Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (60 page)

Godard continued with this theme as it pertained to him personally: “I am distancing myself from the entire cinema that formed me, I am distancing myself from thirty years of talking pictures. And as for silent film, I don’t really know what it was. So I’m working in foggy terrain.” While in Algiers, Godard sought out different kinds of films, going to the Chinese embassy to view several Chinese-made documentaries. He explained to an interviewer there that the film he was about to make would be “the story of a group of Communists in Paris who break up into two tendencies, pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese.”
¹⁴

In late February, the foggy terrain onto which Godard advanced, together with Anne Wiazemsky, was centered on an apartment in the rue Miromesnil, near the Champs-Elysées, that Godard’s friend, the theater director Antoine Bourseiller, and his wife, the actress Chantal Darget, rented. They lent the apartment to Godard as the location for his next film, and he and Wiazemsky moved in there together.

Despite the cinematic passions (Godard’s for the image of Wiazemsky in Bresson’s film, Wiazemsky for
Masculine Feminine
) that had brought the couple together, Godard (in an echo of his earliest relations with Anna Karina) had not wanted Wiazemsky to act in movies.
¹⁵
But as his plans for
La Chinoise
advanced, they inevitably involved Wiazemsky and her role in his initiation in student politics. She would play a student at Nanterre University named Véronique—a reprise of the character Godard had filmed in
All the Boys Are Called Patrick
and of the name he had assigned Karina’s character in her first role, in
Le Petit Soldat
.

The project was inchoate, even by Godard’s own standards: as in
Masculine Feminine
, he brought together five young people, each of whom played a role derived from their own lives. In addition to Wiazemsky as Véronique, Jean-Pierre Léaud played Véronique’s boyfriend, a young bourgeois actor named Guillaume (as in Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister
); Juliet Berto, who had appeared as a café dialectician in
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
, played Yvonne, a young woman from the countryside. They were joined by two others: Michel Semeniako, a science student at the University of Grenoble, as Henri, a science student (and Yvonne’s boyfriend); and a Dutch painter, Lex de Bruijn, as a painter by the name of Kirilov (a character from Dostoyevsky’s
The Devils
).
¹⁶

Though four of the five actors closely resembled the characters they were playing, Léaud, who was living a threadbare existence in a tiny apartment,
was hardly a member of the bourgeoisie. To prepare him for his role, Godard gave Léaud money to eat: “I forbade him to spend it chez Langlois [at the Cinémathèque], so that he could eat calmly, for an hour and a half, every day, without reading the paper and without doing anything beside having a normal meal in a normal restaurant.”
¹⁷

In
La Chinoise
, the five call themselves the “Aden-Arabie” cell (a name taken from the title of the first novel by the late Paul Nizan, Sartre’s close friend who had migrated politically from the right wing to Communism in the 1930s while Sartre was still apolitical). They are staying together in a comfortable apartment that Véronique has borrowed from friends’ parents during the summer between university terms. These young people are in effect on summer vacation and not so much forming a cell as playing at one. Holed up together, they study political texts, deliver lectures to each other, invite guest speakers, and dream of revolution.

The story concerns the group’s passage from theory to practice. After reading a series of texts advocating violence in the name of revolution, the group—with the exception of Henri—decides to assassinate the loyal Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who is in Paris as a cultural ambassador representing the Soviet government.
¹⁸
The painter, Kirilov, who had been planning his own suicide, volunteers for the murder, but the group decides to draw lots to determine who will commit the crime. Véronique is chosen. To facilitate her task, Kirilov writes a letter falsely confessing to the crime that she will commit, then kills himself.

Véronique is driven by a young sympathizer from outside the cell to Sholokhov’s hotel. She goes inside and reads Sholokhov’s name on the guest register. The driver waits in the street for Véronique to reappear (Godard punctuates the scene with a comic-strip panel of a gunshot blast). Véronique re-enters the car, tells the driver that she’s done the deed, then exclaims: “Shit, shit, shit, shit! Stop!”; she realizes that she read the hotel register upside down, took Sholokhov’s room number, 23, for 32, and shot the wrong man. She now returns to the building, as the driver waits again until Véronique signals from the balcony of room 23 that the deed has really been done this time.

Henri, in a kind of on-camera exit interview, explains that he left the group because he found the others “too fanatical.” Guillaume—as announced in a series of title cards heralding “The Theatrical Vocation of Guillaume Meister”—enters the ruins of a building labeled “Theater, Year Zero.” Among the ruins, two women, one young and slender in a bikini, the other aging and plump in a one-piece bathing suit, face each other from behind matching panels of glass and knock loudly on them. The actor then stands in a barren industrial zone selling fruits and vegetables for “ten centimes” each;
he exhorts his customers, “Try your luck!” and they pelt him with his merchandise; leeks, tomatoes, eggs, and zucchini come raining down on his head. Guillaume’s last “work” is to knock on the door of a woman in an apartment building. She tells him tearfully that her boyfriend has left her, and he responds in slightly altered verses from Racine’s
Andromaque:
“Fear not, madame. A god is on your side. The fatal sacrifice is still in abeyance, you need only become Marxist-Leninist!”

The children of the apartment’s tenants (including Blandine Jeanson, who had appeared so memorably in
Two or Three Things
) return from their vacation and are appalled to see copies of the Little Red Book and agit-prop posters strewn about their home. On the balcony, the young women, who learn what Véronique has done, ask what in the world she will tell her family. She says, “Yes, OK, it’s a fiction, but it brought me closer to reality,” and declares, “I thought I had made a great leap forward, and now I realize that I have only made the first timid steps of a very long march.” Going inside the apartment, she closes the shutters, ending her summer interlude, as a title card declares, “The End of a Beginning.”

T
HE FILM WAS
shot with a wildness unusual even for Godard: he had prepared a number of scenes that he intended to shoot, but had little sense of how he was going to organize them into a film. He joked with an interviewer that he “shot the film in the order of shooting”
¹⁹
—in other words, without regard to the order of the story’s events, which he had left vague even as the camera rolled. Michel Semeniako had come to Paris with little idea of what he would be doing. Indeed, he expected to work with Godard behind the camera—and found out differently. As he later recalled: “The very day of my arrival, after hours of train travel, completely exhausted, he had me start work at once. Godard thrust a typewritten two-page synopsis in my hands and a little red book (which I wasn’t at all obliged to read) and I had to speak the text which is at the beginning of the film.”
²⁰

There are also long scenes of the group’s teach-in meetings, where the others listen to Guillaume’s report on newsreels or to Omar, an African student from Nanterre who presents a text on the effort “to give a little existence and theoretical consistency to Marxist philosophy.”

The continuity notebooks of the script supervisor, Suzanne Schiffman, reveal the shoot’s randomness and improvisation. Many scenes were reshot, others went unused. Godard not only did a great many takes (Semeniako, an untrained actor, remembered doing up to twenty of one scene) but also printed many of them in order to leave himself a wide range of choices in the editing room. Godard explained in an interview that
La Chinoise
was “exclusively a film of montage,” and added, “I shot autonomous sequences, without
any order, and I organized them later.”
²¹
Cobbling together scenes from different takes shot on different days with different backgrounds, Godard used inserts and music to paper over the differences.

This element of improvisation, together with the lively spontaneity of the performers, gives the film the exuberant simplicity of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in a Maoist garage. The film is comprised largely of bizarre, tendentious skits: a man in a tiger mask pretends to speak amicably on the phone with the Soviet leader Aleksei Kosygin; Yvonne plays a Vietnamese peasant (using a conical lampshade as a hat) who fends off toy American fighter planes dangling from strings while crying out, “Help, Mister Kosygin!” or plays the same peasant, camped behind a barricade of piled-up Little Red Books.

The poet and critic Alain Jouffroy met Godard often during the shoot of
La Chinoise
and the two spoke about modern painting. Jouffroy believes that the subject of their talks is reflected in the film,
²²
which is highly decorative, a painter’s film. Godard smeared the shutters and the apartment walls in red. He took particular care daubing the actors with blood-red makeup. Throughout the film, graphic images—of Brecht, Shakespeare, Sartre, of young Mao and young Marx, an engraving of Alice in Wonderland, a detail from a painting by Bonnard and another by Klimt, a poster of Chinese theater, and a picture of a newborn baby red with blood—appear in the midst of the live action. The walls of the apartment are a canvas for Godard’s graphic sense: on them, we see a poster of Malcolm X, the covers of magazines (
Peking News, Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, Red Guard
), and Godard’s own designs, including a large-size slogan done in rectilinear letters (“One Must Combat Vague Ideas With Precise Images”). There is also a wall of shame that serves as a target for the group’s sport, archery with a suction-tipped toy arrow, and is adorned with a collage of images of Descartes, Sartre’s book on Descartes, Himmler (inscribed “Emmanuel Kant”), the poet Novalis, Lyndon Johnson, Kosygin, and Leonid Brezhnev. Other walls in the apartment feature blackboards filled with Godard’s recognizable scrawl (“anarchism, ultra-democracy, subjectivism, individualism”) and the last work of the painter Kirilov, a series of polychrome parallel stripes meandering the length of a bedroom.

After the shoot, Antoine Bourseiller returned to his apartment to find it covered with the film’s graphic decorations, including a huge poster in Godard’s own handwriting. On one side, in red, was a doctrinaire decree: “It is the rich who create languages and who endlessly renovate them from top to bottom… A school that selects, destroys culture. It removes the means of expression from the poor. It removes the knowledge of things from the rich.”
²³
The other side of the poster listed the exemplary agents of this oppression: the world’s film producers, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In effect,
La Chinoise
is less a document of Maoist thought, action, or organization than a collage of Maoist graffiti and paraphernalia. The Red Book itself is featured, on bookshelves, in endless rows of uniform authority. Even the sound track contains a sign of the moment’s political effluvia, a bouncy but aggressively intoned song, “Mao Mao.” Godard had wanted a rock song for the film, and Gérard Guégan, a Marxist who wrote for
Cahiers du cinéma
and also had a foot in the world of French pop music, quickly patched the song together from Maoist catchphrases that were in the air.

In
La Chinoise
, Godard breaks the fourth wall more overtly than he had done in any film to date. Dialogue between Godard and his actors is included, as in
Masculine Feminine
, though in
La Chinoise
he often left his voice on the sound track, if faintly, coming to the actors from off-camera as they acknowledge the director’s presence by responding to him directly, without pretending to remain in character. He leaves the slate in many shots, uses a second camera to film Raoul Coutard at the eyepiece of the large studio camera and the small bank of lights behind him, and shows the sound technician at his tape recorder. The proceedings are nominally Brechtian: in his first scene, Léaud as Guillaume defines his theatrical mission with a political parable of a Chinese student protesting in Moscow. After the student’s protest was broken up by Russian police, he appeared before the press with his face bandaged, crying, “Look what they’ve done to me!” While telling this story directly to the camera, Léaud mimes it, putting a bandage on his own face and then unwrapping it to reveal his face, unharmed:

So naturally, the journalists started yelling, “What kind of jokers are these Chinese, what’s this all about?” but they didn’t… they didn’t understand at all. No, they didn’t understand what theater, real theater, is: a reflection on reality, I mean, something like Brecht, or else… or else, Shakespeare, of course.

The Brechtian aspect persists as Guillaume continues his interview and tells the camera, “You think that I’m pulling your leg, you think that I’m playing the clown because I’m being filmed, or because there are technicians around me, but not at all. It’s because there’s a camera in front of me that I’m being sincere.” He then refers to a text by Althusser on a play by Brecht; at the end of the monologue, Godard says, “Cut. Very good,” and a technician is heard saying, “
La Chinoise
, R-seven, take five.”