Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (37 page)

MONTPARNASSE AND LEVALLOIS
AN ACTION-FILM

ORGANIZED BY JEAN-LUC GODARD
AND FILMED BY ALBERT MAYSLES

The young woman, Monika (Godard took the name from Bergman’s film of that title, which is also the story of a defiant adulteress), is played by the Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus as a pert young woman dressed in chic new “mod” styles (dark tights and a short plaid skirt, a red sweater, and a trim trenchcoat). Monika sends the telegrams just outside the Montparnasse train station, tries to fit her hand through the slot of the mailbox to get them back (a detail from the Giraudoux story), and unable to do so, runs to see her nearby boyfriend in Montparnasse.

Philippe, a sculptor who works in metal (played by the sculptor Philippe Hiquilly) is a tall, laconic young man in denim, who moves purposefully through his garagelike studio, bearing a welding torch while Monika attempts to explain the mix-up. When she asks about one of his artworks, he says, “It’s an action sculpture,” and explains: “It means that chance enters into the creation of the sculpture. I take pieces of metal, I throw them, and the way they fall, I weld them. It makes for a very experimental kind of sculpture.” His “action sculpture” is akin to Godard’s “Action-Film”—and to round out the association with Godard, the sculptor also wears dark glasses (albeit industrial ones suited for his work with the acetylene torch) and smokes a cigar (which he lights with a casual blast from his torch).

After being roughly thrown out of Philippe’s studio, Monika is next seen crossing an industrial road and passing a sign for Levallois-Perret. On a side street, she enters the cramped auto body shop belonging to Roger Delpirou, a short, gruff, middle-aged man (played by Serge Davri) who is alone at work on a sports car. He is a proud industrial craftsman who declares, “In my own way, I’m an artist.” When Monika admits her infidelity and tries to make it up to him by beginning to undress and leading him to bed in his upstairs loft, he shows her his letter and throws her out the door: “Get out,
American!” “I’m not American, I’m Canadian,” she responds. “It’s the same thing, American and Canadian.” “No, it’s not.” Both of the artists, manual laborers who work with heavy metal, have rid themselves of the bourgeois woman, the New World foreigner.

Giraudoux’s original story was called “La Méprise”—literally, “The Mistake”—which happens also to be the feminine form of
Le Mépris
(
Contempt
), the title of the film Godard had just completed.
Contempt
concerns a man who has lost his moral clarity due to a tangle of confused thinking; Godard’s film of “La Méprise” is about a woman who thinks confusedly due to her loss of moral clarity. The adaptation of “La Méprise,” a small-scale, feminine version of Godard’s previous film, was as much a letter to Anna Karina as
Contempt
had been.

Godard praised Maysles publicly for
Montparnasse et Levallois
.
³
In fact, Maysles’s camera work is merely efficient and functional; but this inexpressive neutrality is itself the point of the film: thanks to Maysles, a famously objective observer, Godard could offer blandly documentary images as indisputable evidence that the woman was wrong—not simply in the practical error of her letters but in the moral error on which the story is based, her blithe infidelity.

Montparnasse et Levallois
is not one of Godard’s greatest works of art, but it is an extraordinary illustration of how he conceived cinematic form in terms of his own private allegories. Its uninflected images—and Godard’s willingness to relinquish control of them to Maysles—suggest his growing doubt about how, and on what basis, to make films. The crisis in cinema history that Godard had asserted in
Contempt
left its first concrete trace on his filmmaking in this short film. It was a crisis that would mark his films all the more deeply in the coming years.

T
HE DESPERATE INDICTMENT
of the New World as the source of modern decadence—a sadly comical reflection of the American stereotype of libertine France—hints at Godard’s changing view of the American cinema and its role in the world. In late 1963, he joined the other former Hitchcocko-Hawksians (minus Rohmer) in a roundtable discussion (published in the December 1963–January 1964
Cahiers
) in which everyone agreed that the collapse of the Hollywood studio system also meant the end of the American cinema as an aesthetic wellspring. Though six of the films on Godard’s topten list for 1963 were from the United States—
The Birds, The Chapman Report, Donovan’s Reef, The Nutty Professor, Irma la Douce
, and
Two Weeks in Another Town
—he said that films of such caliber had become the exception: “The reason we loved the American cinema was that out of 100 American films, there were, let’s say, 80% good ones. Today, out of 100 American films,
80% are bad.” When he first began making movies, he said, the American cinema “was the model to imitate. Today, it is the thing not to do.”

This remark contained a hint of Godard’s looming crisis: he now knew what not to do, but did not have a positive, constructive model to replace the one he had jettisoned. His films for the next few years would be, in general, decomposed rather than composed, and the collage-like fragmentation for which they were celebrated was in fact a despairing avowal of lost bearings.

Godard’s immediate problem, however, was tied to the scramble for money: he needed financing and, despite the artistic decline of the Hollywood studios, he understood that they were still, indeed more than ever, the place to go: “In reality, the American cinema has never been stronger. Its power is such that no film can succeed today if, sooner or later, it isn’t bought by America or if, in one way or another, the Americans aren’t in on it.”
⁴
Unable to find funding for his desired projects in France, Godard sought to set up his own production company—and to do so with Hollywood money. He recalled:

I couldn’t find any money. So I wrote to Columbia, Paramount, United Artists, asking could they give me $100,000 to make a picture. They said, “Well, that’s a huge fee for a director.”
⁵
And I said, “No, that’s not for me, that’s for the whole picture.” Columbia was the only one interested.
⁶

Godard offered the studio three projects from which to choose: one about “a woman leftist,” one about a writer, and one based on a crime novel—specifically, the French translation of Dolores Hitchens’s
Fool’s Gold
, which he had read on Truffaut’s suggestion that it would make a good subject for him. Unsurprisingly, the studio opted for the crime novel. Though it provided a rich trove of pulp for Godard to adorn as he had done with
Breathless
, he now intended to take a new approach to such lowbrow material.

In an interview, he announced his new plan: “I want to remain faithful to my two inclinations, let’s call them the instinctive and the reflective. But to realize them separately, from one film to the next, rather than blending them in one same film.” He wanted, on the one hand, “to tell little stories, to return to the tradition of
Quai des brumes
[a classic French crime drama from 1939], the genre of
The 400 Blows
, of
Shoot the Piano Player
and of
Jules and Jim
, or of American comedy,” and on the other, “to make reflective films, without concessions.” He admitted, “Before, I tended to stuff all this into the film of the moment. Now, I want it to be all one or all the other.”
⁷

By hailing Truffaut’s three films as exemplars of “instinctive” and “nonreflective” cinema, Godard was damning them with faint praise. Yet by becoming
his own producer, Godard was about to fall into the same trap in which he considered Truffaut to have been caught as the owner of his production company, Les Films du Carrosse: Godard would mix his artistic and his commercial motives, to similarly unhappy effect.

Just as he had done with
Vivre sa vie
, Godard took the step into production to reforge his marital bond with Anna Karina. He called the production company Anouchka Films, after one of his pet names for her.
⁸
It had been almost two years since Godard and Karina had worked together, in
Vivre sa vie
. She had since appeared in a series of commercial vehicles, from the pageantry of
Scheherazade
to the domestic comedy of
Un Mari à prix fixe
(A Prix Fixe Husband). Karina was a well-known actress but hardly a star, and despite the acclaim she enjoyed from several of these roles, she failed to reach the heights, artistically or commercially, that she had with Godard’s films.

Much was riding on this adaptation of
Fool’s Gold:
it was intended to establish the company that bore Anna Karina’s name, to reestablish Godard as a commercial man of the international cinema, to bring her the sort of success that he thought she craved, and so, to secure his future life with her.

The novel was fairly typical for the hard-boiled genre, and the story Godard extracted from it was also typical: a sheltered young woman is befriended by a man to whom she reveals a stash of money in her guardian’s house. The man turns out to be a petty criminal who divulges the secret to his friend, a bolder thief, and the two of them plot with the woman to steal the cash. Both are in love with her; she chooses the second, bolder one. His uncle, a retired gangster, sees a chance for one last big score and tries to move in on the scheme. In the end, the second man is killed, and the woman ends up with the first one.

Godard cast the intense and serious Sami Frey (by then Bardot’s ex) as the first, more romantic criminal and the blunt and impulsive Claude Brasseur as the second, more aggressive one. His original title for the film referred to two of its three leads,
Arthur, Sammy and Anouchka
, but the studio rejected it; he offered as a substitute
Les Mimis
(The Cuties, or The Good-Looking Kids), which was also rejected; in the end, he settled for
Bande à part
(
Band of Outsiders
).

Though otherwise free from direct interference from Columbia’s executives, Godard did too good a job of internalizing their standards and fulfilling their wishes.
Band of Outsiders
is one of Godard’s least substantial and adventuresome films, as well as his most conventional one. It was recognized as such at the time by the critics most familiar with his work, and by Godard himself; and yet—or perhaps, as a result—it was eventually exalted as one of his great artistic triumphs by critics who were bewildered by his more audacious and
original films. Its ongoing popularity is due precisely to the film’s overt neoclassicism.

Columbia’s executives considered the budget so small that, once they approved the project, they did not ask to see a script. However, the CNC did require a script for precensorship and authorization to shoot, and Godard arranged for his assistant, Jean-Paul Savignac, to write what Coutard, the film’s director of photography, called a “junk script.”
⁹
The forty-two-page-long text is not drastically different from the film; Godard’s copy reveals the extent to which his approach to the shoot diverged from his previous work.
¹⁰
His annotations and diagrams, on the front and the back of most of the pages, not only fill in dialogue or modify situations but also map out camera angles, sketch rooms and furnishings, provide blocking for actors, and diagram seating arrangements and various movements and gestures. According to Sami Frey, “Everything was very precise, decided in advance—even the details.”
¹¹
The shoot lasted twenty-five days, and, according to Coutard, Godard worked methodically, making full use of the schedule.
¹²

Despite the casual air of the camera moves, they were largely determined in advance. Coutard described the director’s unusual procedures: “To Godard it was a given that we would work with a handheld camera, always following the actors—whereas in his other films the camera had moved freely, independent of the actors… First the actors’ movements were pretty thoroughly prepared; Godard himself stood in the place of the camera. Then there were rehearsals with the camera, to synchronize the movements of the camera and the actors.”
¹³
The film’s look of offhand grace and spontaneity was in fact the product of careful forethought.
Band of Outsiders
is the first film in which Godard attempted to convey an impression that was essentially different from the reality of the shoot.

Godard took no chances with the material: he declared that he wanted “to make a simple, perfectly legible film.”
¹⁴
The transparently masked content of the story is apparent in the names that Godard assigned to his fictional characters: Claude Brasseur’s audacious thief became Arthur (Arthur Rimbaud); Frey’s sensitive one became Franz (for Kafka, whom Godard thought Frey resembled); and Karina’s character was named Odile Monod (Godard’s mother’s maiden name). Godard said that he took the name both from his mother and from the eponymous novel by Raymond Queneau (a copy of which turns up in the film), a roman à clef about the surrealists—another band of outsiders similar to the New Wave itself. Odile Monod Godard was an accomplished and refined woman, nothing like the unpolished adolescent played by Karina; but it had been almost precisely ten years since Godard’s mother’s sudden and horrific end, and her name in the film suggests a touching
conflation of the two women of Godard’s life to date. The film is nowhere more personal than in this connection of love and death. Karina had survived a suicide attempt and was extremely fragile and desperate at the time of the filming: