Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (98 page)

As befit what Godard considered Sellars’s privileged relation to the works of Shakespeare, he created a new character for him, one that would reproduce within the film his behind-the-scenes work on
King Lear
. Sellars’s
involvement spurred Godard to make the project even more oblique and potentially comical in its approach to Shakespeare’s work. Sellars was to play “William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth,” who had been commissioned by the Queen of England and the so-called Cannon Cultural Group to attempt to rediscover the works of his ancestor, which had been lost in the catastrophe of Chernobyl. Godard avoided making a naturalistic drama adapted directly from a familiar object of high culture, instead presenting
King Lear
in ametaphorical frame, as if to find out which aspects of that classic work were relevant to the modern age.

Sellars’s arrival prompted a renewed start to the shoot. In January 1987, Godard traveled to New York to film Woody Allen in his editing room at the Brill Building, at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway. The shoot was inauspicious. The terms of Allen’s contract were satisfactory for Godard but quite unfavorable for Golan: Godard later recalled that Allen was paid “ten thousand dollars—in exchange, we don’t use his name.”
³⁴
Allen maintained that he did the part as “a favor,” and that “there was no money involved.”
³⁵
During the shoot, Allen asked Godard to permit him to leave earlier than planned and before they had completed the filming. Godard agreed.
³⁶

The work they did consisted of Allen reciting Shakespeare’s sixtieth sonnet and editing film with safety pins and a needle and thread, like a tailor. “It didn’t make sense to me when I did it,” Allen said, “but I knew I was in goodhands.”
³⁷
To the critic Roger Ebert, however, Allen reportedly said, “I had the impression that I was being directed by Rufus T. Firefly”—Groucho Marx’s character in
Duck Soup
.
³⁸

Godard then added a new cast member as Cordelia, Molly Ringwald, who was a major star of American teen comedies and dramas. She met him and Sellars at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, where, as Ringwaldlater recalled, Godard “basically just sort of puttered around the room and explained the whole concept”—the idea of making Lear a mafioso and filming the attempt to rediscover the play—“and it just seemed really interesting, so I asked him why he wanted to use me… and he said, because Cordelia was a princess and I was the closest thing at the time to what a princess is in America, which is an actress, a teen actress.”
³⁹

Godard finally found his King Lear, or Don Learo, in Burgess Meredith(after Rod Steiger withdrew from the project, which ruled out Malibu), as the 1987 Cannes festival loomed and Golan insisted that he had to have the film in time to be shown there in May.

T
HE MAIN PART
of the shoot began in Nyon in March 1987; by this time, Godard knew that the project would have to be completed with twelve days of filming, twelve of editing, and twelve of laboratory work. And yet this
head long production went far more smoothly than many others, partly because of Godard’s respect for his performers and partly because Sellars proved to be tremendously helpful in assembling the film’s text (which was not exactly a script—among the elements were index cards issued daily, many from Sellars).

The cast included several additional participants whose roles were not to be found in Shakespeare. Shortly before the shoot, Juliette Binoche, whose first important role had been in
Hail Mary
, called Godard. She had recently starred alongside Julie Delpy in
Mauvais Sang
(Bad Blood), the second film by the young filmmaker Leos Carax, with whom she was living. Binoche told Godard that Carax was “desperate,” and asked whether he could come to the shoot of
King Lear
to do “anything, chauffeur, or whatever.”
⁴⁰
Godard, who admired
Mauvais Sang
and recalled fondly Carax’s visit to the set of
Sauvequi peut
with Alain Bergala for
Cahiers du cinéma
, invented a role for him: Edgar (as in Poe). He also invited Delpy, for whom he created a part to be played alongside Carax: Virginia (as in Woolf). To ensure the associations, the film shows a copy of Woolf’ s
The Waves
and includes a citation from it, as well as one line from Poe: “Nevermore.”

Godard himself plays Professor Pluggy, a solitary inventor housed in a raw, blasted barrack—actually Anne-Marie Miéville’s new house in Rolle, which was still under construction—where he conducts experiments toward the invention of something he calls the “image.” Pluggy wears a headdress made of jingling ornaments and video cables, which Godard explained in a brief synopsis prepared just before the shoot: “His hair is made of hi-fi cables so that he is able to plug his head directly into the unknown.”
⁴¹
From the play itself, only Lear—Don Learo—played by Meredith, and Cordelia, played by Ringwald, remained.

As usual, Godard did not provide his actors with their lines until the moment of the shoot. For Burgess Meredith, who was seventy-nine years old, this posed memory problems, and he asked Godard to give him his dialogue the night before he needed it. Godard ignored his request. Molly Ringwald observed that this discomfort seemed to be the effect that Godard was trying to achieve; as she put it, Lear turned into a “rattled old guy.” As for the actress herself, she admitted, “I didn’t know at all what I was doing. I just did everything he told me to do, basically.” Meredith’s stalwart acceptance of Godard’s method, Ringwald’s respectful obedience, and Sellars’s intellectual contributions helped to smooth the film’s hasty path to completion.

Godard was observed to be in a peculiarly good humor, but aspects of his genial mood played startling tricks on the substance of the film itself. Ringwald reported that Godard “short-sheeted” Meredith’s bed and also put fake blood on it, and that this “completely perplexed Burgess. He just didn’t
know what to make of him.”
⁴²
Yet Godard’s pranks with stage blood were no joke; they were, instead, a surprising fulcrum of the film.

Meredith’s bed, in the hotel Beau-Rivage in Nyon, was actually used on-camera as Don Learo’s bed. Danièle Heymann of
Le Monde
described a scene in which several goblins, played by young models, were supposed to enter Learo’s room. There, she noticed, “His bed was unmade. An atrocious pool of blood stains the sheets.” She further described the shoot of that scene: “Godard speaks to the tall Swiss ‘spirit’: ‘OK, you come in and you lean over the bed and say, “Abracadabra Mao Zedong Che Guevara.”’ A discreet laugh is heard.” Godard reportedly responded with anger: “What’s that? Did someone say something funny?” After the scene was shot, Heymann asked Duhamel whether the blood was “what’s left of Lear.” He responded, “Yes… and of Cordelia’s virginity.”
⁴³
The “kicker” of incest that Norman Mailer had suspected was indeed revealed on-screen.

T
HE GRAND METAPHORICAL
conceit of Godard’s
King Lear
, albeit arch and puckish, is a project of vast aesthetic, quasi-cosmic ambition, in which Godard’s own comic role as an artistic shaman is central. On the one hand, the film’s metaphysical speculations exceed even those of
Hail Mary;
on the other, its concrete incorporation of the specific conditions of its creation are greater than in any of Godard’s other films. If, in
Passion
, Godard sought to film reality and its metaphors, in
King Lear
he rendered the symbolic and the concrete inseparable, even indistinguishable. In this film more than in anyother, he brought together the material and the transcendent, life and art.

The first voices in the film are those of Godard answering the telephone and Menahem Golan—in an authentic conversation surreptitiously taped by Godard—demanding that the film be finished in time for the 1987 festival. Tom Luddy’s voice comes on the line and asks Godard to answer. The response is a voice from the set: “Action.”

The action begins with two successive takes of Norman Mailer in his hotel room in Nyon, writing a line of dialogue for a character he named “Mailer.” He calls his daughter Kate on the phone just as she comes in and looks with dismay at his finished script, asking why he’s so interested in the Mafia. Mailer answers, “I think the Mafia is the only way to do
King Lear
.” Meanwhile, on the sound track, Godard states his case against Mailer, complaining about the writer’s “ceremony of star behavior.” Godard concludes, “After the fifth take of the first shot, the great writer left the set. He took off for America, he said. He and his daughter, first class. His daughter’s boyfriend, economy. Anyway, I was fired.”

From the beginning, the sound track is elaborate: using Dolby stereo, Godard had conflicting sounds and voices come contrapuntally from the two sides
of the screen. He used slowed-down and electronically manipulated versions of Beethoven’s last string quartet, as well as sea sounds, bird cries, and Shakespearean recitations in voice-over, to create a complex sonic texture. The film’s images are equally rich, with soft natural light from Lake Geneva leaving the actors in deep, detailed shadows. The film is replete with reproductions of classic paintings, from Giotto to Rembrandt to Watteau, Doré to Renoir and van Gogh; like a visual music, they set the mood.

Engrossed in his ongoing research for
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, Godard also anchored the search for
King Lear
in the history of cinema. Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth contemplates an album of photographs of Luchino Visconti, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles, and wonders which other directors might have taken on the job of recovering
King Lear
. As more black-and-white stills of directors—Marcel Pagnol, Jacques Rivette, Georges Franju, Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, Jacques Becker, Jean Cocteau—come on the screen, Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth announces each of the film-makers by their first names, enthusiastically adding “Yes” after each. Butwhen an image of François Truffaut appears, he says, “No, no, no. François, I’m not sure”—a reprise of Godard’s blunt funerary judgment of Truffaut.

The quest by William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth to rediscover his ancestor’s plays after their destruction along with all of culture, particularly “movies and art,” is of course an absurdist futurist comedy, but its tone and import are parodies of classic film noirs and detective stories. Before getting to the particulars of
King Lear
, Godard inscribed the film firmly within the cinematic tradition.

The effort to rediscover
King Lear
begins at an elegant table in the Nyon hotel dining room, where Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth is slurping soup as he listens to dialogue being spoken off-screen: a man’s gravelly voice pronounces lines that capture his attention; as he hears them, he writes frantically in a notebook:

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose
.

Give me the map there. Know, that we have divided

In three our Kingdom: and’ tis our fast intent
,

To shake all cares and business from our age
,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburthen’d crawl toward death
.

The voice is that of Burgess Meredith as Don Learo, who adds, with a Brooklyn-tinged snarl, “Are ya listening?” and issues the command to his “joy,” to his “last and least,” that she speak. A young woman’s voice—Molly Ringwald’s—speaks: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.”

Learo and Cordelia are now seen sitting at a nearby table, and Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth continues to take notes as Learo launches into a disquisition for Cordelia on the subject of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Siegel was “a realkiller, not like this Richard Nixon” and Lansky, “a little guy, he was a philosopher.” Shakespeare rises to thank Cordelia for her contribution to his quest, but Learo angrily sends him away—“Are you making a play for my daughter?”

King Lear
is infused with Godard’s unmade film
The Story
, a tale of Jewish gangsters and their ties to Las Vegas and Hollywood. In his hotel room, Learodictates to Cordelia, who types at a manual typewriter, from a book about Siegel and Lansky. She reads back to him: “By the late’ 60s, the whole country was Las Vegasized. Entertainment conglomerates like MGM today own the largest establishments in Vegas…All of these vice and leisure centers are linked together by my Learo Jet company. All of America is now embracing our vision, and Bugsy Siegel’s death”—he changes the word to
martyrdom
—“was not in vain.” Referring back to the long-dormant outline for
The Story
, about the connections between Bugsy Siegel and modern Hollywood, Godard brings together Learo’s “royal” and paternal authority with the origins of cinema in the violent power of the criminal underworld. In his quest for a single story, Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth finds himself plunged into the story of stories, at least, as Godard saw it: the material reality of gangsterism and high finance that gaverise to the classical cinema, and which, in its stories, the cinema reflects.

Meanwhile, Godard introduces five Shakespearean goblins—“the secret agents of human memory,” Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth says—and they show upon the balcony of Learo’s room. Learo stands on the balcony with a goblin beside him, as a voice speaks: “Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?… Who is it that can tell me who I am?” As one goblin dances before Learo’s bed, another intones “Abracadabra Mao Zedong Che Guevara.” A chambermaid comes in, turns down the bed, and finds blood stained sheets; so does Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth. The goblin’s lines, spoken of Lear, allude to Oedipus, who is first blind to his own identity and then, after discovering it, dashes out his eyes. The implication of Cordelia’s virginity sacrificed to her father is clear, though achieved without any overt declaration on the set. Molly Ringwald was unaware during the shoot that the scene had any such erotic implication.