Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (85 page)

The images themselves also contributed greatly to the film’s surprising serenity.
Sauve qui peut
was the first film that Godard filmed in color with the same freedom with which he had filmed in black and white in the 1960s. Godard used Zeiss “super-speed” (ultra-wide aperture) lenses, which eliminated much of the need for added lighting, and allowed him to capture in the film the painterly, quasi-impressionistic textures of ambient and natural light. However, the wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field, making it very difficult for a camera operator to keep in focus anything in motion. The lenses thus influenced Godard’s aesthetic in a second way, by encouraging static shots of static people.

Godard spoke of his new style: “With
Breathless
, I rebelled against all those tired shots with the camera anchored on a tripod, and now I made a film full of what I used to think were those awful steady shots.”
²⁶
A certain type of image resulted, suggesting a poised, receptive neutrality: “I did not express [
exprimé
] much, but I impressed [
imprimé
—“printed” or “registered”] quite a lot of things.”
²⁷
He used many wide-angle shots which allowed lots of action to take place at the edges of the frame, conveying a sense of teeming and nuanced reality.

Yet at the same time, Godard’s restrained, inclusive framings fulfilled another more personal, documentary ambition: to show the making of the film in the film itself. He said that the significance of living and filming in his “studio of exteriors” in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland was that, unlike in a Hollywood studio, “here everything”—life and work—“happens in the same place. So, in addition, one sees how the film was shot!”
²⁸
Godard’s idea was that, by showing the sights and activities of the place where he lived and worked, he included in the film the elements of his own behind-the-scenes reality. A loose frame of the streets of Lausanne was the equivalent, for Godard, of filming what took place in a studio beyond the edges of the set; his shots of the lake and the sky were not only a paean to the natural beauty of the Swiss landscape, but also a report on his own daily experience.

I
F GODARD’S LIFE
was implicated with what he filmed, he also bore the burden of responsibility for what his film’s subject suggested about his life. At its premiere at Cannes on May 21, 1980,
Sauve qui peut
was booed; after the screening, Godard faced the anger of spectators who, responding to the film’s sexually provocative scenes, flung at him such epithets as, “Filth!” and “Degenerate!”
²⁹
One journalist called Godard’s post-screening press conference “the closing argument in a criminal trial.”
³⁰
The festival, which was supposed to have been Godard’s triumphant return home, quickly turned into a disaster.

Marin Karmitz, as coproducer and the executive in charge of distribution, stepped in and saved the day. Karmitz had originally planned to release the film in France immediately after the festival, but now he postponed it, declaring that
Sauve qui peut
had been screened as a work in progress and was not really finished. During the summer, he organized screenings for journalists as well as for such cultural luminaries as Duras and Michel Foucault, and let them know that “in the meantime, Godard had changed and finished the film.” The producer later recalled what happened when
Sauve qui peut
was released in October: “The same journalists who had demolished the film at Cannes now declared it a masterpiece. Of course, [Godard] hadn’t changed a thing.”
³¹

The French critics did indeed declare
Sauve qui peut
a masterpiece; to herald its release,
Le Monde
featured no fewer than three rave reviews on the same day, including Yvonne Baby’s: “Thanks to Jean-Luc Godard, ‘painter in letters,’ the cinema recovers the risks of art, comes back to life.”
³²
As Godard’s “second first film,” it was also a great financial success, rivaling that of
Breathless
. Having returned to the institutions of the mainstream French cinema, Godard had also succeeded in recovering the kind of good graces that its potentates best recognized: commercial viability.

In the United States,
Sauve qui peut
was similarly restorative to Godard’s commercial fortunes and popular recognition. Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
called it “funny and surprising… by far the most stimulating and encouraging film at Cannes.”
³³
Andrew Sarris of the
Village Voice
recognized the film’s importance:

No Godard film since
Pierrot le fou
has excited me as much as
Sauve qui peut (la vie)… Sauve qui peut
is perhaps more like a piece of music than a movie. Every image is suffused with such elegant and exquisite insights into what makes the medium interact with its material that the total effect is intoxicating… Somewhere on the screen he has captured the subtle reality of what it is to be a thinking, feeling being in these ridiculously convulsive times.
³⁴

Sauve qui peut
played in the New York Film Festival on October 8 and 11, and started its commercial run as
Every Man for Himself
on October 12. Godard promoted the film feverishly, in the press, on television (including on
The Dick Cavett Show
), and in person. Despite criticism of his depiction of brutality toward women (in Los Angeles, according to theater owner Max Laemmle,“Our audiences were personally offended, personally insulted, that we should expose them to such a film which shows in detail how men abuse women”),
³⁵
the film was reported to be a greater success in the United States
than, again, even
Breathless
had been; yet the American enthusiasm was to be short-lived.

In a sign of trouble to come, Pauline Kael of
The New Yorker
rejected the film with the vindictive cruelty of a disappointed lover.

More than the fat has been burned out of “Every Man for Himself”: the juice is gone, too… If it were possible to have lyricism without emotion, that might describe the film’s style… I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either.
³⁶

At a time when she exhibited an increasingly passionate devotion to popular, even simplistic, cinematic sensations, Kael was unable to appreciate Godard’s first successful new effort to create images on a newly ideal basis, and she took his rejection of her anointed popular models as an affront.

Kael’s insensitivity to the film heralded obstacles to Godard’s new manner. Over time, many of Godard’s leading critical supporters in the American press would drop off, one by one, and his audiences, out of sync with his increasingly intellectualized range of concerns and abstract connections to Hollywood’s moods and models, would drift away. Godard was heading in the direction of high art at a moment when even serious viewers were, more than ever, in thrall to the popular. The New Wave’s claim to have found art disguised as Hollywood’s commercial fare had worked too well: now many took it preeminently as movie art and turned away from more demanding films.

I
N
F
RANCE
, by contrast, a remarkable confluence of politics and culture was to make Godard’s position particularly secure. Godard’s assistant, Romain Goupil, was a friend of Coluche, a provocative comedian whose radio broadcasts won him a great public following and the bitter enmity of those politicians he mocked on the government-controlled airwaves. Goupil put Godard in touch with Coluche; the two got along famously, and Godard sought to have Coluche play the lead in a film that seemed to have little to do with the comedian’s public persona: an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s classic noir novel,
Pop. 1280
. Despite Karmitz’s efforts, however, he could not get rights to the novel, which had been purchased by the director Bertrand Tavernier. (Godard suggested to him that they both make films based on the book, but Tavernier demurred.)
³⁷
Instead, Godard developed another project involving himself, Goupil, and Coluche.

Coluche was hired by Radio Monte-Carlo in February 1980, and was removed from the airwaves (under orders from Prince Rainier) within weeks
because of his sharp-edged political humor. Goupil at once conceived a scheme of high comedy: the only way for the comic to assure himself of access to the airwaves was to get himself elected president of France in the May 1981 elections.
³⁸
Coluche liked the idea, and spent months laying the groundwork for what proved to be a salutary jolt to the French political system and foreshadowed the cultural turn that French politics would take.

In October 1980, Coluche began to float the plan publicly; on October 30, he convened journalists at the theater where he performed nightly and officially declared his candidacy.
³⁹
On November 2, a list was published of the first 150 signatories in support of Coluche for president; the names included Godard and Goupil, along with other luminaries of the arts: Gérard Depardieu, Jacques Dutronc, Léo Ferré, Johnny Hallyday, Serge July (the editor of
Libération
), Miou-Miou, Roman Polanski, and many others of popular music and the cinema. Within days, such intellectuals as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Pierre Bourdieu came to the support of Coluche. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Daniel Cohn-Bendit joined in.
Libération
officially endorsed him. Television and radio, still under state control, largely barred him from the airwaves; nonetheless, in a poll taken in December 1980, he was preferred by 16.1% of the electorate.
⁴⁰

Coluche’s popularity threatened the presidential aspirations of the leading left-wing candidate, the Socialist Mitterrand, whose campaign depended on uniting the left against the two conservative candidates, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand, however, was careful not to alienate Coluche, and, though the performer had had little good to say publicly about his rival, behind-the-scenes contacts between representatives of the two campaigns helped Coluche to acknowledge the relative proximity of their political and cultural preoccupations. On March 15, 1981, seven weeks before the election, Coluche withdrew from the race, and soon thereafter endorsed Mitterrand.
⁴¹

Coluche’s candidacy, and the support he attracted from avatars of the post-1968 generation, proved the extent to which the new French left was different; it was a joyful and culturally oriented left, a left in which the comedian’s antics and the ironic derision of institutions and their seriousness went together with the work of intellectuals and artists. The aesthetic left that Godard had foretold in 1960, that had brought its anti-authoritarian attitudes to bear on the revolts of May 1968, was on the verge of pushing its way into the halls of power and becoming part of France’s cultural authority.

twenty.

PASSION AND FIRST NAME: CARMEN

“The world and its metaphor”

D
ESPITE THE CRITICAL RECOGNITION AND COMMERCIAL
success of
Sauve qui peut
, Godard did not have another project awaiting him. A recurring motif in the film features the word “passion,” with characters reproaching others for misusing it: “That’s not passion.” Huppert asked Godard what, in fact, he thought passion was; his response was that she should make another film with him to find out,
¹
but did not specify what the project would be.
²
Marin Karmitz hoped to incite a film by bringing Godard and Marguerite Duras together for a meeting in the Normandy seaside town of Trouville, where both film makers had apartments. Godard wanted to work with her on something “having to do with incest,”
³
but they could not come to an agreement about what it should be. On her own, Duras converted the subject of their talks into her next feature film,
Agatha et les lectures illimitées
(Agatha and the Unlimited Readings), a story of incestuous siblings. For his part, Godard told the audience at the New York Film Festival in October 1980 that his next film would be about “fathers and daughters,” but took no concrete steps toward making it.

Some months earlier, after the success of
Apocalypse Now
, Francis Ford Coppola had bought the former Hollywood General studio and renamed it Zoetrope. He planned to bring together filmmakers, actors, and technicians as in a traditional Hollywood studio, but to run a “civilized, pro-artistic” enterprise.
⁴
He included Godard in his creative program and anticipated producing the video “script” for
The Story
, as well as Godard’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
. Godard likened Coppola’s activities to his own, saying that Coppola “tries to make a home out of his studio, and I have a home and I would like to make a studio out of it.”
⁵