Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (41 page)

The burgeoning interest in both classical and aesthetically ambitious cinema opened up yet other new viewing options for the young film lover in Paris. The ciné-club movement, which had thrived after the war, again flourished, with French film clubs reporting over four million tickets sold in 1961. A new category of movie theater, which the government aided under the rubric of
art et essai
(art houses), was growing rapidly, more than tripling, from fifteen to more than fifty, between 1959 and 1962.
¹⁹
Godard noted that the art houses in the Latin Quarter were “always full to the rafters.”
²⁰

In early 1962,
France-Observateur
’s critic Bernard Dort waxed sarcastic about the generation of young intellectuals for whom the cinema had become “a religion.”
²¹
A year later, in the same magazine, Robert Benayoun
wondered whether the rise of obsessive cinephilia among “students of law, philosophy, or philology” indicated that all were now living “in the
age of the cinema?
”
²²

Of the serious young people who were devoted to the Cinémathèque and its tributaries, the most intellectually adventuresome gravitated to
Cahiers
. Such younger writers as Michel Delahaye, Jean-André Fieschi, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jean Narboni, who joined the magazine between 1960 and 1962, kept up with the demanding intellectual currents of the day—including the work of Heidegger, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Louis Althusser—without sacrificing their love of the cinema to any one theoretical line. When Rivette took over in 1963, he devoted much space to these writers and their advanced preoccupations, which he shared. He published interviews with thinkers and artists not obviously connected with the cinema, such as Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and the composer Pierre Boulez. The young critics at
Cahiers
employed the new theoretical vocabularies, and Godard quickly picked up on them.

Godard used the language of structuralist philosophy to describe the analytical aspects of
The Married Woman
and their role in the making of the film:

I have a fragmented and dislocated vision of the world. I wanted to translate only its most important signs. Thus, one can say “I love you” using only four letters. For the feeling, for the form to be felt, to come through, one needs only a minimum of signs. If one lets the meaning take the lead, the form disappears.
²³

Philosophically, Godard had used a structuralist approach for diagnosis in
The Married Woman
, but Sartrean methods—self-consciousness, historical consciousness, an appeal to conscience and the liberty it implies—for the cure. The cinematic terrain on which Godard had been negotiating these debates in recent years was the Italian cinema—the humanistic modernism of Roberto Rossellini versus the analytical modernism of Michelangelo Antonioni. Now, with the film’s completion, Godard declared himself forthrightly in Antonioni’s camp.

W
HEN
T
HE
M
ARRIED
W
OMAN
was shown at the Venice festival, on the evening of September 8, 1964, it was well received: “The ironic lines, the humorous scenes were underlined by the applause and laughter of the audience and set off only once by an angry whistle.”
²⁴

Antonioni, whose
Red Desert
, his first color film, was also being shown in competition, came up to Godard after the screening and energetically
shook his hand. Following the closing ceremonies, at which Antonioni won first prize, the Golden Lion, and Godard nothing, the triumphant director told the
Cahiers
critic François Weyergans, “Tell Godard that in my opinion he deserved the Silver Lion.”
²⁵
Godard, for his part, said that Antonioni fully deserved his award: “I saw that there was a difference in quality that was far from being in my favor.”
²⁶
Godard recognized in Antonioni’s film something that he himself had wanted to do but couldn’t: “When I saw
Red Desert
… I said to myself: this is the kind of movie I wanted to make with
Contempt
.”
²⁷
The thirty-three-year-old Godard approached Antonioni humbly to congratulate him on his achievement and also proposed to interview him for
Cahiers du cinéma
, a gesture that Antonioni graciously accepted.

Although Godard’s film won no prizes, it was immediately praised by French critics. Claude Tarare of
L’Express
apologized in print for his prior fulminations against Godard and declared the new film to be “quite superior to
Breathless
.”
²⁸
In
Le Monde
, Jean de Baroncelli, whose admiration for Godard had long been hedged, now applauded unreservedly the personal, essayistic aspect of
The Married Woman:
“It is indeed a documentary. But this documentary is less about conjugal life than about Jean-Luc Godard himself, or more exactly, about the cinema according to Jean-Luc Godard.”
²⁹

In
Cahiers du cinéma
, where
Band of Outsiders
had been received poorly,
The Married Woman
was immediately hailed as a major artistic and intellectual achievement. Jean-Louis Comolli wrote an unusually long and deeply engaged review, confirming the unity of Godard’s cinema with his philosophical thought: “The shot takes about as much time to complete itself as the idea to formulate itself. That is to say that thinking and filming are one and the same thing for Godard.”
³⁰

Other young writers at
Cahiers
praised the film even more vigorously when
The Married Woman
went into theatrical release, but that release turned out to be somewhat delayed.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER, THE
Commission de Contrôle (the censorship board) met to view
The Married Woman
and to vote on whether to permit its release. Godard had foreseen difficulties with censorship even while making the film, and included in it a classical citation to defend it in advance: Robert tells Charlotte of the theologian Bossuet’s charge that “the representation of agreeable passions naturally leads to sin,” and cites Molière’s response that “the theater purifies love in order to prevent sin.”

This defense proved unsuccessful: on September 29, the commission voted, by a count of thirteen to five, with two abstentions, to ban
The Married Woman
outright. The next day, its president, Henry de Segogne, wrote to the minister of information, Alain Peyrefitte, to explain the proposed ban.

• The title, “by the generalization that it implies, appears as a sort of insult to all women who find themselves engaged in that state”—the state of marriage. In other words, the title implied that all married women were adulterous.
  
• “
  The Married Woman
  is devoted almost exclusively, in a disguised but clever, and in any case perfectly suggestive, fashion, to the salacious illustration of scenes of sexuality.” And it wasn’t just a few scenes that the commission would have wanted to suppress, but rather, “it is half the film that would have to be cut.”
  
• Above all, the commission and its president saw
  The Married Woman
  as a crucial test case and wanted to make use of it to set a clear example for the entire French film industry: “We must, I believe, draw the line.”
  

De Segogne also told Peyrefitte that one member of the board was furious that the film had already appeared at Venice, thus giving it “publicity of a worldwide character.” The commission’s reasoning, so carefully detailed in the letter to Peyrefitte, was not made public. Instead, de Segogne simply announced the board’s recommendation that the film be banned on the grounds of “images contrary to good morals.” The ultimate decision, however, lay with Peyrefitte, who at the time was on a mission to New Caledonia. When he returned in early October, he watched the film and, keeping his opinions to himself, agreed to meet with Godard.

Thus began two months of debate, negotiation, and precisely the sort of scandal that the commission members feared.
France-Observateur
immediately made the proposed censorship a cause célèbre, publishing a fierce article by Michel Cournot in high praise of the film (“This film is materially formed of ideas, and, more than of cinema, one must think of Plato directly ‘visualized’”).

Perhaps never have the annoying and ultimately somewhat useless complications of adultery been shown so clearly. Never has adultery been so fittingly condemned. But Godard condemns it in beauty. The censors, for whom adultery signifies ugliness, do not see further, and they condemn beauty.
³¹

The magazine accompanied Cournot’s diatribe with an interview in which Godard compared the film’s censorship with the shrugging tolerance of blatantly “erotic” films shown in “specialized” theaters, and contended that the political import of the film was the real problem: “The people of the commission have sensed that my film attacks a certain mode of life, that of air conditioning, of the prefabricated, of advertising.” At the same time, he declared himself open to negotiation: “If you ask to cut the feet off of Rodin’s
The Kiss
, fine, it may be possible. If you ask to cut off the mouth, he’ll say: It’s not possible.”
³²

On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 13, Godard met with Peyrefitte, who proposed several changes. First, the title would have to be changed. (Godard made a modest proposal: “We could call it, for example, ‘No Admission Under 18 Years of Age.’”)
³³
Second, the minister proposed “cutting three minutes of the picture and several changes in the dialogue, notably the suppression of an allusion to concentration-camp inmates.”
³⁴
Godard told a journalist, “I have a month to think about it and to propose cuts and changes. Then, the new version will be shown again to the commission, which will deliberate.”
³⁵

Godard indeed made what he considered “no great changes,”
³⁶
and did so with an ironic good cheer. He refused to remove the references to concentration-camp inmates but did excise a short documentary interlude by Jacques Rozier about the “monokini,” or topless bathing suit for women, a shot of Charlotte’s panties falling to her feet, a shot of a bidet,
³⁷
and the sound of a pair of scissors which Charlotte brought below her waistline (and below the line of the film frame) to trim her pubic hair.
³⁸
He also changed the title of the film from
La Femme mariée
(The Married Woman) to
Une Femme mariée
(
A Married Woman
), which prompted one Swiss critic to wonder whether the French censors might next seek to change Molière’s titles to “A Misanthrope” and “A Miser.”
³⁹

On November 30, 1964, Peyrefitte wrote to Godard’s company, Anouchka Films, to announce that at the plenary session of the Commission de Contrôle of November 24, the film, thus modified, had been granted a visa but would be forbidden to viewers under eighteen years of age.

T
HE FILM WAS
released on December 5, to the energetically favorable critical response that could have been foretold from the advance word from Venice. Not only was the film itself praised, and not only did it do well—the next year, Godard told Helen Scott of the French Film Office in New York that the only films of his to have made money were
Breathless, Vivre sa vie
, and
A Married Woman
⁴⁰
—but Godard himself was now recognized and extolled as a representative of the highest intellectual and cultural values. Georges Sadoul of
Les Lettres françaises
praised the film lavishly and declared Godard to be both a great artist and a crucial thinker of the age:

This
Married Woman
has become
Madame Bovary
, an object of scandal for expressing too directly the reality of its times… it is even more by his ideas than by his rhetoric that Godard belongs, profoundly and consciously, to our times. Yesterday, he asked himself questions. Today, he answers them.
⁴¹

The acclaim grew rapidly and took diverse forms, as Godard’s public appearances proliferated in the press and on television. He was already a recognized filmmaker and a celebrity; now he became an artistic phenomenon. In October, he was interviewed on film for a thirty-minute television program,
Jean-Luc Godard ou le cinéma au défi
(Jean-Luc Godard or the Cinema Put to the Test). The title was derived from a 1930 essay by Louis Aragon, “La Peinture au défi” (Painting Put to the Test), and the program began with Aragon speaking in praise of Godard. In January 1965, Godard was interviewed on French television by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Although the discussion with his elder friend and
Cahiers
colleague turned lofty, with long exegeses of Sartre and Bonnard, Godard also repeated for the studio cameras the trick that he had performed in Capri to get Bardot to change her hairdo: he walked on his hands.