Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (77 page)

Bertin told Godard, “You’re crazy! You’ll never finish, because even a half of that is already a lot.” But unable to find another filmmaker who was willing to make even one program on such short notice, she gave his and Miéville’s Sonimage the full commission. When Bertin shared this news over lunch with Roux’s retired predecessor, Pierre Schaeffer—whose cameras Godard had “liberated” in May 1968—he told her, “My dear girl, you are screwed.”
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Godard’s initial idea was to do six live 100-minute interviews and discussions, but he was told that his programs had to be recorded. So he divided each time slot into two parts, the first “a little more composed,” the second “simply someone talking,” and he called the whole series simply
Six fois deux
(Six Times Two).
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Godard had set up his video studio to permit him to work copiously and rapidly with a small crew, and
Six fois deux
gave him the chance to prove it. The budget was low, less than half the typical cost of a television documentary of that length, and his crew featured only three people—the cameraman William Lubtchansky, the camera assistant Dominique Chapuis, and the production assistant Philippe Rony.

Miéville and Godard were cocredited as the project’s directors. Miéville’s role was as Godard’s constant interlocutor. Because of her lack of technical knowledge and on-set experience, she exerted her creative authority largely through her relations with him. She was aware of how she was likely to be perceived as a result: as an “unknown cow” benefiting from her association with “a famous filmmaker,” similar to the way that Gorin had been misperceived; and she defined her role in the production as “trying to collide gently with people from behind the images.”
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Godard described his partnership with Miéville as “one and a half because we are only half of three.”
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He was in search of the third party who would, so to speak, complete the artistic duo. Jean-Pierre Beauviala’s involvement was proving less useful than he had hoped. The distance between his workshop and Godard’s office was small, but sufficient to get in the way of spontaneous and continuous collaboration.

Throughout the making of
Six fois deux
, Godard had felt the need for a full-time technical collaborator. As with
Numéro Deux
, there was no sound recordist, and Godard recorded the sound himself. But Godard also sought a manual mastery over his equipment that surpassed his actual competence, as the cameraman William Lubtchansky recalled:

When there was a problem with a cable, it was he who soldered it. And he didn’t know how to solder…. He tried to use tape, which doesn’t hold, so he tried to use solder, which does. But his didn’t hold, he redid them, he spent all his time soldering, the cables were covered with solder.
⁴⁵

Godard had hoped that Lubtchansky would move to Grenoble to work constantly with him. Lubtchansky had been Willy Kurant’s assistant on
Masculine Feminine;
he had helped Godard film his
Ciné-tracts
and
Un Film comme les autres
in 1968; and when Godard was setting up his studio in Paris, Lubtchansky responded to his call and gave him a lesson in lighting. Lubtchansky subsequently shot
Numéro Deux
and the supplementary footage for
Ici et ailleurs
. Godard admired Lubtchansky’s inventiveness: for
Six fois deux
, Lubtchansky got a small van and turned it into a “camera car” that carried videotape recorders and an independent electrical system—a miniature and homemade version of the sort of mobile video studio used by
television stations. Lubtchansky, however, was unwilling to relocate, so his visits to Godard in Grenoble were limited to two weeks at a time.

T
HE SHOWS WERE
to air every Sunday from July 25 to August 29, and Godard worked on a last-minute schedule, with episodes being shot three weeks or less before their broadcast. This put terrible pressure on Godard, who was, throughout the series, in a bitter mood.

He was both liberated and exasperated by the video equipment that he used. It was relatively light and portable, but its simplicity entailed other inconveniences. Editing was very difficult, because it had to be done strictly sequentially: to change an image at the beginning of a tape meant to begin editing the entire tape from scratch. The demands of the process forced him to work rapidly and decisively. Also, his equipment was not considered broadcast-quality, and Godard spent time and energy debating with technicians from the television station over their smoothing-out of his visual concepts in the transfer of the footage to a professional-format master tape.

Also, Godard, who was still convalescent, hesitated to film out of doors and was still withdrawn in company—odd and trying conditions under which to produce interviews. Indeed, like almost all the scenes in Godard’s three films of 1975, most of
Six fois deux
was shot indoors, and for exterior shots where he was not interviewing, Godard often stayed behind and sent his crew out alone (“Go film the river,” Lubtchansky recalled him saying). These difficulties almost derailed the first day of shooting: Godard had posted a notice at a state employment agency seeking unemployed people willing to be interviewed for a small fee, but on the day of the shoot, he tried to avoid meeting them. He didn’t want to come to the office that day, telling Lubtchansky, “I have nothing to say to them.” Lubtchansky recalled, “At the moment of the shoot, he disappeared,” and Godard had to be persuaded to come in and do the interviews.
⁴⁶

Each of the six two-part programs of
Six fois deux
is based on a different theme—unemployment, montage, journalism, photography, childhood, love. These ideas, taken together, would dominate Godard’s work for decades to come in their relevance to his own situation as a filmmaker, specifically regarding the possibility of joining work and love. The first part of each pair treats the subject in the form of a video essay, and the second reflects the idea in interviews with unemployed people, a farmer, an amateur filmmaker, a mathematician, a war photographer, a journalist, several women, two psychiatric patients, and Godard himself. The series would also involve theoretical issues regarding communication—and would draw the two problems, of communication and personal relations, together, as Godard had anticipated doing in the unrealized
Moi je
.

One long interview features “Marcel,” an elderly watchmaker in a small Swiss workshop and an amateur filmmaker who records only scenes of nature. Godard shows Marcel’s naive but majestic images of mountains and rivers, and when he asks the craftsman why he doesn’t add a commentary (“to record what is going on inside you”), Marcel answers, “The images show what is going on inside me.” Within several years, Godard too would start to film nature, and would do so more insistently, and with more originality, in order to show what was going on inside himself. Marcel opened up to Godard the possibilities of filming nature spontaneously and simply, yet grandly. The amateur movies of Marcel Reymond would prove to be a more direct inspiration to Godard’s later work than even Bresson or Rossellini had been to his earlier films.

One installment features Godard at a café in discussion with a man identified only as “Paulo” (and whom Godard later identified as Dominique Chapuis, the camera assistant); only their hands, cigarettes, and espresso cups on a café table are visible. The exchange begins with word games, as a picture of a bed appears on-screen. Godard identifies it as a bed, while Paulo calls it a table: “It’s a special kind of a table, it’s an editing table [une table de montage]”: he explains that “montage” means “mounting,” that editing a film is like a man mounting a woman, and likens the creation of a film to the creation of a family, the making of a film to the making of a child.

The series is full of children, including a little red-haired child whom Godard films at length in a park, and a photograph that appears on the cover of a manual for pregnant women, an image that recurs passingly in many of the episodes but which becomes here the object of a lengthy meditation: a woman and a baby, face to face but upside-down, the woman kissing the baby’s head and the baby reaching up to the mother’s. With a device called the Telestrator, permitting Godard to “write” with a magnetic pen directly onto the video image, he sketches on the picture to analyze the mother-child relationship: in voice-over, he likens their contours to the banks of the river, and explains, “What makes possible the love between a man and a woman, in this case an adult woman and a baby, is work.” Godard’s use of a popular journalistic image to exemplify the bond of mother and child suggested precisely where he thought that breakdowns in personal understanding derive from: the failure to understand the codes embedded in messages.

The series is also full of women, and one woman in particular—Anne-Marie Miéville, who watches Godard film other women in an episode called “Nanas” (Chicks) and then intervenes to criticize his method: “One hour of interview after centuries of silence is either too much or too little.” (The interview was originally to have been with Miéville herself, who instead preferred
to be heard from behind the scenes.) In another episode, Godard writes, directly onto the screen, a love letter to Miéville, in the form of a man in prison writing to his beloved explaining that the thoughts of her and of their daughter make him able to endure his imprisonment and withstand his jailers’ blows.

When an elderly woman complains in an interview that her great-granddaughter rarely visits her, Godard asks her why she thinks that the child is hers, and why the child is different from a neighbor’s child. “Are they a part of you?” he asks. The woman answers that they are, in a way, a part of her, and changes the subject. But the question lingers, especially for Godard, who was living with Anne-Marie Miéville and her daughter from a prior relationship.

In Godard’s view, being with Miéville put him into a relationship not with one woman but with two. As he explained to Manette Bertin, in his life with Miéville and her daughter, “There are two couples”: Miéville and Godard, and Miéville and her daughter.
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The issue would come up, explicitly, in the strangest of the episodes, 5A, an interview with René Thom, the mathematician who invented “catastrophe theory,” the theory of discontinuities. Godard challenges the mathematician’s notions by questioning him about the making of children, considered numerically. Thom calls the creation of children the conversion of two into one; Godard thinks it should be called the turning of one into two. An especially disturbing sequence at the program’s conclusion suggests the emotional ambiguities that such a redoubled relationship entailed for him. It features pictures of a child—Miéville’s daughter, who was approximately ten years old—growing up, from infancy to pre-adolescence. The girl is shown next to Miéville in a photograph, and then in a long clip of a fuzzy black-and-white video, taken in a bare modern apartment: the prepubescent girl, naked except for toe shoes, does an antic and exaggerated ballet to orchestral music coming from a tinny cassette or record player. The dance is as odd, as innocent, and as funny as the filming of it is unseemly. The sequence appears to be a home video by Godard or Miéville. The strange decision to film the girl this way is surpassed by the indiscretion of Godard and Miéville’s inclusion of it in a television program. It is hard to watch, and it is astonishing that it was shown on French television. (It aired at 8:30 pm on August 22, 1976.) And it was all the more astonishing that nobody cared.

M
ANETTE BERTIN AND
officials at INA and FR3 were pleased with
Six fois deux
. The series gained the new station a great deal of publicity and respect. Despite the bewilderment of the popular press—and a viewership so low
that it did not register with the French rating service—the programs received extraordinary coverage.
Le Monde
published a long interview with Godard;
Le Nouvel Observateur
devoted a full page to a journalist’s account of a day of videotaping that he had witnessed;
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Cahiers du cinéma
interviewed the philosopher Gilles Deleuze for his views on the series;
Libération
featured news of the programs on its front page and ran full-page spreads with interviews with Godard, a text by Miéville, and discussions of the broadcasts each week for the duration of the series.

And yet, Godard sensed that the series was just a beginning, indeed hardly even a beginning, telling an interviewer, “These films, they’re from before the work, not after. The elements of the salad, not the salad… It isn’t even a sketch. It’s the eraser, the paper to make the sketch.”
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He had produced tools and material—but for what? The series ordered by INA marked a short break in a long commissionless stretch. The brief flurry of attention and activity provided by the release of
Ici et ailleurs
in mid-September that year was a further distraction from Godard’s isolation. But the absence of work was not a crisis that he alone endured.

In the mid-1970s, the French film industry seemed to go out of its way to leave its premier artists out in the cold. The disappointment of the left after the 1974 presidential elections, which put conservative Valéry Giscard d’Estaing into power, was magnified by France’s overall mood at the time, famously described as “morose.”
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The oil crisis of 1973–1974 had struck France’s prosperity at the root; the “trente glorieuses”—the “thirty glorious years” of postwar economic growth—had come to an end, unemployment was dramatically on the rise, and France turned not only sour but vindictive. Those in power sought excuses and turned to culture wars; they offered nostalgia for the pre-1968 verities, viewed the activists of 1968 as enemies, and put the New Wave high on the list of cultural scapegoats. The centralized film industry, which derived financing from the government and depended on the good graces of state administrators, choked off funding to the New Wave and its acolytes.