Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (99 page)

The film then moves to Shakespeare’s quest for Professor Pluggy, whose research was said to be moving in a “direction parallel to [his] own.” He finds the reclusive sorcerer. It is Godard himself, speaking sepulchral English from one side of his mouth—in his bare house, surrounded by acolytes (including Leos Carax as Edgar). He then goes to witness the professor perform an experiment in his “laboratory,” a darkened video studio. The two face a bank of video monitors on which Pluggy has intertwined images from cartoons, classic
paintings, advertising, and silent films. As Edgar stands beside the screens, Professor Pluggy intones lines from the French surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy (lines which Godard had previously cited in
Passion
), a definition of “the image” that stands as Godard’s own manifesto for the complex and highly constructed images of his later work:

The image is a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connection between these two realities are [
sic
] distant and true, the more it will have emotive power… An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant and true… What is great is not the image but the emotion that it provokes.

To observe Pluggy’s next experiment, Shakespeare goes to a movie theater. There, the professor is interviewed by Michèle Halberstadt, a journalist for the
New York Times
, to whom he explains that the room is his invention: all the seats face the same way, so that the audience will know which way to look when they hear voices. Now “Professor Kozintsev” (the director of the Russian film of
King Lear
, impersonated by Freddy Buache of the Cinémathèque Suisse) arrives—“from Siberia”—and shows the assembled guests his work. Halberstadt asks Kozintsev what he calls it; Kozintsev answers, “I was thinking of calling it ‘image.’” Shakespeare takes out his notebook and writes, exclaiming, “‘Image,’ that’s a good word.” What Pluggy and Kozintsev—Godard and Buache—have reinvented is the cinema itself.

In the brief synopsis that Godard showed a journalist on the set, the experiment was a failure, and Pluggy and Kozintsev “kill themselves from shame and despair.”
⁴⁴
But in the actual film, the experiment is a great success—and the cinema is reborn, but at shockingly high cost, as Shakespeare discovers. After having seen Kozintsev’s film, he declares his ancestor’s play rediscovered, and goes to thank Pluggy for his help. Shakespeare finds him gathering flower petals strewn in the grass, and watches furtively as Pluggy, through the miracle of reverse photography, puts the petals back on the flowers (an homage to Jean Cocteau’s similar gesture in
The Testament of Orpheus
). Through his cinematic learning and artistry, Pluggy has single-handedly brought nature back to life—and then expires from the exertion, as church bells peal.

Pluggy’s last words, whispered into Shakespeare’s ear, are “Mister Alien! Mister Alien!” In voice-over, Shakespeare explains, “Yes, they were Easterbells. The images were there as new: innocent, shy, strong. Now I understand that Pluggy’s sacrifice was not in vain. Now I understand, through his work, Saint Paul’s words: that the image will appear in the time of resurrection.” As
in
Soigne ta droite
, Godard here depicted the rebirth of the cinema as the result of his sacrifice. He presents himself in
King Lear
as a Christ-like figure who gives his life to redeem the world.

The possibility of a new cinema, one that would follow on his own demise, is raised in an epilogue. Shakespeare, Edgar, and Virginia are sitting on rocks beside the lake as they watch Learo walk through the underbrush with Cordelia. She is wearing a shroud like white dress and leading a white horse. Learo takes Shakespeare’s notebook and reads aloud: “I might have saved her, now she’s gone forever.” Learo exchanges his butterfly net for Edgar’s shotgun, and follows Cordelia. Watching Learo and Cordelia, Edgar wants to invent a word, which Shakespeare says will “accompany the dawn of our first image.”

This “first image,” a majestic tableau, shows Cordelia dead, her corpse stretched out on a rock by the side of the lake as, with his back to her, Learo stands, the shotgun in hand, facing the water, the mountains, and the sky. With this, the primal image of the incestuous father enduring the death of his daughter—the scenario at the basis of Godard’s work throughout the decade—Pluggy’s project is realized: the cinema is reborn, albeit in darkest sin.

Declaring that the motion picture industry is again growing fast, Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth announces, “I was finishing the picture in a small editing place they had hired for me. The man in charge was Mister Alien.” In the editing room, Mister Alien, Woody Allen, is wearing a T-shirt inscribed “Picasso” and editing film with safety pins and needle and thread, as Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth recalls a remark by Professor Pluggy about “handling in both hands the present, the future, and the past.” As film runs through the editing table, Mister Alien recites aloud from Shakespeare’s sixtieth sonnet:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before
,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend
.

The genesis of the film is present: Mailer, Welles, Sellars’s knowledge of Shakespeare, the pressure from Golan, the trip to New York to film Woody Allen, the absorption in the history of cinema to which Godard sought to link his
King Lear
, the origin of the cinema in the story of stories, the criminal underworld’s violent power, and the suggestion of incest, so subtle as to defy both vulgarity and horror. And, crucially, Godard himself is also there as the self-sacrificing demiurge who brings these elements to life.

In Godard’s preceding films he had stormed the bastions of high art: in
Passion
, he took on the history of painting; in
First Name: Carmen
, he approached music as such, through the rarefied summit of Beethoven’s quartets; in
Hail Mary
, he assumed the challenge of the founding Christian myth. With
King Lear
he went further still: he raises his claims for the power of the cinema—of his own films—to the level of divine power.

R
EQUIRED TO FINISH
the film in time for Cannes, Godard claimed he stayed awake for sixty-two consecutive hours making sure that the rough cut was ready for its May 17 screening. He declared that the film was “ninety percent” complete.
⁴⁵
At the festival,
King Lear
was admired by the happy few critics who were particularly sensitive to Godard’s work, but was generally viewed by others as a very expensive practical joke, or even as simply “incomprehensible.”
⁴⁶
At his press conference, Godard claimed never to have read the play
King Lear
and asserted, “Shakespeare is untranslatable, and I don’t understand half of what is said in the film.”
⁴⁷
Golan, who was outraged by the inclusion of his private telephone conversation, complained that Godard had “spit in his own soup,”
⁴⁸
and said that the director should make press conferences rather than films.

Mailer, whose film
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
also played at the festival, out of competition, was present as a juror. In advance of the screening of
King Lear
, the writer magnanimously told a journalist, “We separated amicably… I’m sure that he has made a good film.”
⁴⁹
Mailer had not seen it; in private, he was seething. In June 2000, Mailer said, “Working for Godard on
King Lear
was probably the most disagreeable single experience I’ve had in all these years as a writer.”
⁵⁰

After Cannes, Godard finished the film, which was shown in July at the Avignon theater festival, again to acclaim from the best critics but to little note in the movie business.
⁵¹
Being an English-language film, it did not open promptly in France; its “untranslatability” was taken quite seriously in the industry, as was its generally harsh reception at Cannes: no French distributor bought rights to release it there. It thus went unreleased in France despite Godard’s artistic reputation and widespread recognition.

Instead,
King Lear
had its commercial premiere in New York on January 22, 1988, at the Quad Theater, its elaborately contrapuntal stereo sound track mixed down to a garbled mono. The famous actors in the cast had signed contracts with Godard that prohibited their names from being used in advertising. Reviewers generally abhorred Godard’s approach to an English-language classic: Vincent Canby, in the
New York Times
, called the film“lifeless”;
⁵²
in
Time
magazine, Richard Corliss called it “cynical” but also “Godard’s most infuriating, entertaining pastiche in two decades.”
⁵³
At three
evening screenings in the film’s brief first run, the viewing audience was never more than twenty people.

King Lear
did not open in France until 2002—with Godard’s revelatory stereo sound track—where it received great attention from the press, but mainly for the curious stories of its genesis rather than for what was on the screen. Moreover, the writer Viviane Forrester, whose essay on Cordelia’s silence was quoted on the sound track, sued the filmmaker for copyright infringement and won. The French distributor, Bodega Films, now was obligated to mention Forrester’s book in the credits, and Godard and the distributor were both required to pay Forrester and her publisher damages in the amount of five thousand euros.
⁵⁴

The reception of the film, at home and abroad, was grotesquely anticlimactic; its minimal impact at the time of its completion was absurdly disproportionate to its vast artistic significance.
King Lear
is one of Godard’s artistic summits; it is also a dead end of sorts. In it, he combined the themes, tones, moods, and methods that had dominated his work since his return to the film industry in 1979. Immediately after completing it, he embarked on amassive project that had been gestating for years,
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which would occupy his attention for a long time to come and which would prove to be his most subjective and personal cinematic essay.

M
EANWHILE, IN LATE
1987, Anne-Marie Miéville finally got the opportunity to make her first feature film when a Swiss production company added funds to those already committed by Gaumont and the CNC.
⁵⁵
She started with a well-defined and carefully elaborated story (though she, like Godard, preferred not to write dialogue until the time of the shoot). Miéville did not, however, know what to call her film and claimed that from being asked for years about her progress on “her dear subject,” she decided to call the film
Mon cher sujet
.

The film is a modern melodrama, a worthy successor to the work of Douglas Sirk. Miéville filmed three generations of women: an elderly grandmother, still working (in the office of a garage); a woman in her early forties, a writer of some renown but whose love life was unsatisfyingly distributed between two men, one crude and tender, the other intellectual and cold; and a young opera singer whose boyfriend, a saxophonist with a rock band, tries to persuade her to sing pop music. The young woman becomes pregnant, and the arrival of the child, a boy, becomes the focus of the three women’s lives, taking the place of the men who are absent.

Miéville’s film is also a noteworthy attempt to capture the mental and physical discipline of an artist’s apprenticeship. The daughter’s singing lesson with an older male teacher is among the most powerful moments in the
film. Miéville’s own daughter, Anne, was a singer and writer of popular songs, and she performed one of her compositions on-screen. Several months after the film was completed, Anne gave birth to a child. Miéville admitted the correlations of the film’s substance to her own experience, likening her family situation to that of the woman writer, as a daughter, a mother, and a new grandmother.
⁵⁶

Miéville, as she confessed, was not a person of the cinema; as such, like a young first-time novelist, she was able to work in the first person, without references to movie genres or other cinematic antecedents. Her first feature film was spontaneous and alert to her actors as well as to her own emotions. She fully justified the confidence that Godard had expressed in her ability when they had discussed the question two years earlier in
Soft and Hard. Mon cher sujet
premiered in the Critics’ Fortnight at the Cannes festival in 1988 and was released commercially in Paris on January 18, 1989. Despite generally favorable reviews, Miéville was not immediately able to launch another project.

T
HE TIME THAT
followed the completion of
King Lear
was suddenly busy for Godard. Shortly before the 1987 Cannes festival, Godard had asked René Bonnell, the historian of cinema economics who had become the head of the film production department at Canal Plus, France’s pay-television channel, to approve that company’s investment in
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, which the station had been planning to broadcast since its inception in 1984.
⁵⁷
Bonnell agreed, and at the festival announced the joint venture with Godard. Soon thereafter, Godard immersed himself more deeply than ever in the project, nurtured for years, that concerned his own “cher sujet”—the cinema itself.