Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (61 page)

The set piece that speaks most clearly from and to Godard is one that takes place at a blackboard: as Kirilov delivers a lecture, off-camera, on the history of art (praising Mayakovsky and Eisenstein, who was “stabbed in the back by Trotsky”), Guillaume stands at a blackboard covered with the names of several dozen playwrights including Sartre, Giraudoux, Racine, Cocteau,
Goethe, Sophocles, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. One by one, Guillaume takes a sponge and effaces the names. The first to go is Sartre. In the end, all are erased except one: Brecht. The effect is that of an intellectual purge—a purge largely of Godard himself, who was wiping out his own ample literary culture in favor of the sole writer he could rescue in the name of his narrow new political doctrine—indeed, something of an intellectual suicide.

M
OST OF
L
A CHINOISE
takes place in the comfortable apartment that Bourseiller had lent for the shoot. During that time, Godard lived there with Anne Wiazemsky, who found it odd to share his bed at night and then to share it on-camera with Léaud the next day. The experience was all the more odd in that Godard often had Wiazemsky and Léaud speak in the film the dialogue that she and Godard had had the night before. They also spent much time watching movies: despite Godard’s declaration that he needed to return to life after having immured himself in the cinema, he saw to what Anne Wiazemsky called her “cinematographic education,” taking her to see two films a day when they weren’t shooting.
²⁴

Their evolving relationship is echoed in the romantic aspect of
La Chi-noise
, involving Guillaume and Véronique, although this is significantly underplayed in the couple’s three important scenes. In the first, which begins the film, only their hands are visible. In the second, they sit face-to-face at a table, studying and attempting “to speak to each other as if words were detached from sounds and from matter,” speaking as if in ideograms: “Beside a river,” “Green and blue,” “Tenderness,” “A bit of despair,” “The day after tomorrow,” “Oh, maybe,” “Theory of literature,” “A film by Nicholas… Ray.” In the third scene—which Godard admitted he derived from Max Ophüls’s
Le Plaisir
—Véronique attempts to teach Guillaume how to do two things at once (“to fight the battle on two fronts,” citing Mao) by playing a record of Schubert while explaining to him (falsely, just to get his attention) that she doesn’t love him. Wiazemsky later recalled, “There is a great deal of me in this scene,” a great deal of her own personal life with Godard: in a fight, she had told him in anger that she didn’t like the color of his sweaters, and this appears verbatim in that scene.

Godard presents a spare and unemotional, formalized, politicized, abstracted view of love, a solely intellectual intimacy, as if, unsubordinated to ideology, romance itself was suspect. At the end of the film the couple’s story is unresolved; it is unclear whether it continues or ends. Godard told an audience, “About
La Chinoise
, it’s clear that I don’t want to talk about human emotions… There’s no interest in relating a story of two young Marxist-Leninists in terms of a love story. What’s important is to try to know what Marxist-Leninism is and how it helps them in their love.”
²⁵

Masculine Feminine
and
La Chinoise
share Léaud as a lead actor in a love
story, and both films feature five young people. But in the earlier movie, the young people are not a group, whereas the group in
La Chinoise
takes precedence over its individuals. (When Henri leaves the group, he is also excluded from his relationship with Yvonne.) In both films, a young man fails to fit into a woman’s ideology—in
Masculine Feminine
, the romantic and consumerist notions of prefabricated pleasure, a stereotypical woman’s world; in
La Chinoise
, the political fanaticism and paramilitary violence that reach an apex as voiced by Véronique in the film’s longest, most important, and most audacious set piece: her dialogue on board a train with Wiazemsky’s philosophy tutor, Francis Jeanson.

Throughout the film, Véronique expresses a desire for violent, revolutionary action, at one point declaring, “But seriously, what I mean is that if I had the courage, well, I would go and blow up the Sorbonne, the Louvre and the Comédie-Française.” Now, on a train ride from Paris to Nanterre, Véronique faces Jeanson, who reveals his plans for “cultural action” with a theater company in Dijon; she, in turn, reveals her own plans: “To shut down the university.” He asks her how she intends to do it, and she answers, “With bombs,” justifying her plans by likening herself to Algerian insurgents and “the young Russian nihilists.” After hearing Jeanson’s diverse arguments against her methods, she asks bluntly whether he thinks she is making a mistake. “Yes, I think that it’s an error,” he says. “Yes, I think that you are heading into a perfect dead end.” His reasoning and his judgment do not at all dissuade her, and, immediately thereafter the group decides to kill Sholokhov.

Years later, Godard discussed the scene and recalled that when he made
La Chinoise
, he thought that Wiazemsky—that is, himself, speaking into her earpiece the lines she repeats in the scene—had won the debate about shutting down the university by acts of terror. In retrospect, however, it seemed clear to him that in the film, Jeanson’s argument is the more persuasive. Godard attributed these results to the difference between his conscious sympathies at the time, with Wiazemsky’s terrorist position, and his unconscious ones, with peaceful forms of political action.
²⁶
His inner conflict would only be exacerbated in the years that followed.

D
ESPITE THE
I
DEOLOGICAL
rigors of
La Chinoise
, its exhilarating cinematic style, with its collage-like assemblage of disparate scenes and allusive fragments, is as provocative and enticing as any in Godard’s films. And yet from the beginning, the film conveys a frenetic sense of self-destruction in the name of the enthusiasms of youth. It is as if Leonard Bernstein had thrown down his baton for an electric guitar in a three-chord garage band: the momentary surge of joy, the shock of incongruity and aesthetic invigoration, quickly give way to a view of pathetic self-abnegation. The dogmatic rhetoric
that dominates the film has an incantatory appeal, a self-enclosed and circular religious certainty that shuns the ambiguities of critical thought and introspection for the energizing simplicity of exhortation and advocacy. To reach such naive ecstasies, Godard had to film his own brainwashing.

In
Masculine Feminine
, Léaud was assigned Godard’s intellectual qualities and interests in order to contrast them with those of the young women, who are satirized and criticized. In
La Chinoise
, despite the dazzlingly spontaneous and daring technique, Godard filmed an altogether more somber spectacle: he applied his own attributes to Guillaume and then filmed the young man’s private chastisement (by Véronique) and public self-humiliation (the pelting of vegetables) in an attempt to purge himself of them. If the Aden-Arabie cell stood for Godard’s notion of an aspiring group of French Red Guards—something simultaneously absurd and touchingly romantic—he himself was the first of the bourgeois intellectuals to face its derision and wrath.

Godard had intended to use new filmmaking techniques to build the Marxist concept of self-criticism into
La Chinoise
. Amateur video cameras had just come on the market, and Godard acquired one, with the intention of including scenes of the characters videotaping, then watching and discussing their political conversations. However, he had trouble with the new equipment and so eliminated it from the film. The self-criticism that was applied to Guillaume, who represents Godard, was implemented by means of the traditional movie camera.

The mockery and abuse that Guillaume endures joyfully at the end suggest Godard’s position: he is willing to submit to ridicule in the name of his absolute political doctrine, and there is masochistic pleasure in his humiliation, which seems to define the art announced by the title card, “Cinema, year zero.”

La Chinoise
is widely understood to be prophetic: 1967 was a year of political confrontation, and 1968 a year of legendary upheaval, especially in France. The film expressed the latent proclivity for violence among the highly politicized youth of France and suggested that their opposition went far beyond the local concerns of the university, extending to revolution in the literal sense—a sudden, radical, and violent change that would affect all of society and culture.

The coming transformation that Godard both foresaw and helped to foster was one of art as well as of politics. In
La Chinoise
, Godard was doing more than exploding the conventions of the cinema: he was expressing despair that the radical politics of the time had surpassed the radicalism of his cinema. There, the contortions to which he would have to subject himself to press the cinema into the confining mold of those politics began to come into view .

T
HE FILM WAS
completed in the spring of 1967. On July 21, in Begnins, in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard, thirty-six years old, and
Anne Wiazemsky, who was not quite twenty, were married. Wiazemsky was thin and angular, with wide cheekbones, large, soft eyes, and an easy grin. Her manner was a blend of quiet, blunt sincerity and ethereal contemplation. She was something of an aristocrat, being descended on her father’s side from Polish nobility and on her mother’s from the Nobel-Prize–winning novelist François Mauriac. Like Godard, she was the scion of a notable family; like Godard, she enjoyed the cultural advantages—and the freedom from conventional expectations—it afforded. She was, in effect, a bourgeois bohemian of a similar stripe, less of an omnivorous intellectual, perhaps, but emotionally more spontaneous and less guarded.

Godard and Wiazemsky got a cocker spaniel and were photographed washing it in their bathtub and walking it together on the rue de Miromesnil. Mauriac, Wiazemsky’s grandfather, was interviewed, and he declared Godard to be “nice.” The newlyweds (and their dog) spent three days in the country at Jeanne Moreau’s estate.
²⁷
Two weeks after the marriage, on August 3,
La Chinoise
was shown publicly for the first time, at the Avignon theater festival. Antoine Bourseiller had persuaded Jean Vilar, the festival’s august director, to show
La Chinoise
in the unusual setting of the courtyard of the Palace of Popes, which he recalled as a “mythical place for the theater.”
²⁸
Many of the spectators, according to Nicole Zand of
Le Monde
, were unpleasantly surprised by the film, which they expected to be “a report on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict,” but she herself recognized it as an attempt “to capture a certain youth as one captures a radio frequency.”
²⁹

The film was released commercially in Paris on September 1 and shown at the Venice festival on September 4. (Godard and Wiazemsky went to Venice to present the film; there, on a vaporetto, she met by chance the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who asked her to play a leading role in his upcoming film,
Teorema
. She didn’t know who Pasolini was; Godard explained, and she accepted.)
³⁰
Pierre Daix, of
Les Lettres françaises
, wrote: “The power of Godard’s fable does not come from the
way
that these young people pose the question of revolution, but from the
fact
that they pose the question seriously in France in 1967.” He concluded that what would be most important about the film was “what young people will make of
La Chinoise
.”
³¹

What they made of it soon became clear. Those who had inspired it, the Marxist-Leninist Maoists of the Ecole normale, were furious with Godard for having, they thought, made them look ridiculous, and with Gorin for having transmitted what they assumed to be false or misleading information to Godard for that purpose. One member of the group was calmly derisive: “He exploited a need for romanticism. He described a fanatical little group that has nothing Marxist-Leninist about it, which could be anarchist or fascist… It’s
a film about bourgeois youth who have adopted a new disguise.”
³²
Another young Maoist called the film “a provocation. A police provocation,” because it showed Maoists to be “irresponsible terrorists.”
³³
Others threatened Godard with a people’s tribunal.
³⁴

Older critics, however, readily embraced both the film’s message and its characters. Claude Mauriac, Anne Wiazemsky’s uncle, declared Godard’s “condemnations of the ongoing American barbarity” to be “sublime and terrifying.”
³⁵
Jean de Baroncelli wrote in
Le Monde
that the film’s story is “an avatar—vintage 1967—of the eternal revolt of youth, of that irresistible élan for an ideal of purity, propriety, and nobility, that is the trait of all the adolescents of the world (at least, of those who have some soul and some heart).”
³⁶
Baroncelli hoped that the film would win the Golden Lion at the Venice festival. It did not; Luis Buñuel’s
Belle de Jour
did.

La Chinoise
indeed showed that Maoist groups existed and made clear their charismatic force. Yet the film’s “documentary” view of sweet-tempered revolutionaries and naive terrorists, joined with Godard’s anarchically exuberant method of construction, got in the way of a view of Godard himself in the picture. Where his previous films had all appeared as self-portraits, as entries in a journal,
La Chinoise
, the work of a self-abasing and self-excoriating filmmaker on the verge of a political and aesthetic breakdown, was less a portrait of him than the attempt to efface one.