Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (36 page)

R
EVIEWS OF THE
film were mixed. On the one hand, Jean-Louis Bory, writing in
Arts
, claimed that “there has rarely been so profound an understanding… between an actress and a director.”
⁵⁹
Michel Aubriant, in
Paris-Presse-L’Intransigeant
, called
Contempt
“the densest and most stripped-down, in my view, of Godard’s works, and one of the most enriching works of the French cinema in recent years.”
⁶⁰
In
Le Monde
, Jean de Baroncelli reserved special praise for the apartment scene: “The mise-enscène is here truly, as Godard desires, the reflection of a thought.”
⁶¹
On the other hand, Gérard Legrand complained in the pages of
Positif
that “Godard
no more mastered the procedure in
Contempt
than elsewhere.”
⁶²
Robert Benayoun of
France-Observateur
called it “empty,” “foolishly pretentious,” and “intellectually null,” and praised only the opening nude scene, commending Joseph E. Levine for requiring it.
⁶³
In
Les Lettres françaises
, Georges Sadoul contemplated the film at length but deferred judgment: “I thus reserve the right to come back one of these weeks to this work, which is sometimes irritating but always fascinating.”
⁶⁴

Several weeks after the film’s opening, the editor in chief of
Les Lettres françaises
, the poet and novelist Louis Aragon, wrote an exultant “Homage to Jean-Luc Godard” in which he put Godard’s achievement into a broad perspective:

I’ve seen a novel oftoday. At the cinema… It’s called
Contempt
, the novelist is someone named Godard. The French screen has seen nothing better since Renoir, when Renoir was the novelist Jean Renoir. I can’t understand the reservations that I’ve read regarding this film, elsewhere and in my own newspaper. We’ve been asking for genius—well, here is genius.
⁶⁵

Contempt
did business that would have been creditable for films made on a lower budget, but which was only modest for a million-dollar production: in its first run, it attracted 234,374 viewers,
⁶⁶
still a larger audience than had seen Godard’s previous films. It was very likely that some viewers came mainly to see the film’s star in the nude; some audience members in the opening week whistled in the theaters (the local equivalent of booing).
⁶⁷
Deemed a commercial disappointment, the film led to the breakup of Georges de Beauregard’s partnership with Carlo Ponti, who withdrew from Rome-Paris Films. Joseph E. Levine offered to take Ponti’s place as Beauregard’s coproducer, but Beauregard turned him down. He was determined to be on his own again, and his work with Godard would go forward.

I
N THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
a year later, the film also flopped at the box office, after devastatingly silly reviews in major publications; Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
suggested that Godard “could put his talents to more intelligent and illuminating use,” and Judith Crist in the
New York Herald Tribune
praised the opening nude scene and concluded that “charming as the Bardot derriere is, you can, under the Godard circumstance, have too much of a good thing very early on.”

But a sea change in the American moviegoing audience, and therefore the American reception of
Contempt
, was taking place beneath the radar of the box-office reports, and several years later, Joseph E. Levine would bear
witness to it, as reported in a 1967 profile of him in
The New Yorker
. Asked by the writer Calvin Tomkins about a recent speaking engagement at Dartmouth, Levine answered enthusiastically:

A thousand people showed up—practically the whole student body… Those kids were great. They asked me questions for two hours. And you know what film of mine they really wanted to hear about?
Contempt
!… I told them it was the worst film we ever made—maybe the worst film
anybody
ever made. We lost a million bucks on that lousy film, because that
great
director Jean-Luc Godard refused to follow the script… I said, “Listen, I’m very glad your fathers had enough money to send you to college, but if you liked that picture you haven’t learned much.” At the end, I said I was going to donate prints of some of my films to Dartmouth, the way I did last year to the Museum of Modern Art. “And I’m not only going to give you a print of
Contempt
,” I said. “I’m going to give you the negative.” They loved it.
⁶⁸

Karina, looking young and vulnerable (
Columbia Pictures / Photofest
)

eight.

MONTPARNASSE ET LEVALLOIS, BAND OF OUTSIDERS

“A simple, perfectly legible film”

L
ATE IN 1963, GODARD AND KARINA AGAIN SEPARATED
, and he sought the usual means of attempting communication and reconciliation: the cinema. But the cinema, at the time of his wrangling over the completion of
Contempt
, and in the wake of the utter financial disaster of
Les Carabiniers
, was less receptive than usual to Godard’s entreaties. He offered the Hakim brothers’ production company a project called
La Bande à Bonnot
. The Bonnot Gang was a group of political anarchists who terrorized France from December 1911 through April 1912 with a series of bank robberies, brazen murders, and amazing escapes. Their capture was a public spectacle, with tens of thousands of people crowding to watch divisions of the French army and national guard surround and bombard the gunmen, who had barricaded themselves in several houses. Their legendary status in France was similar to that of Bonnie and Clyde’s in America. The story’s significance to Godard was suggested by the motive of the gang’s leader, Jules Bonnot, an expert mechanic who turned to a life of vengeful crime in his despair over the loss of his wife to another man. Godard’s project thus promised to be a radicalized view of marital infidelity and its price, but it also promised to be a big-budget costume production, and the Hakim brothers demurred.

At the same time, Godard was seeking to launch another large-scale commercial project, a new installment in the series of action-adventure films about the fictional secret agent Lemmy Caution, starring the rough-hewn, American-born Eddie Constantine, whose prior incarnations of this character made him one of France’s most popular actors. Speaking to a journalist
in October 1963, Constantine—who had appeared in Godard’s short film
La Paresse
in 1961—explained his interest in agreeing to work with Godard: “He should be able to find new tricks for an old character.”
¹
But despite the film’s evident box-office appeal, Godard and Constantine found, for the moment, no backers.

Godard was briefly without anything to do, but his friends’ fortunes and misfortunes quickly brought him a project of slight cinematic merit but great personal significance. If nothing more, it offered proof of Godard’s power to mold even the most recalcitrant forms to his own personal ends.

AFTER THE DEATH
of André Bazin in November 1958, Eric Rohmer had taken over as the editor of
Cahiers du cinéma
. He had intended his editorship to be a way station on his route to a career as a filmmaker, but his first feature,
Le Signe du lion
, which had been shot in the summer of 1959, was not released until three years later. In 1962, Rohmer made a short film,
La Boulangère de Monceau
(The Bakery Girl of Monceau), with amateur equipment, on 16mm black-and-white film. The lead actor was Barbet Schroeder, a twenty-one-year-old critic at
Cahiers
, who joined Rohmer in founding a production company, Les Films du Losange. Soon thereafter, Schroeder gained crucial experience as an assistant to Godard on
Les Carabiniers
, and then oversaw the production of another 16mm film by Rohmer,
La Carrière de Suzanne
(Suzanne’s Career).

Meanwhile, Rohmer’s editorship of
Cahiers
was prompting some dissatisfaction. Despite the journal’s favorable coverage of most of the New Wave films, it did not fight for the movement as a whole. Rohmer ran special issues on Brecht, on Joseph Losey, on the state of film criticism, on the Italian cinema, but none on the French New Wave. The New Wave was taking a beating in the general press, in other film journals, and at the box office, yet Rohmer’s
Cahiers
did not stand up for it.

In the spring of 1962, after discussions with Godard, Truffaut, and Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze drafted a lofty editorial in their name, calling for a new orientation of the journal as an “instrument of combat” for the New Wave. They wanted Rohmer to sign the document, to publish it, and to act on its fiery advocacy. Rohmer partially complied, publishing a tribute to the New Wave in December 1962 with a brief statement of purpose that featured part of Doniol-Valcroze’s text. He also accepted a new editorial committee that included Godard and Truffaut. But in June 1963, still under pressure, Rohmer yielded the editorship to Jacques Rivette and left the magazine, as did his younger allies, including Schroeder. (One of the first combative acts of Rivette’s refashioned
Cahiers
was to grant Godard space, in August 1963, to respond to the negative reviews of
Les Carabiniers
.)

Rohmer’s departure from
Cahiers
was the best thing that could have happened to him (as he later acknowledged), inasmuch as it induced him to relaunch himself quickly as a filmmaker. He and Schroeder embarked on an ambitious feature-film project,
Paris vu par
… (Paris seen by…, released in the United States as
Six in Paris
), a compilation of six short films that would bring together three unestablished directors (Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and
Cahiers
critic Jean Douchet, who had resigned along with Rohmer) and three well-known filmmakers (Godard, Chabrol, and Jean Rouch). The films were to be made with a minimal budget and crew on 16mm film; the project’s unifying idea was for each film to be shot in a different part of Paris.

In late 1963, Schroeder happened to be in New York and staying with Albert Maysles, a pioneering director and cameraman of the American cinema verité movement, just as Godard was preparing to start work on his contribution. Schroeder had the sudden inspiration to pair Maysles with Godard. Schroeder mentioned this to Godard, who told Maysles to take the next plane for Paris, as the shoot would take place in a few days. As Maysles recalled: “He had it all set up, actors, script, lighting… I filmed it like a real event, as if it were a piece of documentary reality, so it had this quality of total spontaneity. As everything took place, I filmed it as I would a documentary—each moment a new discovery.”
²
Godard stood on its head not only the method, but also the idea, of cinema verité—to document reality without directorial intervention—and put it to an end entirely his own.

The event that Godard staged for Maysles’s camera was an anecdote—derived from a story by Jean Giraudoux—that Jean-Paul Belmondo had told Anna Karina in
A Woman Is a Woman:
A woman sends two “pneumatiques” (telegrams) to schedule dates with her two lovers, but is immediately seized with panic; she believes she has accidentally switched the envelopes and sent each man the billet-doux meant for the other. She goes to the first lover to confess her infidelity before he receives the other man’s note, and he kicks her out. She crosses Paris to see the second lover, assuming that by now his envelope has arrived, yet she finds him calm and supposes that he is toying with her. She apologizes for her infidelity, and he shows her the letter he received—which is indeed the one she had written to him—and then he, too, turns her out. (In Giraudoux’s story, from 1910, the protagonist is a man, the deceived lovers two women.)

To render the film neighborhood-specific, according to Rohmer and Schroeder’s plan, Godard put the two boyfriends in two distinct parts of
town, which became the film’s title:
Montparnasse et Levallois
. Montparnasse is the modern artistic center of Paris, Levallois an industrial suburb just over the city line to the northwest—and they are at opposite ends of bus line number 94.

The film’s title card indicates the nature of Godard’s limited ambition in making this sketch—he does not credit himself as the director or author of the film; instead, the credits read: