Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (68 page)

One Plus One
—Godard’s version—finally opened on May 7, 1969, at a single Left Bank movie house. It was the first film by Godard to come out in Paris since
Weekend
, more than a year earlier. The film was not seen in the United States until screenings at Hunter College in March 1970
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after which it was released theatrically, with Godard’s and Quarrier’s versions shown on alternating days.
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G
ODARD SEEMED TO
be flailing in various directions. He had gotten to know the artist Gérard Fromanger, whose paintings of French tricolor flags with the red dripping down them like blood had been one of the defining graphic images of the open street battles. Fromanger came to Godard’s apartment, where Godard sought to extract from him the secret to these pictures. Fromanger agreed to teach him how to make such paintings, while Godard recorded on film the dripping of paint on the flag in a short called
Rouge
(Red). In October, the two collaborated on a stunt. Fromanger brought trucks to deliver to a sidewalk plaza outside a church in the fourteenth arrondissement a series of enormous red and blue plastic half-spheres; Godard filmed the responses of passersby, who, as Alain Jouffroy recalled, put their heads inside the half-spheres to use their reflective inner surfaces as mirrors.
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Godard and Fromanger were arrested, and Godard—who claimed that he represented a government ministry—was additionally charged with impersonating a public official. The police used Godard’s sound equipment to listen to the filmmaker’s remarks upon arrest,
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but nothing came of the charges.

As the revolution lost steam in France, Godard returned to the United States, where it seemed to be heating up. A new project brought him back together with the American documentary filmmakers Leacock and Pennebaker.

Executives at the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (New York’s WNET, channel 13, and the precursor to PBS), were eager to produce a film by Godard, and Leacock and Pennebaker were able to package the project. On October 15, 1968, the Public Broadcasting Laboratory issued a press release for Godard’s film,
One American Movie
, which he would begin to shoot on October 30, “using actors and actual figures in fictional and factual situations. Tentative locations include New York, Chicago and San Francisco.”

Leacock and Pennebaker would be the cameramen on the project, with their documentary orientation determining its course. Godard’s idea was to film people expressing views that interested him and then to refilm those discussions as fictionalized recitations and performances by actors.

In New York, Godard had Rip Torn, dressed first in a Civil War—era uniform, then a contemporary army uniform, speak with students in an elementary school classroom in Ocean Hill—Brownsville, a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Leacock also had the idea to film Rip Torn in the cramped and rickety construction elevator of an unfinished skyscraper reciting a text along with the actor’s own prerecorded performance of it that blared from a portable cassette player. (Godard, who was afraid of heights, spent the entire ride clinging to Leacock’s waist.) The crew also went to the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank to interview Carol Bellamy, a young lawyer who worked there. In Newark, Godard arranged for LeRoi Jones (later Imamu Amiri Baraka) to recite a text in the street. But all of this work was, for Godard, merely a preliminary for the main event: he was impatient to get to the West Coast. “We’ve got to get to California before it’s over,” Pennebaker later recalled Godard saying. “Before what’s over?” Pennebaker asked. Godard responded, “The revolution: the students are going to rise up and take over.”
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Once in Berkeley, Godard had Leacock and Pennebaker film Tom Hayden, the national leader of the Students for a Democratic Society. Then he interviewed Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Godard later described the scene: “He received us in his house in Oakland. We were searched more than at the airports here. They all had berets, submachine guns… and then, he agreed to be interviewed because Tom [Hayden]… gave him five hundred dollars and he desperately needed money because two days later he fled to Algiers… or I don’t know where.”
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The crew returned to New York, where, on November 19, Godard filmed the Jefferson Airplane. He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth Street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and
out.)
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The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”
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Eventually, as the band expected, the police came to the hotel roof to stop the music, all to the loud protests of the audience that had spontaneously formed in the street.
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G
ODARD, WHO HAD
arrived in California a little early for the revolution, did not finish
One American Movie
. He abandoned the United States for several days in November, traveling to Montreal with Wiazemsky and the French producer Claude Nedjar (whom they had met by chance in New York) for the Festival of Political Cinema. Wiazemsky later recalled that both she and Godard were “seduced” by the Canadian landscape and wanted to return to Quebec. When they got back to Paris, she suggested that Godard make a film in Canada.
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Nedjar, who had a connection with media executives in Rouyn-Noranda in rural Quebec, proposed an ambitious scheme: that Godard put together a ten-part television series there in collaboration with a group of leftist filmmakers whom the director had met at the Montreal festival.

Thus Godard and Wiazemsky soon returned to Rouyn-Noranda, where, on December 16, Godard appeared on television and declared that he wanted to open the medium up to people who, he said, were usually “prevented” from appearing there, meaning, workers, students, and political militants, who might be unaware of being prevented “because in the United States, television belongs to the rich, and elsewhere it belongs to the governments.” Godard took on not only the executives of the airwaves but also the conventions of the medium: he pointed to the cameraman who was filming him head-on and said, “There is a man who is filming me but who is not listening to what I am saying.” Godard rose from his seat beside the host, crossed the stage, approached the cameraman, and asked him, “Why don’t you ask me questions too?”
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The ten-part project was to begin with documentary material: Godard intended to film discussions with local workers and students and to develop a fiction film from that research. Working with a group of politically active video-makers from the area, Godard recorded a large amount of video footage, but, according to Anne Wiazemsky, he was unclear about what he wanted to do. “There was a blizzard,” she recalled. “He said to me, ‘It would be nice if you would climb on the roof, like that, in your underwear.’ I was wearing woolen underwear. I said, ‘No, it’s too cold.’”
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Godard quickly lost interest in the project and told her simply, “We’re going home.”
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Which they did, without informing the local group or the television station of their departure.
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It was a fittingly inconclusive end to a year of frenzied, unfocused activity, which was only to escalate.

I
SABELLE
P
ONS, WHO
had been Godard’s assistant since the shoot of
Two or Three Things
and who was now keeping his books, realized, at the end of 1968, that Godard was in desperate financial straits. She suspected that the aborted project in Canada might well have been a matter not of politics or art but of money.
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In late 1968, Godard wrote to Truffaut asking for financial help. He claimed that seven hundred thousand francs (about $120,000) were due him from
Two or Three Things
, which Truffaut had coproduced. He said that the money would “increase the rate of production of anti-boss films” and concluded, “I have nothing to add, either about you, or about myself, and the others, we no longer agree about anything.”
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Truffaut considered the request outrageous but sent funds anyway. Godard eventually wrote to thank him: the money, he said, “greatly helped us pay for our editing room-office.” The plural,
us
, is no accident. The collective life Godard had once shared with Truffaut and “the others,” in the early days of cinematic fanaticism, was undergoing a sort of resurrection, in the name of another totalizing ideal.

In September 1968, Godard had invited the twenty-year-old Jean-Henri Roger, from the militant newspaper
Action
, to work with him. As Roger recalled, Godard intended “to break with his practice as a filmmaker—never to do things as he had done them before—and to join politics and aesthetics.”
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Wiazemsky had less faith in Roger’s contribution. Of his “arrival” she said: “Jean-Luc was in awe of him, whereas in my opinion his discourse was prefabricated. He crashed at our house; he took us for his mother and father.”
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Godard and Roger had coffee together almost every morning at the café La Favorite on the boulevard St.-Michel, close to Godard and Wiazemsky’s apartment on the rue St.-Jacques. Up to that point, Wiazemsky recalled, Godard, despite his increasing distance from conventional cinematic practice, frequently went with her to the movies, listened to music, and read books, but then “politics took the place of literature, of music, thanks to Jean-Henri Roger.”
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When, in early 1969, Godard started work on another film—one even more aridly doctrinaire than the fictional scenes of
One Plus One
or the narration of
A Film Like the Others
—Roger joined Godard on location.

A B
RITISH PRODUCTION COMPANY
, Kestrel Productions, had commissioned Godard to make a television film about Great Britain. Godard decided that rather than make a film of “British Images,” it should be called
British Sounds
. The innocuous title could not have been more apt. The opening ten-minute sequence is a sterile series of long tracking shots of an assembly line in a British car factory together with the factory noise on the sound track.
(Speaking to interviewers, Godard warded off criticism with an analogy: “The workers have to listen to that sound all day, every day, for weeks, months, and years, but bourgeois audiences can’t stand to listen to it for more than a few seconds.”)
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The screech of metal on metal is indeed terrible, as is the cadence of heavy labor; but more terrible still, indeed unbearable, are the hectoring pronouncements that accompany it, a monotonous description of surplus value and class conflict, drawn from the
Communist Manifesto
with particulars altered to refer to the automotive industry.

The sounds indeed took precedence over the images. A sequence of a nude woman descending and reascending a staircase (the allusion to Duchamp’s painting is both obvious and undeveloped) followed by a medium close-up, not titillating but simply leering, of the woman’s pubic zone, is accompanied by a feminist tract; a workers’ meeting in a cramped office is paired with a recitation of more political dogma; a bad imitation of a television news reporter spews leaden phrases that Godard claimed were taken from speeches by such politicians as Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Georges Pompidou, and Richard Nixon;
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students in a lounge rewrite the Beatles’“Hello, Goodbye” to read, “You say U.S. and I say Mao”; the film ends with a bloodstained hand struggling to emerge from a covering of earth. Along with the doctrinal badgering is a series of political lessons, recitations of dates and events, spoken by a father and repeated by a child. Godard was the self-appointed child learning his basics; he was the elder taking dictation from his juniors.

The film has the stiff and self-punishing feel of a cinematic hair shirt. And yet the activity that went into its making—from the producer’s wife, Mo Teitelbaum, finding Godard the feminist text by Sheila Rowbotham, to Godard attempting to persuade the writer to perform the nude scenes herself (“Don’t you think I am able to make a cunt boring?” he told her),
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to his sarcastic doctrinal discussions with the producers and their associates, to his rejection of stage blood in favor of cutting his own arm to provide the prop for the final sequence—suggests the intensity of Godard’s devotion to the absurd and failed project. The making of
British Sounds
was far from dull, but the actual images (except for the opening and closing ones, the fist through the Union Jack and the bloodied hand, which are potent living posters) range from neutral to vacant.

The flaws of
British Sounds
could have been predicted, not only from the attenuated work Godard had done after May but also from remarks he made in January 1969.

A better film would result from taking a film by de Funès and redoing the dialogue, as the Situationists redo the dialogue balloons of comic strips. Whenever I go to the Third World, that’s what I tell them: don’t refuse films you don’t like, redo them; an image is so simple; a film is nothing at all; it is what you make of it.
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