Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (8 page)

In Rohmer’s film, Godard is intense and romantic, with an ardent, tremulous gaze and precise gestures that suggest the mastery of great passions. His dark, wavy hair is thick, his hairline high and well defined, his jaw-line angular, his chin prominent. He is a handsome but intellectual leading man, burdened with too much inhibition to sweep Charlotte off her feet, too reflective to let himself get carried away, yet desirous of such abandon above all. Charles Bitsch, another young man of the CCQL and Cinémathèque circle, recalled Godard from that time as

something of a dandy, with his dark glasses and his way of dressing. He was much better dressed than we were. He wore a tie, a checked vest, dark gloves—not Saint-Laurent, but with a certain class.
⁶

Bitsch mentioned Godard’s “way of talking very little” and added, “Seeing him, you would say that he isn’t just anybody, he was a character.” In choosing Godard to play Walter, Rohmer had indulged in typecasting. But he had also put Godard into a psychodrama, giving the amateur actor lines that coincided with his philosophical preoccupation with death—for it was at this time that Godard, thinking of making his own first film, wanted to interest a producer in an adaptation of Albert Camus’s philosophical essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
, with specific reference to its famous first line, “The only serious philosophical problem is suicide.”

Godard did not make this film. Instead, he addressed its existential theme in the pages of
Cahiers du cinéma
. He was the first of the younger critics from the CCQL/Cinémathèque group to be published in
Cahiers du cinéma:
although Bazin turned down his first article for the journal, a favorable review of Max Ophüls’s
Le Plaisir
,
⁷
the January 1952 issue featured a brief review by “Hans Lucas” of an American melodrama from 1950 directed by Rudolph Maté,
No Sad Songs for Me
. One sentence in the article is loaded with references, allusions, self-promotions, and enough thematic material for an entire oeuvre:

If destiny and death are the cinema’s preferred themes, then there must be, in this carefully controlled presentation [
présentation
] which is mise-en-scène, the definition of the human condition.

In bringing together in a single phrase the title of his film with Rohmer,
Présentation
, and the title of André Malraux’s novel,
La Condition humaine
, Godard announced outsized ambition and asserted that he had begun to fulfill it in the making of Rohmer’s short film.

In May 1952,
Cahiers
reproduced the four-page screenplay for
Présentation
, credited to Eric Rohmer, along with a photograph of its three actors: though Godard is clearly recognizable, the caption lists him as “Nick Bradford,” and the credits attribute the direction of the film to “Guy de Ray.” A note in the same issue’s “Cinema News” column declares,“After
Présentation
, Guy de Ray will shoot, with the collaboration of Hans Lucas, a cinemato-graphic story,
Weekend of Love
.” This film did not get made either. For the time being, Godard’s activities would not involve making movies; instead, they were centered around watching movies and writing about them for
Cahiers du cinéma
, and
Cahiers
itself was centered around André Bazin.

B
AZIN THE ORGANIZER
and Bazin the critic were, in effect, two different men. As a critic, he relentlessly pushed an idea that he developed into a doctrine, hardened to a dogma, and uttered as a prejudice. Yet as an organizer of ciné-clubs, he united lovers of movies and tirelessly proselytized for the cinema as such, and did so with extraordinary openness, tolerance, and generosity. At
Cahiers du cinéma
, Bazin did both: he continued to argue for his own theoretical notions, but he also gathered around him enthusiasts who disagreed with him—mainly Rohmer and the young men from the CCQL—and none did so more bluntly or brilliantly than Godard.

In March 1952,
Cahiers
included Godard’s review of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train
, the first endorsement in the magazine of the director
whom the CCQL habitués considered the exemplary artist of Hollywood’s industrial system of film production—and
Cahiers
published it despite Bazin’s distaste for Hitchcock’s films. (An editor’s note affirmed that Godard was arguing “against the Editors-in-chief.”) In the September issue, Godard, again writing as Hans Lucas, offered a polemic that united his ideas in a remarkably sophisticated theoretical manifesto. He was not yet twenty-two years old. The title was “Defense and Illustration of Classical Découpage,”
⁸
and the object of his critique was Bazin.

In an article in the first issue of
Cahiers
, “To Be Done with Depth of Field,” Bazin had attacked the “obsolete play of shot-reverse shot” (i.e., the standard Hollywood method for shooting and editing of dialogue sequences, with alternating shots of two characters seen from matching angles) and again argued in favor of long takes and great depth of field in order to maintain spatial continuity. He claimed that this practice constituted “dialectical progress in the history of cinematographic language.”
⁹

Godard challenged that notion head-on. Praising Otto Preminger and other American directors for their use of shot-reverse shot, he specifically locates in “that spatial discontinuity due to a change of shot, which certain enthusiasts of the ‘ten-minute take’”—meaning Bazin—“feel obligated to disdain, the reason for the greater part of truth which this figure of style contains.” Godard was claiming that spatial discontinuity itself generated a sense of “psychological reality, meaning that of the emotions.” He argued that visual elements resulting from shot-reverse shot, such as the isolation of characters in the frame or the change in visual perspective, reflected the characters’ differing mental points of view, their inner life. His prime example for his argument is the work of a director whom Godard referred to as “the greatest American artist—I mean Howard Hawks”—another Hollywood filmmaker whose films Bazin neglected.

Godard further argued that Bazin merely fetishized the technique of long takes and deep focus. In effect, he was accusing Bazin of a formalism that caused the elder critic to sacrifice the emotional life of the film to a theoretical prejudice. And the specific emotional life, the supercharged sentimentality, that Godard found exemplified in American melodramas, was not something that Godard apologized for as a base, kitschy, or guilty pleasure: on the contrary, he defended it as an attribute of high art and called attention to what he considered its latent philosophical import: “Do not smile at such passion inflamed by logic, one surely feels that what ensures its worth is that at each instant it is a matter of loving or dying.”
¹⁰

In effect, Godard’s own revolution, though inspired by the philosophical modernism of Sartre and Camus, would be a conservative one, based
on the preservation, or restoration, of classical values. The cinema that Godard was praising aroused a direct emotional response through a traditional, nineteenth-century-novelistic and naturalistic approach to character. For Godard, paradoxically, this classicizing approach, as exemplified in such Hollywood films as the harsh melodramas directed by Hawks or Preminger, yielded a more authentically modern art—as a result of its forthright confrontation with the existential crises of death and the human condition—than the more formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica, or Wyler, which Bazin endorsed. For Godard, the cinema would be the definitive repository of a traditional idea of humanity as represented in art.

Thus, Godard was stating his own case for existentialism as a humanism, one more concerned with the life and fate of individual characters than with the politics of social conscience that Sartre proffered. But it was also, for Godard, a humanism of a more venerable sort, akin to the Renaissance humanism of classical learning. His early articles in
Cahiers
were filled with citations. Godard cited not only films from among the vast number that he took in, but also works from the literary and philosophical tradition that he imbibed with a comparable intellectual voracity. The brief texts are spangled with references to Sartre, La Bruyère, Diderot, Gide, Madame de Lafayette, Stendhal, Delacroix, Poussin, David, Mauriac, Fénélon, Corneille, Baudelaire, Botticelli, Titian, Ingres, Dostoyevsky, Schumann, Manet, and Aragon. Having quit his studies young, Godard was an autodidact, and in his first days he exhibited his independent learning with the pride of a self-made man. The exalted company of artistic notables was no accident: Godard considered the artists of Hollywood to be their peers, and conceived of the cinema as a high art, despite its origins in the fiercely commercial domain.

But Godard’s coherent and lofty sense of the cinema and of his own grand philosophical promise stood at this time in pathetic contrast to his desperate life. When he came back to Paris, but did not return to the university, he lost his family support and lived on expedients, which included “borrowing” from his mother’s best friend, his godmother, in Paris, and theft. He stole first editions of Paul Valéry from his grandfather’s collection, and other first editions from Jean Schlumberger, selling them at the riverbank book-stalls to pay for his moviegoing. He stole and sold a painting by Renoir that belonged to his grandfather.

However, Godard, living a floating life in cafés and scrounging a living, also associated with shallow provocateurs and publicity hounds who despised the complex, subtle, and introspective classicism that Godard intuited. In St.-Germain-des-Prés, he spent his days with the current
avant-garde, the Lettrists and their even more radical dissidents (later the Situationists), who had begun to achieve an impressive public record of scandal and recognition. Isou’s film,
Traité de bave et d’éternité
(A Treatise of Venom and Eternity), a vehement attack on the classical cinema, was shown privately at Cannes in 1951 alongside the festival;
¹¹
even Rohmer, another St.-Germaindes-Prés adept, praised Isou’s film in
Cahiers
while Godard praised it in private. In 1952, a film by the original Situationist, Guy Debord,
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(Screams in Favor of Sade), made with a black screen and featuring a staged riot in the theater, was a succès de scandale . But theirs was an avant-garde of pure negativity that burst onto the scene with the sudden flame of gossip and outrage. Godard’s project, in its philosophical complexity and neoclassical grandeur, was necessarily slow to develop, and was endangered by his proximity to dilettantes and poseurs. For a second time, he needed to get out.

I
N THE FALL
of 1952, tired of living on small change and on the edge of destitution, and in the hope of finding an alternate, more rapid, route into the cinema, Godard took money from
Cahiers
’s till and slunk back to Switzerland; there, with his mother’s help, he found work with Swiss television in Zurich, but after stealing money from its safe, he went to jail for a few days,
¹²
then, through his father’s intervention, was removed to a psychiatric clinic. Upon his release, toward the end of 1952, he moved in with his mother, who was living in Lausanne, and he wanted a job.

On Christmas Eve 1952, Godard made a new friend: his mother’s lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, who, born in 1927, was eighteen years his mother’s junior and three years Godard’s senior. Laubscher recalled that on “December 24, 1952, his mother told me, ‘Come at 5 pm’; Jean-Luc Godard arrived at 5:15. He already had his dark glasses—he said that the color values of black-and-white films are those which one obtains with dark glasses.”
¹³
Laubscher, who had literary aspirations as well as practical plans to become an engineer, had been working since February 1952 as a laborer on the monumental Grande Dixence Dam, in the Valais, which, when completed, would be the world’s tallest dam. Laubscher’s uncle, an engineer, had gotten him the job. In October, carrying forty pounds of books up icy steps, Laubscher had slipped and broken his wrist; shortly thereafter, he met Godard’s mother, Odile, who was working as a medical assistant in a physical therapy clinic. Nurse and patient got to talking about literature; he was a writer and enthusiastic reader, and she had letters of Valéry to show him. They soon took a studio together in Lausanne. Laubscher recalled that one day, when he came to the studio, “she said, ‘Don’t get undressed’ because normally we made love
immediately, ‘Jean-Luc has sold all the first editions.’ I went from bookstore to bookstore with my pay to buy them back. I gave them back to her.”
¹⁴

On April 27, 1953, Godard sent Laubscher a beseeching letter, in which he addressed him with the formal “vous”:

Dear Friend:
My mother tells me that you would perhaps be able to get me hired for several months at the work sites where you yourself are working.

He asked Laubscher to send his response in care of his mother. Nothing came of this entreaty, but a lively friendship did develop between the two during Godard’s stay in Lausanne, as evidenced in a letter of Monday, May 25, 1953, from Godard (where he uses the familiar “tu”), in which he addressed Laubscher as “my dear Elder.” He wrote to “forewarn” Laubscher of his arrival for lunch the following Sunday and again to ask for work at the Praz Fleuri work site of the Grande Dixence dam.

The job Laubscher got him entailed hard manual labor: Godard had to carry a pick and a bucket and wear heavy boots. While working on the dam, Godard conceived the idea of making a film about it, and when his contract came to an end, Godard sought to “re-enlist” with the project in mind. On January 14, 1954, Godard wrote again to Laubscher, this time to ask about arranging for a transfer to some sort of office job, and mentioned his plan to shoot a film about the construction of the dam. His thoughts regarding film production were already strikingly practical: he intended to use the nonprofessional 16mm, a format which, he knew, could possibly be sold to English television and also shown to the dam’s management “to see if they want a more beautiful one,” because, he understood, “if the Dixence corporation is inclined to give me 5 to 6,000 francs to make a proper documentary, I could then make it in 35mm.” Also, in deference to Laubscher’s longer experience working on the dam, he asked Laubscher to be his partner.