Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (81 page)

The twelfth and last episode of
France tour détour
ends with a music video-like sequence of a song by Léo Ferré,
²⁰
“Richard,” about a man alone in a bar at night, one of many who are there, “near a pinball machine, simply with their men’s problems, problems of melancholy.” Godard filmed a single shot, for the length of the song, of a crowded bar at night and a lonely man, uneasy in a three-piece suit, at the center of it. It was as if Godard was saying that he, too, had his “men’s problems,” and the video series that the
long musical take concluded had focused on one of them. This man’s problem, and the real story of
France tour détour
, was that, in addition to the “two couples” in his home—Godard and Miéville, Anne and Miéville—he had the problem of the third couple, that of Godard and Anne, the daughter—which Godard did not hide under sentimentality but filmed as a nexus of power and desire, of inevitable intimacy and fear.

T
HE SERIES, WHICH
was supposed to be shown during the 1977 Christmas season, was not completed until early spring 1978; but in January, Marcel Jullian was replaced as head of Antenne 2 by Maurice Ulrich, who had little interest in Godard or in the project. The new management required that the tapes be transferred and retransferred to so-called broadcast-quality tape, and used that technical issue as a pretext to avoid airing them. According to Manette Bertin of INA, the series was considered difficult, even impossible, to broadcast.
²¹

Instead, the series premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 1979 and then ran for a week at the Action-République movie theater in Paris in April. (Alain Bergala, a critic at
Cahiers
who helped organize the screenings, later recalled that Godard “came every night to the République by taxi, gave us the Beta copy of the episode to be shown that night, and picked up the one from the preceding night. He never came into the theater.”)
²²
Then, on May 3, they were shown at the Pompidou Center in Paris in a single six-hour session, followed by a public discussion on “seduction, utilization, manipulation of the child.” The series attracted enthusiastic notice in
Cahiers du cinéma, Le Nouvel Observateur
, and
Le Monde
, where the critic Louis Marcorelles reported that “Godard accomplishes for the art of video the same return to the origins, to Lumière, to Méliès, as he had done twenty years earlier with his first great film.”
²³
Television broadcast waited until 1980.

Godard proposed many other projects to INA—including eight hours of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
and nine 26-minute episodes called
Work
, to feature Robert Linhart himself—but none of them was produced. Manette Bertin, of INA, explained why: “After
France tour détour deux enfants
… no one wanted to finance him.”
²⁴
Upon completing
France tour détour
, Godard went to Montreal to fulfill his commitment to Serge Losique. He had explained to Bertin that he simply had nothing better to do: at least, in going to Montreal, he would be given “$50,000 overall and a first-class ticket once a month, and what’s more, it will yield videos for the series on the history of cinema.”
²⁵

What Godard wanted most of all was a return to the cinema itself. He told Bertin that he would “no longer blend finished work and essay,” as he
had done in his three films of the mid-1970s,
Ici et ailleurs, Numéro Deux
, and
Comment ça va;
he wanted, “with video, to make a film, for the cinema.” His history project in Montreal would provide a bridge to this goal.

A
LTHOUGH THE
ostensible point of Godard’s visits to Montreal was to generate videocassettes of his discussions about the history of cinema, he now proposed a crucial addendum: to show his own films alongside other films, classic or recent, that related to them. Linking the history of cinema to his own cinema, he discussed the cinematic past in terms of himself and his work, a process that had begun the previous year in Montreal. This decisive shift was the spark for his return to feature films.

Godard traveled to Montreal seven times between April and October 1978. Losique presented the talks in a lecture hall seating 840 people, and later recalled that there were never fewer than eight hundred students on hand.
²⁶
As moderator of the question-and-answer sessions, Losique asked many of the questions himself, occasionally opening the floor to the audience.

On April 14, Godard began the first session, concerning
Breathless
, with an admission of his nervousness. He likened the occasion to “a psychoanalysis of myself and of the place where I’m at in the cinema.” He showed Otto Preminger’s
Fallen Angel
along with
Breathless
, and then described the experience: “It was as if I were flipping through a family album and felt a little embarrassed, especially in front of other people.”

Godard was usually voluble in interviews, but now the remarks that followed Losique’s questions were positively eruptive. He did not shy away from discussing his own past; when the conversation on
Le Petit Soldat
turned to the overall problem of history in cinema, he unhesitatingly brought up his family’s own political history as wartime “collaborators” and described his grandfather as “ferociously not even anti-Zionist, he was anti-Jew; whereas I am anti-Zionist, he was anti-Semitic.”
²⁷
In relation to
Vivre sa vie
, he declared,

I was above all preoccupied by my problems with women, or with one woman, or with two women, or with three women… Or my problems in going to see prostitutes, or… And at times the shame that I could have had, given my past or my moralism or things like that… I found the cinema useful since one could, say, expose it without embarrassment.
²⁸

Godard asserted that the problem with the French New Wave, as well as with his own earlier films, was the inability to present personal problems with even greater frankness; he charged that he and his cohorts had made
their films “too much… in relation to the history of cinema” and that each of them had “completely mixed up his subjectivity of personal desires coming from [his] own story, trying to situate it solely in relation to the history of cinema.”
²⁹
He complained that “if one wants to tell stories, there is only the American way to tell them, at least in the cinema,”
³⁰
yet said that he was going to try, anyway, to go back to making films with stories.

T
HE FIRST NEW
project that he developed under the influence of the Montreal courses was similarly self-psychoanalytical. At an airport bookshop in 1978, Godard found the newly published
Bugsy Siegel
, by the investigative journalist Henry Sergg. The book’s subtitle:
The Crime Syndicate in Las Vegas and Hollywood
.

Godard brought the story to the attention of Georges de Beauregard, who had recently restored his finances with the success in 1977 of
Le Crabe tambour (The Drummer Crab
), directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer. Beauregard seemed to bear no grudge following
Numéro deux
, since
Le Cinéma français
reported that he would produce Godard’s film,
Bugsy Siegel
, starring Vittorio Gassman. The report suggested Godard’s more elaborate plans: he had “expressed his intention of integrating into his tale some excerpts of films from the great era of Hollywood.”
³¹
A project on the connections of Hollywood and Las Vegas opened the doors to a meditation on the history of the American cinema. Yet Godard knew that he would have to generate some kind of story to be able to make a full-length film, and he resorted to a traditional solution: he called a screenwriter.

Jean-Claude Carrière, screenwriter for Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, Milos Forman, and Patrice Chéreau, among many others,
³²
knew Godard since the early 1960s, and met him for lunch. Godard explained his project of making a film “about Hollywood and the Mafia.”
³³
Carrière and Godard bounced ideas back and forth and, in mid-1978, Godard explained that the fruit of their collaboration would not be “a traditional fiction film” but “a documented film.”

Against a backdrop that will include certain facts illustrated by the high era of Hollywood, I will inscribe a fairly simple story: a critic (Gassman) and his ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling) will investigate the disappearance of a star. A certain Johnny G. was killed when he was about to make a film about Bugsy. Coincidence or a crime by the Mafia?

The journalist to whom Godard spoke added this summary:

Jean-Luc Godard is not interested in Bugsy (he won’t even appear in the film) but in the investigating couple, who represent for him the essential relations which
make up the equation of love and work, and above all, in the cinema… The filmmaker intends to mix fiction and reality. He would like to integrate into his tale some excerpts from old gangster films and comments from people as different as Franck [
sic
] Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Wim Wenders, Lillian Hellman.
³⁴

Of course, “Johnny G.” suggests Godard’s own name; he wanted to make a film about a man and a woman investigating the death of Jean-Luc Godard in the process of making a film. The “investigating couple” suggests Godard and Miéville. The story behind the old cinema, the classic cinema born of the connection between Hollywood and the mafia, was to be overlaid by the palimpsest of the new cinema, that of the “investigating couple,” who, joining love and work, create something new on the basis of their personal story. The film would, at the same time, tell the old story of the money, desire, crime, and will that went into the founding of Hollywood, the story that Hollywood embodied, transmuted, and concealed in the creations of its golden age. The new Godard would make a film out of the attempt, with Miéville, to study the old Godard and the Hollywood cinema of which he had been born and to which he was all too tempted to return. Godard decided to call the film
The Story
, since its subject was the origins of the story as such—the story of stories.

Seeking financing in the United States (he even met with Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf and Western),
³⁵
Godard was told that he’d need to have a script. Beauregard paid for the creation of a script—but Godard channeled much of that money to Jean-Pierre Beauviala for the creation of a lightweight 35mm camera that he thought essential to the project, to his return to the cinema. Godard wanted a movie camera with which he could shoot film as independently, spontaneously, and casually as video.

The story of
The Story
advanced, but the project did not: Vittorio Gassman couldn’t commit to it; Charlotte Rampling simply refused. Godard contacted a new pair of lead actors: through Tom Luddy, whom Godard had met on his California tour of 1968 and who was now working at the Pacific Film Archives, he spoke with Robert De Niro; with the help of Catherine Verret of the French Film Office in New York, he contacted Diane Keaton (he wanted, he later explained, to reveal on film “another Diane Keaton than the one she pretends she is”).
³⁶
While he was waiting for Keaton in Verret’s office, Godard put on the table a large piece of music paper. Verret asked him what it was. He answered,“The script.” He also carried a briefcase everywhere: it contained the cash he was prepared to offer Keaton for the role.
³⁷
Keaton refused.

Godard had prepared a new synopsis that included collage-like images of Keaton, De Niro, Bugsy Siegel, and Las Vegas, and others taken from Kenneth
Anger’s book
Hollywood Babylon
. The plot involved the exile of a star—now called Frankie—during the McCarthy era, and the self-imposed refuge of Diana, the ex-wife of a critic, Roberto, at a teaching job at the University of San Diego (where Jean-Pierre Gorin now taught), along with their daughter. The synopsis was a collage of motifs, in which Frankie is run over by a truck (in what seems to be no accident), the nonaccident is captured in a Zapruder-like Super-8 film by Roberto, and Johnny Weissmuller, Rita Hay-worth, Wim Wenders, and Elia Kazan play small roles.

Through Tom Luddy, Godard received some financing from Francis Ford Coppola to make
The Story
and got an office at Coppola’s studio. Godard asked Luddy to find him an oceanfront apartment in Malibu. But then, despite having produced his elaborate illustrated synopsis, Godard decided not to go ahead with the project; as Luddy later recalled, “He seemed to lose interest or confidence, and he backed off.”
³⁸
Yet this synopsis, which is as readable as a graphic novel,
³⁹
is, in Godard’s account, precisely the reason why he demurred. In an interview, he explained, “As Anne-Marie [Miéville] told me, I’ve already shot the film three times. Each time I photocopied the photographs, my pleasure in making images was satisfied.”
⁴⁰

Nonetheless, the creation of the synopsis of
The Story
was a big step for Godard toward the reconception of a classical film. Although the film was not produced, its themes’ nexus remained important to Godard, and would dominate his
King Lear
, on which he would work from 1985 to 1987. As for Coppola’s seed money, it was spent; in exchange, Godard promised to grant Coppola American distribution rights to his next two films, whatever they might be.