Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (93 page)

With its false air of a traditional police story—and of Godard’s earlier work—
Detective
was calculated to evoke nostalgia. Even the casting, with its stars of the 1960s (Léaud, Brasseur, Terzieff, and Hallyday), and earlier eras (Cuny), alludes to a glorious cinematic past. To emphasize the story’s pseudo-classical origins, the detectives’ hotel room is filled with piles of instantly recognizable yellow and black
Série noire
paperback crime novels. Emile and Françoise’s family name, Chenal, is that of a French director of popular films from the 1930s through the 1950s whose police drama
Rafles sur la ville
Godard had praised in
Cahiers
in 1958.

Detective
comprises a peculiarly rich lode of retrospective elements for Godard personally, as the central twist in the detectives’ investigation depends on the discovery, by Isidore, that the murder in the hotel two years earlier was the result of a hit man’s error in reading the hotel register upside down—an echo of Véronique’s crucial mistake in
La Chinoise
. The film’s opening image, a video surveillance shot of the sculpted entrance of an arcade, features a pair of young lovers in a passionate kiss, an image that resembles a scene that Bruno Forestier photographs in
Le Petit Soldat
.

Detective
’s retrospective aspect also depended on a new technology that was central to Godard’s historical preoccupations as well as to the fashion for nostalgia: the VCR. With the commercial release of videotapes of classic movies as well as the ability to tape television broadcasts, Godard finally had access to films from the history of cinema that he could excerpt and “quote” in his own work. While planning
Detective
, Godard was also laying the groundwork for his long-delayed video series,
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, and, in
Detective
, he puts his newfound archive on display, placing televisions in the hotel rooms that show such classic films as Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast
(featuring Alain Cuny) and the 1932
The Lost Squadron
(a scene of Erich von Stroheim as a tyrannical director barking orders on a set).

B
UT
D
ETECTIVE ITSELF
was not a contemplative editing-room essay. For all his efforts to personalize the film, Godard was working with actors who brought star habits to the set, a genre story that left him indifferent, and a large crew, as his agreement with Sarde had stipulated. The director of photography, Bruno Nuytten, had been chosen by Sarde despite Godard’s expressed wish to work with Raoul Coutard again. Godard was frustrated, and he took his frustration out on others. Witnesses observed that Godard exceeded his prior excesses in trying to elicit responses through provocative thrusts of anger.

Godard was particularly hard on Claude Brasseur, whom he considered unprepared for the role. Nathalie Baye was aware that Godard disliked the presence of “the makeup artists, the hairdressers,” and described the director as “a little like a lion in a cage.”
⁴
Laurent Terzieff remarked that working with Godard put him in a state of “insecurity” and made him feel like “an ingredient in dough that may or may not rise.”
⁵
Baye considered herself and the other actors to be Godard’s “tubes of paint.”
⁶
Emmanuelle Seigner, eighteen years old, who played the girlfriend of the boxer Tiger Jones, was topless in most of her scenes, and recalled years later: “From the first day of the shoot, Godard asked me to show my breasts. On the third day, he asked me to remove my panties. I refused and he said, ‘But I only hired you because you had a nice ass.’ With that, I left the set at once.”
⁷
The fourteen-year-old Julie Delpy, playing another member of the boxer’s entourage (in her first feature film role), was subjected to lascivious implication when Jim Fox Warner’s assistant, a young man, holds her clarinet upright in his fist for her to blow.

Johnny Hallyday remembered, “On the shoot of
Detective
, I was the only one he treated humanely.”
⁸
Hallyday was not principally an actor and brought the physical discipline of singing and performance to the film without the psychological techniques of acting; on the set, Godard told him,
“When you act, do what you do when you sing.”
⁹
Godard considered that Hallyday, with his way of being that derived from outside the cinema, “brought a great deal” to the film, namely, his own character: Godard wanted actors “who have a certain value in themselves, who have their own existence”
¹⁰
—and this was how he saw Hallyday.

Hallyday delivers a crucial soliloquy in a revealing scene, in which he stands before a window in a hotel room and delivers a line that sums up Godard’s disdain for the subject of the film and the place where it was being filmed: “For all the time that we’ve been dragging from one city to another, there is never any light, there is only hard lighting. Because big cities, Lord, are accursed.”
¹¹
The shoot of this scene, in which daylight striking a facing building contrasted sharply with the dark interior and Nuytten asked about putting in some added lighting, resulted in a provocative outburst by Godard that was extraordinary even by his pugnacious standards (this tirade was caught on videotape by a crew engaged by Sarde to do a “making-of” for
Detective
and was broadcast). Godard doubted whether Nuytten had read the script and understood the point of Hallyday’s text, then went so far as to challenge whether Nuytten knew that the camera they were using, the Arriflex, had been invented in Germany to film German soldiers on the battlefield during the Second World War. In his wrathful exaggerations, Godard was in effect calling Nuytten’s preference for an extra lightbulb an unwitting complicity with genocide.

The tirade may have been outrageous and unfair, but the scene that provoked it expressed an idea that was central to the film—and to Godard’s life. His own move from Paris to Grenoble to Switzerland had been a flight from the accursed city. Even the films he had made since then that took place in Paris, whether
First Name: Carmen
or
Detective
, looked at the street only from a safe remove. His rejection of the city was a rejection of modernity, modern people, and modern mores. In the 1960s Godard’s social politics had been peculiarly conservative, even puritanical, but his move to the small town of Rolle in the late 1970s represented a different form of conservatism. He now embraced nature and the local as a response to, a rejection of, the tumult of urban life; he also embraced his record collection, his books, and his art reproductions as a way of recovering a cultural heritage, he thought, that was lost in the aggressiveness of modern media life. Nature and culture were peculiarly joined as a source of Godard’s inspiration; art and nature were one, and the business of modern life was inimical to both.

The celebrity of the stars in
Detective
was not merely a gimmick to collect needed financing; their celebrity was the enemy. Godard’s ending to the film, with the two male stars dead and Baye carted off in an ambulance, was a symbolic purge of the accursed city. Under its whimsical and nostalgic airs,
Detective
is a hiss of anger and self-pity from one pair of witnesses, Godard and Miéville, who were martyring themselves to their duty to bear witness to the degradations of modern life.

T
HE PRESENTATION OF
Detective
at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival began inauspiciously. After the film’s second screening, on May 10, Godard, while advancing through a hallway toward the podium for a press conference, was nailed in the face with a cream pie by Noël Godin, a philosophical provocateur who calls himself “Georges le Gloupier” (George the Glopper). Godin targets cultural luminaries whom he considers “worthless celebrities.”
¹²
Among his chosen were Marguerite Duras (one of his first targets, in 1969) and Bernard-Henri Lévy (who was victimized no fewer than seven times at last count). After the initial shock, Godard wiped himself off and did his press conference, addressing the assault good-humoredly as “an homage to silent film.” He even intervened to prevent Godin from being banned from Cannes, though later admitted he was “glad it was not like John Lennon, a bullet” and confessed that he felt “ashamed afterwards. Very strange.”
¹³

The film was booed by viewers expecting a more traditional reprise of film noir, and the critical reception was generally unfavorable. Michel Mardore of
Le Nouvel Observateur
reported from Cannes that Godard “got a Belgian cream pie in the face that he didn’t deserve. There’s no provocation in
Detective
, which he made as if wearing his slippers.”
¹⁴
The film’s release, after the festival premiere, did not fare well.
Detective
, undertaken as a commercial venture, even a mercenary one, did not fulfill its purpose: the publicity generated by the pairing of Godard and Hallyday did not attract a wider audience. Despite the film’s personal implications and innovative touches, its compromises were all too evident.

From a practical perspective, however, the visit to Cannes was useful to Godard: he contacted the producer and director Menahem Golan at the festival and asked whether he would produce a film for him. (Cannon Films, the company that Golan owned together with Yoram Globus, had made its money with such films as
Death Wish II
and
The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood
but had recently made a splash in the industry by producing films by such notable directors as John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and Andrei Konchalovsky.) Within minutes, the two concluded a deal—signed on a napkin taken from the bar of the Majestic Hotel, where they met—for Godard to direct an adaptation of
King Lear
, based on a screenplay to be written by Norman Mailer.

O
NE FURTHER OBLIGATION
remained from the financial rescue of
Hail Mary:
Channel Four, based in London, had invested one hundred thousand
dollars toward the film’s completion and had added sixty thousand dollars for the production by Godard and Miéville of a video that the channel’s programming associate, Colin MacCabe,
¹⁵
proposed calling
British Images
, a successor to Godard’s 1969
British Sounds
. To fulfill that commission, Godard and Miéville now made a video, but it had nothing to do with Great Britain: rather, working at home in Rolle, Godard and Miéville produced a fifty-two-minute-long video called
Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation between Friends on a Hard Subject)
. Though a minor effort, it nonetheless suggested an important new aspect to Godard’s effort to fuse work and life: the “friends” it shows in conversation are Godard and Miéville, and the hard subject they discuss is the cinema.

From the start of his career, Godard had made his working methods a crucial part of his films—and had also provided access to journalists who could watch him work, in order to make his methods public. Since Godard now worked, in effect, at home, and sought to derive his films from the life that he lived while making them, he began to make his private life even more strikingly public than before.

Soft and Hard
shows Godard and Miéville in an apartment, Miéville ironing and Godard miming tennis with his racquet, Godard getting into bed and writing in a notebook, Miéville at an editing table reviewing footage from
Detective
, Godard sitting at his desk, talking on the phone with Menahem Golan. The longest sequence is a discussion between Godard and Miéville about her attempt to make a film. Their exchange turns on Miéville’s admission that the cinema does not have the mythical status for her that it does for Godard, and Godard’s recollection of her criticism of him for not having written convincing lovers’ dialogue for the actors in his recent films.

Miéville, who was not devoted to the history or the mythology of the cinema, sought to make films that reflected her experience, and the originality of her work derived from her intense attention to the subject and its personal significance to her. Godard sought to develop his work from his experience, too, but also aspired to reconstruct film forms from a historical standpoint—and to understand his own life in terms of the cinematic elements with which he was imbued; for him, the ability to tell a personal story was inseparable from the history of the cinema. And
Soft and Hard
offers a singular visual metaphor to depict their shared efforts and differing views.

The video ends with Godard and Miéville showing taped images on a video monitor: these include the credit sequence from
Contempt
, in which Raoul Coutard manipulates a heavy studio camera on tracking rails and ultimately turns the camera to point it directly at the viewer. This image from
Contempt
is superimposed on a white wall, toward which Godard and
Miéville stretch their bare arms; that image then disappears, leaving only the two friends’ arms reaching out together in the same direction, before a blank white wall. This ingenious and moving conclusion posed the question of working together against the background (as for Godard) of the mystical, mythical mechanism of the history of cinema or (as for Miéville) against the tabula rasa of experience.

S
OFT AND
H
ARD
was the first in a series of explicitly biographical projects that Godard embarked on. Godard granted MacCabe, who was listed in the credits of
Soft and Hard
as “Friend,” authorization to write his biography and spoke with him at length about his personal life.
¹⁶
Godard also cooperated with the critic Alain Bergala, who had written some of the most trenchant and insightful criticism of his later films, on the editing of an updated and amplified edition of
Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard
, a book of Godard’s criticism, interviews, and documents that had first been issued in 1968. Bergala collected published interviews, culled images from photographic archives, and was granted access to work materials that Godard and Miéville had saved.