Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (54 page)

It was not, however, only the cheerleaders of the
yé-yé
set who leveled such accusations. One director, Philippe Garrel, who, inspired by Godard, had started to make films at the age of sixteen in 1964, later recalled: “I remember that when I was young, the only film by Godard that I didn’t like was
Masculine Feminine
, because of its mockery of young people, that way of making fun of them.”
⁴⁶

Godard’s harsh view of the young—or rather, of young women—provoked a minor scandal. In May 1966, the newspaper
Candide
ran an article asking, “These Horrid Little French Girls—Are They Your Daughters?”
⁴⁷
In an interview several weeks later, “Miss 19,” Elsa Leroy, whom Paul had interrogated at length in the film, said that Godard’s efforts to expose her political ignorance left her feeling “a little bit as a woman must feel when she’s invited to pose for fashion photographs and is then asked to get undressed.”
⁴⁸

In the United States,
Masculine Feminine
’s intimate naturalism was better received than the extravagant symbolism of
Pierrot le fou
. Both films played at the 1966 New York Film Festival. Andrew Sarris recognized the methods of
Masculine Feminine
to be “instant classicism”
⁴⁹
and understood that Godard was fusing up-to-the-minute documentary with his “wounded cry.”
⁵⁰
Pauline Kael also enthused about
Masculine Feminine
.

“Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the non-movie-centered world,” she wrote in
The New Republic
. Having formerly praised Godard for his clever appropriation of American genre conventions, she now saw his rejection of them as a sign of maturity and worldliness rather than a sign of anguish. Kael praised Godard for joining politics and romance, and sensed that he had invented a new way of constructing a film—“Godard has, at last, created the form he needed. It is a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, news and portraiture, love lyric and satire.” She claimed that Godard’s view of youth had a documentary veracity, and wrote that the film contained “life,” by contrast with
Vivre sa vie
and
Pierrot le fou
, which she deemed “cold and empty.”
⁵¹

A
FTER FOUR MONTHS
of immersion in Godard’s milieu, Vianey had trouble writing his book.
En attendant Godard
(Waiting for Godard) is not a typical work of journalism. Although Vianey affirms that all of the events and quotations he provides are true, he wrote the book interpretively, attributing to the people profiled in it emotions and ideas that he deduced from his observations. In effect, he was writing nonfiction with a novelist’s tools. He discussed the problem with Godard; they agreed that, rather than calling the book’s main character “Jean-Luc,” Vianey would call him “Edmond”—though all of the other people in the book are called by their own names. Vianey later recalled that the purpose of the shift was to scrape the received ideas of the public image off the character and to start with a fresh canvas.
⁵²
Godard sympathized with Vianey and contributed a preface, in the form of a rebus, which graciously sought to explain to the reader the difficulty of the task that the writer had taken on. Puzzled out, it forms the sentence: “Regrettably, it’s impossible to write on the subject of Godard, because he does cinema.”
⁵³

An unnamed reviewer in
Le Monde
praised Vianey’s book as “the first ‘literary’ transcription of [Godard’s] style.”
⁵⁴
There were other, unfavorable, reviews of the book, however—indeed the book, with its subjective, first-person modernism, attracted vituperation akin to that which traditionalists reserved for Godard’s films. Willy Kurant was furious at Vianey’s revelations of Godard’s displeasure with him and, fearing that his career could be damaged, even considered suing the author.
⁵⁵
For several years Godard remained in intermittent contact with Vianey, but by the time of the book’s release, in 1967, he was already in a remote political and cinematic universe.

Vianey himself became a screenwriter and director in the 1970s, but his
career was thwarted by generational, political, and economic shifts in the industry, and he returned to writing novels. Out of print since its first edition, Vianey’s book still offers the most thorough and perceptive view available of how Godard works and how his conduct on and off the set converges with his art; additionally, its stylistic and reflexive fillips have a time-capsule authenticity akin to that of Tom Wolfe’s journalism. In 1993, Jacques Drillon of
Le Nouvel Observateur
acclaimed
En attendant Godard
as “a magnificent book, which one can reread every year, if one can find it…”
⁵⁶

One telling tribute to Godard’s methods in
Masculine Feminine
came from an unlikely source. On April 13, 1966, after attending a private screening of the film, Robert Esmenard, the executor of Guy de Maupassant’s literary estate and the head of the publishing house Albin Michel, wrote to Anatole Dauman, the producer, that the film bore so distant a relation to the two stories on which it was ostensibly based that “no allusion to Maupassant should be made in the screen credits for
Masculine Feminine
.” As a result, Dauman retained screen rights to the stories for an additional two years. Godard had adapted Maupassant so liberally that the connection with the adapted work had been broken and the film was transformed into an original work.

But the most important verdict rendered on
Masculine Feminine
was an intimate judgment. The arts page of
Le Figaro
for Thursday, August 12, 1965, featured a pair of photographs taken on the set of Bresson’s
Au Hasard Balthazar:
one, an image of Bresson alongside a young actor and the film’s eponymous protagonist, a donkey; and the other, a close-up of the young woman who played the female lead, Anne Wiazemsky, who was identified in the caption as a student and as the author François Mauriac’s granddaughter. Upon seeing Wiazemsky’s picture in the newspaper, Godard had called the film’s coproducer, Mag Bodard, and asked to visit Bresson’s set for the purpose of meeting the young woman.

Bodard invited Godard, Bresson, and Wiazemsky to lunch. Anne Wiazemsky was eighteen years old and was still in lycée. She had no prior acting experience. She was also, by her own admission, possessed of a formidable spirit of contrariness. Because of the great acclaim that Godard’s films were receiving, particularly among Parisian students, Wiazemsky had assiduously avoided seeing any of them. As she later recalled, she was “very disagreeable with him” at lunch.
⁵⁷

“Then,” she went on to say, “in January 1966, I saw
Pierrot le fou
. It struck me like an artistic thunderbolt.
⁵⁸
Suddenly, retrospectively, the man whom I had seen at lunch fascinated me.” Later that same year, Wiazemsky saw
Masculine Feminine
.

It was as if it were a letter written to me. I loved the film because I loved the man who was behind the film. That was in the month of June; until then I had been very prudent and shy; then I did one of the craziest things that I’ve ever done: I wrote a love letter to Godard, I told him that I loved the film because I loved him. I sent it to
Cahiers du cinéma
.
⁵⁹

fourteen.

MADE IN USA, TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

“Living people are often already dead”

T
HE POLITICAL CONFLICTS THAT PLAYED OUT IN
France’s 1965 elections also gave rise to a cinematic scandal in which Godard became embroiled—one that presaged far greater societal convulsions to follow. When Jacques Rivette left
Cahiers du cinéma
in May 1965, Georges de Beauregard immediately proposed that they make
La Religieuse
(
The Nun
), the film project which, under threat of censorship, Rivette had presented two years earlier as a play, financed by Godard and starring Anna Karina. Now Rivette and his screenwriter, Jean Gruault, again revised the script and submitted it for precensorship. On August 31, 1965, the commission informed Beauregard that the new version of the script contained scenes which “run the risk of being totally or partially cut.” Beauregard nonetheless let Rivette start shooting the film in mid-October, with Karina in the lead role.

Even before the film was completed, it was thrust into the thick of the French presidential campaign. Days before the voting, the Paris police commissioner, Maurice Papon, together with Alain Peyrefitte, the minister of information, came under pressure from church officials who had orchestrated a letter-writing campaign against the film. The two declared their willingness to ban it. Though several journalists
¹
responded with indignation to the prospect of such censorship, the issue quickly dropped out of view after the elections, while Rivette completed his work. Behind the scenes, however, Catholic institutions mobilized for a fight.

In anticipation of trouble, Rivette and Beauregard changed the title of the film from
La Religieuse
to
Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot

A light moment on the balcony of a housing project (
TCD-Prod DB
©
Anouchka—Argos—Les Films du Carrosse—Parc Film / DR
)

(Suzanne Simonin, Diderot’s Nun). Rivette also added a title card in which he stated that the film “is not intended to cause a scandal on the subject of nuns in general.”

When the Commission de contrôle finally screened the film, in March 1966, it voted (twice) to permit its release, but the information minister (now Yvon Bourges) overrode the recommendation and decreed that the film be banned lest it “gravely disturb the sentiments and the consciences of a very large part of the population.”
²
The head of French television, a government appointee, barred news broadcasts from mentioning the ban.

Beauregard and a group of his friends, including Godard and Chabrol, immediately orchestrated a formidable outcry in the press, issuing a “Manifesto of the 1,789” (a reference, of course, to the year of the French Revolution) in defense of the film. It was signed by such writers as Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, and Marguerite Duras, the leading French book publishers, and a range of public figures from the Gaullist right to the Communist left. The ban was condemned by the French film industry and by most of the press. Even many on the right who disdained the film’s theme nonetheless rejected its censorship, which served, as
Le Figaro
editorialized, “to incite an uproar of opinion, arouse passions that a liberal attitude would have avoided.”
³
Priests and nuns also spoke out to denounce the ban.

Godard personally took the fight to the media. Approached for a comment by
Le Monde
, he delivered a text of lofty sarcasm:

For my part, I am grateful to [Bourges]. Because during Munich and Danzig, I was playing with marbles. During Auschwitz, le Vercors, and Hiroshima, I was putting on my first pair of long pants. During Sakiet and the Casbah,
⁴
I was having my first amorous adventures.

   As a beginning intellectual, I was all the more behind the times since I was also a beginning filmmaker. I only knew fascism from books. “They’ve taken Danielle.” “They’ve arrested Pierre.” “They’re going to shoot Etienne.” These typical phrases from the Resistance and the Gestapo struck me with ever greater force, but not in my flesh and blood, because I had the good fortune to be born late. Yesterday, suddenly, that all changed: “They’ve arrested Suzanne.”“Yes. The police came to Georges’s place and to the laboratory. They seized the prints.”

   Thank you, Yvon Bourges, for having made me look head-on at the true face of present-day intolerance.
⁵

In
Le Nouvel Observateur
, Godard soon went even further, publishing a “Letter to André Malraux,” the minister of culture. In this searing diatribe he admits to the minister: “Since you are the only Gaullist I know, my anger will have to fall upon you.”