Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (62 page)

W
HILE
G
ODARD WAS
making
La Chinoise
, Chris Marker—whose politically engaged documentaries included
Le Joli mai
(a portrait of life in France at the end of the Algerian war) and whose fictions included
La Jetée
(a dystopian yet romantic science fiction constructed of still photos with a voice-over)—organized a project called
Far from Vietnam
, a compilation film involving volunteer work from dozens of technicians, actors, and suppliers of motion picture goods and services. He invited Godard, along with Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda, to contribute a short film to the ensemble. Godard’s initial contribution, however, which he described as a shot of a naked woman accompanied by a description on the sound track of what a fragmentation bomb would do to her body, was rejected by the group. As the project’s deadline was nearing, Godard delivered, at the last minute, a short film called
Caméra-Oeil
(
Camera-Eye
, a title taken from the Soviet agit-prop newsreels
Kino-Glaz
, made mainly by Dziga Vertov in the 1920s). Although it, too, as William Klein later recalled, disappointed others in the group, this short film was included in the compilation.
³⁷

In
Camera-Eye
, Godard himself, seen at the eyepiece of a massive 35mm Mitchell camera, meditates on the title of the film and on his situation—namely, that of a Frenchman wanting to do something for the Vietnamese
people despite being “far from Vietnam.” Godard refers to his first, rejected film, and admits that he had wanted to go to North Vietnam but was denied a visa by its government. He intercuts his own image with documentary news images from Vietnam, of battlefields and urban defenses. Most of all, the sequence is a twin self-portrait of Godard and a professional movie camera, a double identity that suggested a double identity crisis.
Camera-Eye
, a film of wit and agony, promised political cinema that would be both aesthetically sophisticated and intensely personal. But Godard did not fulfill that promise; he was seeking to erase himself, and his contribution to
Far from Vietnam
would be the last time for many years that he would face the camera.

In another short film, made in Paris at the same time, Godard expressed even more clearly his political sentiments—together with their romantic implications. He was commissioned to make a short film for a compilation called
Vangelo 70
(Gospel 70, ultimately released under the title of
Amore e Rabbia
, Love and Rage), a French-Italian coproduction. (Other commissioned directors included Bernardo Bertolucci, who filmed a production by the Living Theater with Julian Beck, and Pasolini, who filmed his waifish alter ego, Ninetto Davoli, romping through the streets of Rome bearing a giant flower.) Godard’s contribution, credited simply as “Love,” was given a bilingual title:
L’Aller et retour andate e ritorno des enfants prodigues dei figli prodighi
(The Departure and Return of the Prodigal Children). As the title suggests, Godard took the bilingual premise of the French-Italian coproduction to its ultimate extreme: the film features a couple in which the man speaks Italian and the woman French.

The setting is the same rooftop garden where
Camera-Eye
was filmed—Michèle Rozier’s garden in the sixth arrondissement. The bilingual couple contemplates and discusses another young couple, as if the second pair were in a movie.

The young woman in the “observed” couple speaks (in French) of aesthetics, nature, psychology, and love, while her lover speaks (in Italian) of a new era of world revolution. He tells her that they are at odds because he is a revolutionary and she is not, and adds that he is planning to leave for Cuba later that day. The woman in the “watching” couple declares that the other pair is destined to break up because the young woman is Jewish and the man is an Arab (the film was made immediately after the end of the Six-Day War); her partner explains that it is their parents whose ethnicity is so clearly determined, not theirs.

This dialogue of lovers destined to separate because of political differences suggests that love between ideological opponents would be realized only in a future Arcadian utopia, as the “watched” man says: “When the world is returned to a single black forest to our four astonished eyes, and to a beach for
two loyal children, we’ll meet again.” And the herald of that dream of idyllic love is the age of revolution: “The war that China, and the rest of humanity, will wage, will lead the world to a new age.” As in the series of films that he had begun with
Le Nouveau Monde
, Godard put the blame for his earlier failed romantic relations on the hostile conditions of the world; it was as if Godard was explaining his past to Wiazemsky, with whom things would be different because, as an ideological comrade, she shared his point of view.

Godard’s dreadful and fantastic vision in
L’Aller et retour
is at odds with the elegant formal games that framed it. His next feature film would depict an age of ideological apocalypse with a wild, scattershot fervor more appropriate to his political hysteria and aesthetic revulsion.

I
N INTERVIEWS
at the time of the release of
La Chinoise
, Godard mentioned his plans for a new film,
Weekend
(the English-language word). Its subject was “the God of leisure” and he described his idea: “By following a young managerial couple on the road, I will attempt to show all the perversions which flow from that state of affairs. The journey, begun in apotheoses, will end in tragi-comedy (having left in a new car, our heroes will come home on foot…).”
³⁸
The film was produced by a consortium of French and Italian companies that demanded the casting of two stars: Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne. Both were in the commercial mainstream of the French film industry, neither had any New Wave associations, and, though Godard described them as “a very plausible couple,”
³⁹
he was unhappy about working with Darc, an actress known for films of vapid eroticism.

Godard had left little time to prepare for the film and had to leave the Venice festival before the screening of
La Chinoise
on September 4 because the shoot of
Weekend
was scheduled to begin the next day.
⁴⁰
He told a journalist that the film would be about “a couple… who go driving on the highways for a weekend” and described the sort of things that would happen. As the journalist reported:

One will see accidents. Hippies with flowers in their hair, led by [the avant-garde theater actor] Jean-Pierre Kalfon. And also Jean-Pierre Léaud, who will sing into a telephone. And Juliet Berto, who will make speeches on the street. And a Christ, who will change a flock of sheep into a junkyard full of cars.
⁴¹

The overriding structure of the film, unlike that of
La Chinoise
, was simple, and Godard recognized the difference: “In
La Chinoise
I had nothing but details to assemble, lots of details. For
Weekend
, on the contrary, I have the structure, but not the details.”
⁴²
The pretext for the couple’s trip was grotesquely mercenary: they were rushing to her family home before her
mother died to make sure they would not be disinherited by her stepfather. Their trip and its purpose fit squarely within Godard’s own moral mythology: the film’s first scene, of the couple in comfort and at leisure in a modern suburban house, features the woman (Darc) whispering on the phone to her lover, telling him that she will leave her husband as soon as she gets the money. Once again, Godard associated the political and social immorality of the bourgeois and consumerist way of life with sexual immorality and marital infidelity.

To make his point, Godard created an extraordinary array of set pieces of a bourgeois world desperately out of joint. After the woman’s telephonic tryst, she confesses an erotic incident to her husband in great detail (including, among other things, an egg placed between her legs), during a scene shot in a single long take, with a text derived from Georges Bataille’s
Story of the Eye
. Godard films the scene with a remarkable series of slow zooms in and out, on both husband and wife. (He claimed to have gotten the idea from the scene in Bergman’s
Persona
in which Bibi Andersson describes a sexual encounter.)
⁴³

Then the couple sets out from their apartment, chased by the child of a neighbor whose car bumper they have dented while pulling out: the child (Christophe Bourseiller) is dressed in an American Indian headdress and fires toy arrows at the departing couple. His parents emerge from their own modern apartment building, and his father fires a shotgun at the couple as they drive away.

The most famous set piece in the film, and one of the greatest conceptual gags in the history of cinema, is the traffic jam that the husband and wife encounter on their way out of town. The sequence lasts for nine minutes; it is a series of three tracking shots, cut together by intertitles to simulate the impression of a single take. In this sequence, the camera simply follows a line of cars inching forward—often entirely stopped—on one lane of a two-lane highway. Some people have left their cars, others picnic at the roadside, children throw a beachball from one sunroof to another as horns honk, tempers rise, drivers attempt to cut in on the line and are rebuffed by other drivers, until, at the head of the traffic jam, the cause of the bottleneck is revealed: drivers have stopped to stare at an accident which has strewn wrecked cars around trees and left blood-spattered bodies dispersed on the road. The sequence connects the two scourges of automotive life—traffic jams and car crashes—in a single comic idea and a single image. Despite the very long takes and the very few cuts, the scene is, above all, a masterwork of montage, as Godard had primordially conceived it.

After a series of sardonic calamities in which they lose their car and money, the couple find themselves stranded on a country road. They meet a group of men sitting by the roadside and ask them who they are. The answer: “We’re the Italian extras”—whom Godard had hired to fulfill the
requirements of the Italian coproducers. The couple sit by the roadside like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, each blaming the other for their misfortune and their bilious marriage. Two passersby drag the woman into a ditch; the man doesn’t lift a finger as, off-camera, they rape her (a bitterly serious moment that is played, by way of the passivity of the husband and the matching passivity of the camera, as dark, absurd comedy).

The couple then hitches a ride on a truck carrying a group of workers, who soon stop to eat. The couple asks to share the food; the response (from a worker played by Godard’s friend László Szabó): “If this sandwich represents the gross national product of the West, this”—offering the woman a crumb—“represents aid to Africa.” He then delivers a lengthy lecture on revolution in Africa and the Arab world—the only sincere, noncartoonish, nonexaggerated moment in the film, the only dialogue Godard could bear to hear spoken straight and performed without histrionics.

The couple is next abducted by a band of revolutionary “hippies,” the FLSO (Front de Libération de la Seine-et-Oise, a suburban region of Paris), who turn out to be cannibals. To save herself, the woman joins them; they butcher and roast her husband, whom, in the film’s last shot, she eats. The point is clear: the bourgeois woman does whatever she must to save herself, including joining a band of cannibals and becoming its leader’s lover. The betrayals dramatized by Godard since the start of his career here took on their most bitter and evil form. As for the cannibals (led by Jean-Pierre Kalfon), Godard seemed ready to pardon them on the grounds of their revolutionary principles. Mao had famously declared (a citation spoken by Wiazemsky in
La Chinoise
) that a revolution is not a dinner party. Godard begged to differ: why not a dinner party, at which the enemy would be served?

I
N WEEKEND
, G
ODARD
offers a wide range of cultural references, including the apparition of the fictional revolutionary and sorcerer Joseph Balsamo, the title character of a novel by Alexandre Dumas; the dual role of Jean-Pierre Léaud as the revolutionary Saint-Just and as a desperate lover singing a pop love song in an isolated phone booth; a philosophical Tom Thumb and a philosophical Emily Brontë (dressed as Alice in Wonderland); the appearance of Godard’s friend Paul Gégauff as an itinerant pianist whose truck brings a concert grand to a desolate barnyard where he performs a Mozart piano sonata, with spoken commentary (filmed in a colossal series of circular tracking shots); and the declamation of Lautréamont by the revolutionary cannibals (whose radio code names are Battleship Potemkin, Johnny Guitar, and Gösta Berling, the defrocked priest and title character of Mauritz Stiller’s 1923 film). The references are ironic and mocking; in a world gone cartoonish, culture does the same.

Godard called his film “closer to a cry” than to a movie, and he was right. His characters are lost in a landscape of pain.
⁴⁴
France is depicted as an automotive inferno in which people beat and shoot each other over right of way or a dented bumper; where a mile-long traffic jam is caused by compulsive rubbernecking at a corpse-strewn flaming wreck; where overturned and burned-out blood-doused cars and their victims are as common as trees in the landscape; where emotionally dissociated monsters remain as unaffected by the farmers in a barnyard as by the Mozart incongruously played there, and who set afire a poet (Emily Brontë) when she will not interrupt her musings to give them directions.
Weekend
is a prolonged howl of rage at the perceived vanities and cruelties of bourgeois life.