Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (92 page)

In the summer, after completing the shoot of
Hail Mary
, Roussel, who still wanted to become a professional actress, took the next step: she accepted a role in another director’s film.
²⁷
Godard put the footage of
Hail Mary
aside and devoted himself to the production of
Detective
. During the shoot of that film, which took place in Paris in September and October 1984, Godard met Roussel again and felt motivated to complete postproduction work on
Hail Mary
.

A pre-release screening of
Hail Mary
was held at a ciné-club in Versailles on January 22, 1985. Members of a group called the “Association familiale et catholique” were there and, as soon as Mary’s naked body appeared on-screen, they disrupted the showing, shouting and throwing stink bombs. The
police intervened and the screening continued, but so did the disturbances. One group sang a prayer in the theater. A reel of the film was stolen from the projection booth. The next day, when
Hail Mary
opened, a conservative local official banned the film, ostensibly not as an act of censorship but in an attempt to ward off trouble. Catholic groups insisted that the government either outlaw the film completely or require the suppression of scenes purporting to show Mary’s body. Minister of Culture Jack Lang defended the film’s release, but the groups still filed suit to ban it. Finally, on January 28, the courts ruled that the film was free to be shown, without cuts.

The protests, however, continued—and intensified. Catholic groups demonstrated in the streets of Paris and Versailles, and conservatives interrupted a mass by Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger to protest his unwillingness to speak against the film. Throughout France, from Nantes to Toulouse, conservative Catholics disrupted screenings and protested outside theaters.

In April, Pope John Paul II, who had long expressed a singular devotion to Mary,
²⁸
denounced
Hail Mary
, saying that it “distorts and offends the spiritual meaning and historical value of the fundamental themes of Christian faith,” and in May he led prayers in condemnation of the film.
²⁹
In response, Godard wrote to his Italian distributors to ask that the film be withdrawn from theaters in Rome,
³⁰
offering a mischievous explanation: “It’s the house of the church, and if the Pope doesn’t want a bad boy running around in his house, the least I can do is respect his wishes. The Pope has a special relationship to Mary. He considers her a daughter, almost.”
³¹

Controversy over the film had by then spread worldwide: there were violent protests against it in Germany, Spain, Greece, and Australia.

In the United States, the film was scheduled to be premiered on October 7 at the New York Film Festival. When the screening was announced in September, New York’s Archbishop John O’Connor spoke out against it and many Catholics mobilized for a show of force. The night of the screening, angry crowds, many brought into town on chartered buses, lined the streets around Lincoln Center; Broadway was filled with an estimated eight thousand protesters. They encircled the theater and attempted to prevent viewers from entering. The police parted the crowd, creating a narrow path for ticket-holders to enter the theater, albeit through a gauntlet of jeering protesters. Godard himself had been present at Lincoln Center for the film’s press screening on October 4 and fielded questions from journalists, but, despite the pleas of festival officials, he left town before the public screening.

The film’s original American distributor, Triumph, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, owned by the Coca-Cola Company, soon abandoned its
long-standing plans to distribute
Hail Mary
. Instead, the American release was undertaken by New Yorker Films in conjunction with Gaumont.
³²

B
Y THIS TIME
, in the fall of 1985, Godard had moved on to a new stage of cinematic life. The availability of favorable sources of financing from the French film industry and European coproducers, together with his new and well-defined set of methods and themes, had launched him on another round of rapid and copious production. With
Hail Mary
, Godard’s legendary artistic status only grew, and yet his contemplative isolation in his “studio of exteriors” in Rolle and his perceived distance from the contemporary world—both physical and intellectual—rendered his prominence largely virtual.

Yet in his isolation, Godard was developing a radically new way of film-making, one that was based on a practical state of affairs—the long period of gestation. Ever since his return to the industry with
Sauve qui peut
, he had taken a long time to get his films under way. Unlike his work of the 1960s, which derived their tone from the rapidity of their production, his later films replicated on his own small scale the Hollywood development process. Instead of passing through the hands of diverse producers and screenwriters, his projects metamorphosed through long meditation, changes in his own life, the happenstance of readings or breaking news, and contact with different actors and producers (whether or not they ultimately participated in the film). He took the quasi-industrial methods of the movie industry, abstracted them, and rendered them personal; he made high-concept films that had truly high concepts.

The cost in personal relationships was also high, however. After the shoot of
Hail Mary
, Godard and Roussel fell out of touch. She had found the intensity of her conjoined personal and professional relations with Godard to be very difficult; she was exhausted by the conflicts engendered by the long shoot and by her awareness that the work depended on them. In general, this way of working was difficult for the film’s participants because the extended relations, involving plenty of time spent not shooting, inevitably became personal. The blending of work and life, the blurring of boundaries between the professional and the personal, was immensely nourishing for Godard’s films. His work thrived on the resulting tensions, even as he seemed to suffer from them as greatly as his associates did. This ordinary, intimate, human pain left its mark on the films, infusing with firsthand emotion (and a touch of irony) Godard’s grand, tragic, classical aspirations.

In the wake of
Hail Mary
, his inclinations were metaphysical, supernatural, even religious—and yet, utterly unorthodox. Godard linked his spiritual quest with a search for a worldview derived from the classics of Western
culture, and set them in opposition to a narrowly materialist and materialistic way of life. He was filming miracles and mysteries, and the first among them were those of art itself.

The link between the long gestation of Godard’s new series of works and their deep classical origins is suggested in a remark that he made to a journalist the week of
Hail Mary
’s opening: “A long time is needed to go searching far.”
³³
Godard would now make the time of his search a part of his films. For the next decade to come, they would touch on transcendent matters—and the cinema itself, and his own work in it, would be presented as the ultimate form of metaphysical striving.

“Martyr” means “witness.”
(TCD-Prod DB © Gaumont / DR)

twenty-two.

DETECTIVE AND SOIGNE TA DROITE

“It is always a little sad to leave the earth”

F
ROM THE CONCEPTION OF
D
ÉTECTIVE
(
D
ETECTIVE
), Godard had little emotional attachment to the project, which Sarde had cooked up with an eye toward the box office and Godard pursued in a hurry in order to pay for
Hail Mary
. Yet, Godard claimed, this aspect of detachment appealed to him, explaining to an interviewer, “I’m a Renaissance painter looking for commissions. Michelangelo didn’t come up with the idea all by himself to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Pope went looking for him.”
¹
After getting the commission for
Detective
, Godard worked hard to turn it into a personal work of art. He succeeded, to some extent; but as a result, the film did not.

Even the title turned out to be a subtle joke. In classic detective films, the detective is the main character, and is played by the star. In
Detective
, the detective is played by a supporting actor in a secondary role, and it is not even obvious which character the title designates. The film begins with a woman and two men engaged in surveillance of a Paris street from the terrace of a hotel room by means of a video camera. A title card lists the three—Aurèle Doazan, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Laurent Terzieff—as “actors.” As the presence of video equipment, the tools of Godard’s trade, suggests, these are the characters in whom he is interested. The slender, romantic Terzieff (whom Godard had considered for the lead in
Breathless
) plays Uncle William Prospero, the former house detective at the hotel where the film is set, the Hôtel Concorde-St.-Lazare. He lost his job there two years earlier when he was unable to find the assassin who killed “the Prince” in the same room where the surveillance stake-out takes place. The ex-detective’s nephew, Isidore (played by Léaud, now forty-one years old and a bit stocky), is a specialist in the analysis of images,
and the young woman, Ariel (Doazan), who is operating the camera, is Isidore’s fiancée; she has joined him on the assignment in the hope that it will bring them closer together. By making and studying their videos together, the filmmaker-detectives will solve the mystery, i.e., discover and tell the film’s story. Isidore and Ariel, who make and interpret images as the basis for their work and love, are analogous to Godard and Miéville.

Their inquiry and the story that emerges from it are centered on three characters played by Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur, and Johnny Hallyday (the French rock musician who was also married to Baye at the time), who are introduced in the next scene. As they appear on-screen, their credits appear: they are billed as “stars.” In their story, Jim Fox Warner (Hallyday), who manages the boxer Tiger Jones (played by the boxer Stéphane Ferrara), is heavily in debt to two people: a pilot, Emile Chenal (Brasseur, who had starred in
Band of Outsiders
), whose wife, Françoise (Baye), is Jim’s former lover; and a mob boss, also called “the Prince” (the elderly, leonine actor Alain Cuny). Both of these creditors have threatened Jim’s life if they don’t get their money by Friday, the day before Tiger Jones’s big fight, which promises Jim a big payout. Meanwhile, Françoise meets Jim at the hotel and reveals that the money he owes Emile is really hers; she pairs up again with Jim, but with unclear motives—either from true desire or to make sure that she, and not her husband, gets the money.

Meanwhile, Ariel and Uncle William make love while Isidore is out of the room, and Ariel now doubts whether she will marry Isidore. When Isidore takes on another woman, Anne (Ann-Gisel Glass), as his associate, Ariel becomes jealous and rejoins him in the quest and ultimately in life.

In a final, rapid, and absurd shoot-out, both Jim and Emile are killed, and Uncle William is accidentally gunned down by Isidore, who was aiming at Emile. The two characters played by the male “stars” are in effect brought down by the predatory Françoise and the Mafia together—two different versions of “family.” The story that they were living—the story that was discovered by the three observers with their camera—was pointless; the real narrative and emotional force behind the fiction is not the vain agitation and forced destinies of the stars, but the experience of the three observers with their camera: as Isidore tells Ariel in the film’s last scene, when they leave the hotel after the bloodbath, “Witness means martyr.”
²
As for Uncle William Prospero—the patron-saint of the theater, the witness without a camera—he is sacrificed for the creation of a story which would live on in Ariel and Isidore’s conjoined life and work.

Godard admitted to his lack of interest in the story; he had fulfilled his obligation to Sarde in making a film with stars, but he did not make much of their situation. To fill out his ninety minutes of film, he stuffed it with
literary citations. He had been reading the poet René Char, and took lines from his poetry for the film. He referred to Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim
, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and André Breton, explaining, “In this film, there are only quotations, not a word of my own. In times of emergency, one empties one’s storehouse.”
³

Since the project was conceived with a “retro” air, in response to an ambient nostalgia for a lost age of cinema (the’ 80s in France were a time of taking stock of the cultural heritage), Godard filled the film with allusions to the pulp fiction of years past and to many other forgotten artifacts of a former world. One scene involving the “stars” stands out as particularly heartfelt and emotionally charged: as Jim and Emile await Françoise in the cramped, overdecorated hotel bar, Jim brings up memories of the Orient Express of his youth, the motorman who hammered on the axles and the vendor who walked the train selling ice cream with an incomprehensible cry. Françoise arrives and asks the men what they are discussing: “Men’s problems,” Jim says, “problems of melancholy”—a line from the song by Léo Ferré, “Richard,” with which Godard had concluded the television series
France tour détour deux enfants
. Jim brings up
Lord Jim
, the book his mother had given him when he left home, and Emile apostrophizes that for him “the only real book is
Parti de Liverpool
and also
Le Voyage d’Edgar
”—two adventures, published in the 1930s, by the sailor-turned-writer Edouard Peisson, boyhood fantasies that Godard loved in his own youth. To underscore the point, Jim immediately asks the waiter, “What is Salade Vaudoise?”—salad from the canton of Vaud, Godard’s homeland.