Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (64 page)

The new administrator of the Cinémathèque, Pierre Barbin, expected trouble and immediately closed both screening rooms. At a press conference led by Godard on February 16, it became clear exactly what kind of trouble Barbin could expect. Godard suggested that, if the new administrators dared to reopen the Cinémathèque, audience members should engage in “perpetual sabotage: discreetly slash the seats with a razor blade, throw inkpots at the screen.” It was Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, however, who suggested a more bureaucratic form of sabotage—“We can paralyze the functioning of the Cinémathèque by forbidding the projection of films”
⁷
—
all
films, not just those by Langlois’s supporters—and his suggestion hit the government where it was vulnerable.

The following week, Barbin, seeking to contain the potential damage of such threats, proposed to require the mandatory deposit with the Cinémathèque of a print of any film
shown
in France—meaning, of course, Hollywood films. (The new American films he would thereby acquire for the quasi-nationalized Cinémathèque would compensate for the classics being withdrawn from it.) In response, S. Frederick Gronich, of the Motion Picture Association of America, resisted this coercive measure and demanded directly of Minister of Culture André Malraux the return of all U.S. prints that had ever been submitted to the Cinémathèque by the major studios.
⁸
In the face of this potentially catastrophic depletion of the Cinémathèque’s holdings, the government was forced to reinstate Langlois and announced that a meeting of the Cinémathèque council would be held on April 22.

In a joint communiqué, Truffaut and Henri-Georges Clouzot promised that if Langlois were not reinstated at that meeting, they would bring the fight to the Cannes festival in May. Finally, Langlois was restored to his position, but the Cinémathèque was stripped of its government funding—and Langlois lost his government salary. Nonetheless, the Cannes festival turned out to be a battleground and the fight, albeit of a different nature, was fought by many of the same cinematic activists, and again Godard was among the leading combatants.

M
EANWHILE
, L
EACOCK-PENNEBAKER
, the company run by the documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, acquired American distribution rights to
La Chinoise
. Godard’s recent films had not been commercially successful in the United States, but Leacock-Pennebaker decided to release the film mainly to a university market, where Godard was a
celebrity, and to bring Godard to meet with students on American and Canadian campuses. This was no benevolent educational mission: Godard was paid from $1,000 to $1,500 for an evening’s talk, which equaled the highest lecture fee of anyone on the university circuit at the time. Louise Crest of Leacock-Pennebaker confirmed that Godard, who would be traveling, all expenses paid, with Anne Wiazemsky, was also guaranteed “50% of the take where admission is charged,” and that Godard could make “more than $30,000 for his month’s work.”
⁹

But before fulfilling his obligations in America and prior to the battles over the Cinémathèque, Godard went to Cuba, in response to an invitation by the government to participate in a cultural conference there in January, which, in the event, attracted hundreds of intellectuals and artists from around the world. Godard told the Cuban authorities that he would gladly come to Cuba, but after the conference ended, and at his own expense. He and Wiazemsky visited from February 3 to 11, 1968, and while in Havana, he told a journalist: “It was important for me to come here, because I am planning a trip to the United States to give talks at several universities and I couldn’t do it before getting to know Cuba.”
¹⁰

In fact, Godard was planning to make a two-part film—“one part in America, one part in Cuba”
¹¹
—and he started work on the Cuban part. Photographs from the trip show him filming a group of children lined up side by side and a man crouching in the bush.
¹²
No film resulted, however; as Wiazemsky later recalled: “We were both very enthusiastic about what we saw there. Jean-Luc was looking for what to do, but he didn’t find it.”
¹³

F
OR
G
ODARD
, A
MERICA
was the right place at the right time. In France, he could have found financing for any quasi-commercial project he chose, but his celebrity itself was of no value. In America, he was paid merely to show up.

In February, a retrospective of Godard’s films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was received, one journalist wrote, “like a Beatles concert.”
¹⁴
The comparison was apt: the filmmaker was the cinematic idol of American university students and young intellectuals. Francis Ford Coppola, interviewed in 1968, declared, “There are kids at UCLA and USC who are incredible Godard addicts.”
¹⁵
Brian De Palma, fresh from his first feature film (
Greetings
), declared, “If I could be the American Godard, that would be great.”
¹⁶
George Lucas, a prizewinning student filmmaker at age twenty-three, said to a
Newsweek
correspondent about Godard, “When you find someone who’s going the same direction as you, you don’t feel so alone.”
¹⁷
As one enthusiastic reporter declared, “For me and for an increasing number of serious young people, Jean-Luc Godard is as important as Sartre, Hesse, and Dostoyevski.”
¹⁸

Godard stayed at the Algonquin Hotel in New York for several days in late February (together with Wiazemsky, who would soon leave for Rome to appear in Pasolini’s
Teorema
). After speaking at New York University, he went to the West Coast for four nights of panel discussions at the University of Southern California, including one with Agnès Varda and another with Samuel Fuller, King Vidor, Roger Corman, and Peter Bogdanovich. Godard spent four days at Berkeley, where he was hosted by Tom Luddy, a young political activist who worked for Pacific Film Archives. Godard went with Luddy and Mark Woodcock, Godard’s translator, to the courthouse in Oakland to observe the murder trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, but, lacking a press pass, they could not get in.

The tour included screenings of
La Chinoise
, which played to twelve sold-out houses in Berkeley.
¹⁹
The student audiences who came to hear Godard speak were not only cinematic but political, and Godard gave them what they came for. Asked in Berkeley whether, after failing to get a visa to go to North Vietnam, he would try again, he answered, “No, because I think that the North Vietnamese will have won the war before I get it,” and received a huge ovation.
²⁰
Godard explained to a reporter from
Newsweek
, “Every film is the result of the society that produced it; that’s why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.”
²¹
He divulged his thoughts on a “revolutionary cinema”: “I think that the future for a revolutionary cinema is an amateur cinema. And television is the only true possibility we have of making a popular cinema, the true possibility for the people to express themselves on a screen.”
²²
Students invited him to film their activities that summer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where, they said, they intended to bring about nothing less than “the destruction of the United States as we know it.”
²³
Godard demurred, recommending newsreel cameramen instead.

On Friday, March 8, Godard spoke at the University of Texas at Austin.
²⁴
On Saturday night, at St. Thomas University in Houston, students dove for shards of the print of
La Chinoise
that were scattered by a broken projector.
²⁵
On Sunday afternoon, Godard arrived in Kansas, where a local journalist captured the scene: “Almost immediately he was thrust into a cocktail party, which was followed by a dinner, a screening of
La Chinoise
, a public question-and-answer session and another party at the ultra avant-garde digs of a group of theater students.”
²⁶
The pace was wearying, and, on Thursday, March 14, Godard went to visit Wiazemsky in Rome for his days “off”—and did not return for the last twelve stops of his nineteen-city tour.

G
ODARD HAD TOLD
Louise Crest of Leacock-Pennebaker that he needed the money from his lecture tour “to get started on a picture he wanted very much
to make. Something planned for early spring.”
²⁷
It was a massive project; it would also be hugely expensive. He wanted to produce a film that was less the work of a director than of an impresario: a twenty-four-hour-long film,
Communications
, which would be made in many parts by many filmmakers. The new project’s utopian tone made it hard for Godard to find funding; without financing, the film could not go into production and Godard was deprived of both his director’s and producer’s fees. Seed money for the project had been put up by the actors Yves Robert and Danièle Delorme, but it proved to be un-realizably vast, and Godard had no cash flowing to his production company, no immediate source of income.
²⁸

Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre Gorin had also gone to Cuba—in January, to report for
Le Monde
on the country’s cultural conference—and what he saw there disheartened him. He recognized that the event “had nothing to do with the dreams and the hopes attached to Cuba,” that the country “was obviously repressed, undemocratic,” and, moreover, that “all the foreign intellectuals came and ate up a whole month of the people’s food.” This posed a problem for Gorin, who, as a left-wing journalist, “became aphasic”; as he later recalled, he “neither wanted to lie nor to hurt the cause.”
²⁹
Gorin left
Le Monde
and asked Godard for a job. Godard invited him to make an hour of
Communications
.

Holed up in his apartment, Gorin wrote a script, something he had never done before. He called his segment
Un film français
(A French Film);
³⁰
but by the time he completed it, Godard had already spent the money earmarked for the project and was being sued by Robert and Delorme. According to Gorin, Godard “pretended he hadn’t read it.”
³¹
It was, in any case, an impossible project, far out of line with any budget that could plausibly be found, and nothing was done to realize it. Godard and Gorin fell out of touch for several months.

G
ODARD WENT BACK
to New York on April 4, 1968, for a discussion with NYU film students which was filmed by Leacock and Pennebaker and later released as
Two American Audiences
. The session took place the day after the opening of
La Chinoise
in a mainstream theater in the residential Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. Neither Leacock-Pennebaker nor the exhibitors had high hopes. As Pennebaker later recalled:

Even the films of his that were famous, like
Breathless
, really didn’t do that well here, so we really didn’t have any expectations for the film; we didn’t run any ads or anything. The day the thing opened, we get a call from the guy who ran the theater—it was the day we were shooting at NYU—he asks us what we were doing for publicity; there was a line around the block. We were astonished.

Pennebaker later came up with what seemed to him a plausible explanation: “Turns out, it was within a day or two of the Columbia riots, and people were coming down to get their politics straight.”
³²

It was actually twenty days before the “riots” at Columbia University, which were sparked by the university’s plan to build a gymnasium on land in the public Morningside Park in a predominantly black neighborhood. The building would contain two separate facilities, one for the students and one for the community. The uprising against the implication of official segregation led to the student takeover of several buildings. But at the time of the release of
La Chinoise
, that construction program, as well as recent changes in the draft law, had already sparked protests; the campus was in a state of political tension. As the writer and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum later recalled, “I went to see
La Chinoise
with friends at Columbia, before the students took over the administration building, and I think that it actually had an effect.”
³³
In any case, the effect was mutual: if Godard had, to some small extent, inspired the Columbia takeover, the political ferment in American universities gave Godard cause for hope regarding student activism in France.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1968, another youth-oriented project came to Godard from an unlikely source. In Paris, he met a Greek film producer, Eleni Col-lard, who wanted him to make a film in London about abortion, but then, according to Richard Roud (then the director of the London and New York film festivals), Britain’s newly liberalized abortion laws obviated the film.
³⁴
However, soon thereafter, at a Paris nightclub, Godard met a young British talent agent, Mim Scala, who told him about the London rock scene and, upon returning home, sent Godard some records. Soon Collard called Scala on Godard’s behalf to inquire about the possibility of making a film in London with either the Beatles or with the Rolling Stones.