Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (49 page)

I want everyone who works on a film to live it. They must continue to exist while they shoot. Personal problems count. Mine necessarily influence the film. So if a technician thinks about his wife during his work, so much the better, so long as it inspires him, helps him to frame a shot well. But if you don’t tell them this, they stop existing, except when you push them.

Godard described a familiar exchange: “A shot is messed up. I complain. [They say] ‘Ah, but you didn’t tell us…’ ‘You should have found it by yourself.’ ‘Not at all. We’re not paid for that.’ And I think that it is precisely this that they’re paid for. And so we quarrel.”
¹²

They certainly did. Godard’s taciturn ferocity on the set was already legendary, but he raised it to a new pitch while making
Pierrot le fou
, and he knew it: “I get along very well with Belmondo. Except, sometimes, I lose patience. Even with Coutard. Lovers’ quarrels. Indifference. It’s getting worse.”
¹³

Godard made the same demands of Karina as of the rest of the cast and crew but expressed them with particular venom. Luc Moullet observed, “Anna Karina said, ‘What should I do?’ and Godard said, ‘You have a mouth to talk with, don’t you?’”
¹⁴
Alain Jouffroy recalled that “on the set, she fled from him.”
¹⁵
Bitterness prevailed. Belmondo said they were “like a cobra and a mongoose, always glaring at each other.”
¹⁶

The tension was further heightened by the actors’ difficulty remembering Godard’s last-minute dialogue. Assistants carried cue cards with text written in blue and red letters as the camera rolled. After a fight one day
with Karina over her unwillingness to sing,
¹⁷
Godard kicked the camera and caused it to fall, costing the crew the rest of the day’s shoot and prompting a vehement argument with Coutard, who walked off the set. As Suzanne Schiffman recounted, Godard ran after the cameraman and called out, “Just because I yell at you today doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see you tomorrow.”
¹⁸

Godard sought the input of the cast and the crew for the simple reason that while making the film, he was at a loss by himself: his North Star of cinematic navigation was gone, and he was at sea. Shortly after completing the film, he admitted as much to interviewers from
Cahiers du cinéma:
“In my other films, when I had a problem, I asked myself what Hitchcock would have done in my place. While making
Pierrot
, I had the impression that he wouldn’t have known how to answer, other than, ‘Work it out for yourself.’”
¹⁹
But Godard had trouble working it out without the example of the classic Hollywood films that had inspired and sustained him. His absorption of the entire canon of cinema was of no help to him, nor was his experience as a filmmaker. In making
Pierrot le fou
, Godard felt as if he were making his “first film.”
²⁰

Yet this lack of mooring, this state of doubt and bewilderment, had surprising results, not all of which were negative. Godard advanced the plot of Lionel White’s novel mechanically and with a conspicuous boredom, but filled in its interstices with a free and flamboyant array of images produced with untrammeled creativity: “The whole last part was invented on the spot, unlike the beginning which was planned. It is a kind of happening, but controlled and mastered. This said, it is a completely unconscious film.”
²¹
In
Pierrot le fou
, Godard gave unusually free vent to his emotions, without the intervening forms of modernist social science (as in
A Married Woman)
or winks at genre conventions (as in
Alphaville
)—and those emotions were harrowing ones.
Pierrot le fou
was an angry accusation against Anna Karina and a self-pitying keen to bewail how she had destroyed him.

I
N
G
ODARD’S REVISION
of Forlani’s script treatment, the main characters’ names were changed: Pierre became Pierre-Louis-Ferdinand—Pierre plus the name of Louis-Ferdinand Céline—and the woman, Lena, was renamed Marianne Renoir (Marianne being the name of the exemplary French revolutionary heroine, the Amazonian symbol of the Republic). The film is studded with references to Céline, including a recitation by Ferdinand from the posthumously published
Guignol’s Band II: London Bridge
. While making
Pierrot le fou
, Godard was expecting to follow up with a vast film based on Céline’s
Journey to the End of Night
. The project was the brainchild of the
Old Wave screenwriter Jacques Audiard, and Belmondo would star. Although the Céline film was never made, by Godard or anyone else,
Pierrot le fou
was itself a Célinian eruption of ecstatic rage at the state of the world and of his own existence.

It was also full of Godard’s ambitious allusions to a kind of cinema he dreamed of but was not yet able to create. The first scene shows Ferdinand in the bathtub reading aloud to his young daughter a passage by the art historian Elie Faure: “Velázquez, after age fifty, no longer painted a definite thing. He drifted around objects by means of air and twilight, he captured in the shadows and the transparent backgrounds the colored palpitations that he made the invisible center of his silent symphony.” The citation proved prophetic: Godard would be nearly fifty before he could achieve anything similar. In
Pierrot le fou
he was left, as he knew, just with doubt and fury, with methods too crude to convey his finer impressions.

In the film, Ferdinand is preparing to go to a cocktail party with his wife at the home of his in-laws (“Mr. and Mrs. Expresso”). After admitting to having sent the maid off to the movies to see Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar
, Ferdinand sees the replacement babysitter—Marianne—arrive, and the two, who already know each other from long ago, exchange a magnetic glance. He will flee the cocktail party and, ostensibly driving the babysitter home, will take off with her into the night, never to return. Godard effected this crucially personal plot twist to the novel and to Forlani’s script: the “Lolita-style”
²²
moment of lust at first sight is converted into a romance of reunion (precisely as in
Johnny Guitar
). He turned
Pierrot le fou
into a story of separated lovers reconnecting.

Ferdinand’s flight from home is a flight from civilization, and Godard takes care to define, in the most bilious terms, the sorry excuse for a civilization that Ferdinand has fled. He filmed the cocktail party as an inhuman environment of ugly, artificial people in ugly, artificial light, as a scream of revulsion, with actors posed flat against the wall and shot in a denaturing harsh front-lit overexposure that burns out humanizing details.

Yet from this morass comes a hero, a silent older man leaning against the wall and smoking a cigar. Ferdinand addresses him. He introduces himself, in English: “I’m an American film director. My name is Samuel Fuller. I’m here to make a picture in Paris, called
Flowers of Evil
.”

Fuller, the director of
Forty Guns, The Naked Kiss
, and other violent action movies with extremely low budgets, was recognized in Paris as a great artist, but back home was treated like a schlockmeister. Unable to get work in the foundering studio system, Fuller went to Paris in 1965 on the promise of two young aspiring producers to finance his film version of Aristophanes’s
Lysistrata
with the Baudelairean title
Flowers of Evil
.
²³
Godard asked Fuller to
play himself in
Pierrot le fou
and to answer questions that actors would ask him on-camera.

Belmondo asks Fuller, “What is cinema?” Fuller came up with a lapidary aphorism: “The film is like a battleground—there’s love, hate, action, violence, death—in one word, emotions.” He delivered it with his hard-boiled sidelong cackle, his cigar jabbing the air. Off-camera, Fuller’s response brought tears to Godard’s eyes. The American director in Paris was an artist in exile, and the irony of filming Fuller adrift in Paris and stuck at a cocktail party with his back against the wall and nobody to talk to was not lost on Godard, who outfitted the uprooted director in a pair of dark glasses like Godard’s own. The director of primal aggression—whose film
Shock Corridor
Godard placed fifth on his
Cahiers
top-ten list for 1965—was a good fit for Godard’s raw and raging movie.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
Ferdinand’s escape with Marianne, he awakens to her carefree love song by Rezvani, in an apartment filled with blood and corpses and the mark of political intrigue: daubed on the wall is a sign, OASIS, hinting at the OAS, the group of right-wing paramilitaries who had terrorized Algerians and French advocates for Algerian independence. For the film, Godard changed the novel’s criminal subplot into a story of Marianne’s shadowy role in a political underworld of violence and terror.

Fleeing the apartment in a stolen car, the couple reach the countryside and conceal their traces by setting the car on fire. Their realization that they have also burned up a suitcase full of cash that was in the trunk exposes the fault line along which the couple will come apart, as Marianne pouts: “Do you know what we could have done with that money? We could have gone to Chicago, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo. Pathetic jerk!” Ferdinand responds, “I’d have said, Florence, Venice, Athens.”

Soon, after Ferdinand ditches another stolen car—Godard’s own big convertible
²⁴
—by driving it into the sea, the couple, broke and without a car, is compelled to put up where they are, in the wild. Marianne asks,“Where are we going?”

“To Mysterious Island, like the children of Captain Grant,” Ferdinand tells her. “And what will we do there?” she asks. “Nothing. We’ll exist.”

Marianne’s response heralds trouble: “Oh, boy, won’t that be fun.”

Yet their brief time together, in isolation at a wild seaside, is the crowning moment in Ferdinand’s romantic dream of life and art coexisting. Seated on a high rock with a gaudy parrot perched on his shoulder, he keeps on his lap a notebook in which he constantly writes. This journal, seen in extreme close-up at different points in the film, is in Godard’s own handwriting. As Ferdinand writes in it, he announces his vastly ambitious plans
for a new form of the novel: “not to describe the lives of people,” he tells Marianne, “but just life, life by itself; what is between people, space, sound, colors. I’d like to accomplish that. Joyce tried, but one should be able to do better.”

Again Godard suggests a grand artistic dream of work more composed and more serene than the scattershot eruptions of
Pierrot
. But Ferdinand would not long enjoy the chance to fulfill it in idyllic partnership with Marianne, any more than would Godard with Karina. In
Pierrot le fou
, Godard brings together the beauty of nature and the life of shared purpose with the beloved woman as the basic preconditions of artistic creation. The problem of the couple—of Ferdinand and Marianne, of Godard and Karina—is made plainly and painfully obvious in the film’s most famous moment, as Marianne wades through the water, repeatedly whining, “What can I do? I don’t know what to do.” Ferdinand, sitting on a boulder, tells her, “Silence! I’m writing.”

Such a mode of existence, in which she provides moral and practical support for an artist in isolation from society, is not enough for Marianne, who demands a change: “I’ve had it! I’ve had it with the sea, with the sun, with the sand, and with eating from cans, that’s it! I’ve had it with always wearing the same dress! I want to get away from here!” It is not enough for her to
be;
she cries, “I want to live!”

The couple returns to civilization and its corruptions, to what Marianne calls “a police novel with cars, revolvers, nightclubs.” It is a return to sordid political violence, to living history, with its bloodshed, tumult, and imposed commitments—not just for Ferdinand and Marianne but for Godard himself.

Godard had imbued
A Married Woman
and
Alphaville
with allusions to Nazi Germany and its depredations, as they were both remembered and forgotten in the present day. But a current event elbowed the Nazi demon off-stage: the American war in Vietnam. In March 1965, Jean-Paul Sartre cancelled a lecture tour of the United States because, according to Gallup polls, a majority of Americans supported the escalation of the Vietnam War—thus, he exclaimed, “dialogue is impossible.” He explained, “I would not want to find myself in New York the day they are bombing Hanoi.”
²⁵
Sartre put the French left on alert that there was a new cause to take up.

Pierrot le fou
is full of the Vietnam War, from a news report on the car radio to a movie-theater newsreel of the Vietcong raid on the American base at Da Nang. However, the war is just one in the litany of charges that Godard brought against the United States. Ferdinand and Marianne, intertwined on the beach in the moonlight, talk in a way that recalls the neutral French path that Godard had already begun to trace, along the lines of Bernanos, in
Alphaville
. They look up at the “man in the moon,” and Ferdinand explains that the man in the moon is actually packing up to leave:

Because he’s fed up. When he saw [Russian cosmonaut] Leonov coming, he was happy. You bet: finally there’s somebody to talk to, after all eternity as the only man in the moon. But Leonov tried to cram the complete works of Lenin into his head. So as soon as [U.S. astronaut] White arrived, he ran over to the American side. But before he even said hello, the other guy shoved a bottle of Coca-Cola down his throat and made him first say thank you. So he’s fed up. He’ll let the Americans and the Russians fight it out, and he’s taking off.