentary filmmaker to find and to film him.

The filmmakers in that movement used lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment to record reality as unobtrusively as possible and edited their footage with a minimum of voice-over commentary and overt intervention. Such films as
La Pyramide humaine
(by Jean Rouch),
Primary
(by Richard Lea-cock, Robert Drew, and D. A. Pennebaker),
Le Joli mai
(by Chris Marker), and
Showman
(by Albert and David Maysles) were bringing the movement a great deal of attention and critical respect. Rossellini was hostile to the trend, arguing that the filmmakers, in their desire to make films without apparent directorial self-assertion, had substituted mere verisimilitude for comprehension. “There is no technique for grasping reality,” Rossellini said. “Only a moral position can do so… The camera’s a ball-point pen, an imbecile, it’s not worth anything if you don’t have anything to say.”
⁷⁸

Godard filmed
Le Grand Escroc
in Morocco in January 1963. It would mark the first time that he made his protagonist a filmmaker—a woman, played by Jean Seberg—and in so doing, he would satirize her in terms that
echoed Rossellini’s critique of cinema verité. Seberg plays a character with the same first name as her role in
Breathless:
Patricia Leacock, an American television reporter who goes to Marrakesh, Morocco, to do a “man-in-the-street” report. Walking through a souk, she stops at a stall to buy a traditional gown and is promptly arrested, for reasons unknown to her. In the police station, the inspector (played by Godard’s friend Làszló Szabó) explains that she had passed a counterfeit bill and asks whether she knew where it had come from. When she explains that she had come to Marrakesh precisely in order to do a report on a counterfeiter, the inspector engages her in a theoretical discussion about the word
report
. After her release, Patricia finds the swindler. He defends his counterfeiting as philanthropic, and likens her photographic report about him to his own benevolent swindle: “You are stealing something from me and you, too, are giving it to others.”

Le Grand Escroc
is itself something of a swindle, a casual goof filmed casually, although, as with any true artist, Godard was unable to make an ugly or pointless work. A long take of a car pulling into a huge public square, where the counterfeiter attracts a crowd with his fraudulent giveaway, is a striking realization of epic sweep with minimal means. A final flourish makes clear the deeper significance of the facile theoretical considerations that preceded it: the film concludes with a close-up of Patricia pointing her camera directly at the viewer, as Godard intones in his own voice the literary moral of the story, citing lines from Shakespeare that Patricia Leacock recalled:

All the world’s a stage
,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
.

The last words of
Le Grand Escroc
, with Godard’s voice on the sound track, suggest a critique of cinema-verité that is closer to Antonioni’s than to Rossellini’s: life is intrinsically theatrical and personal identity necessarily fabricated, multiple, and elusive, thus thwarting attempts to film them without artifice. And—going both Antonioni and Rossellini one better—the identity called into question by the last shot, which joined the fictional filmmaker’s face and the actual filmmaker’s voice, was Godard’s own.