The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  The truth was more complicated and less organized. Godard’s deconstruction of a narrative film’s form was not too far from those American films of 1959 that were abandoning narrative sincerity for parody or an explosive camp reappraisal. But Rio Bravo and Some Like It Hot still ran smooth; their subversion lay in their ironic attitudes. Godard sensed more, spurred on by the anthology called television, where the audience had seen everything—so make it different. In advance of the remote-control device for self-editing with television, Breathless had a scattered dynamic that said, next, next, hurry on. More than telling a story, Breathless had the world-weary attitude “let’s get this over with,” and so the film was always plunging toward the last blank look on Patricia’s face as the dying Michel tells her she is “dégueulasse.”

  A few years later, talking about Pierrot le Fou (1965), Godard admitted, “The Americans are good at story-telling, the French aren’t.” He added that by the mid-1960s a great film almost had to be based on a misunderstanding, or something done by accident. The old grammar of film narrative, he felt, was archaic and useless. But “everything is possible on television.” More or less, people watched that screen in the way they observed life, bored yet expectant. So he concluded that he wanted Pierrot to be not so much a film “but an attempt at film.”

  He was a theorist, but a careerist, too. As if aware how he had outflanked Truffaut and Chabrol, and left them looking old-fashioned, Godard the deadpan opportunist and chronic word player started to do interviews. There’s a comparison with the Beatles here: their radicalism lay not just in the freshness of their music—tough as well as lyrical—but in the indifference they flaunted in interviews. No one had talked to the press like that before; no one had taken their own fame and said, look, it’s stupid. Not that the Beatles or Godard were free from the pleasure of being hits. Godard could be dismissive one minute and charming the next; his own evasiveness was a kind of cutting. He could say that his film was really just his film criticism applied by different means—it was an “essay,” an analysis of a process that had to change fast now to keep up with the unstable culture. But then, talking about Breathless, he could slip back into being the art student in love with artiness: “For a long time the boy has been obsessed by death, he has forebodings. That’s the reason why I shot that scene of the accident where he sees a guy die in the street. I quoted that sentence from Lenin, ‘We are all dead people on leave,’ and I chose the Clarinet Concerto that Mozart wrote shortly before dying.”

  Godard liked to seem unreachable and superior. He wore dark glasses most of the time. He tried to be impassive. He spoke lucidly but in a monotone—there was something of Alpha 60 there already, the all-knowing computer from Alphaville (1965). But the new movie order he was introducing should not conceal his own disarray—European yet besotted with Americana, emotional but cold, an avant-gardist but eager for movie hits to surpass the rest of the gang. The confusion was intensified once he met Anna Karina, and his work took on an emotional force that he would not regain without her.

  Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer (her real name) had come to Paris from Denmark as a model and perhaps an actress. Godard had considered her for a small role in Breathless, but it required that she bare her breasts, and Anna Karina (the professional name she adopted) was reluctant to do that. So Godard pursued her for his next film, Le Petit Soldat (1963). He even put out an advertisement suggesting that the actress in the new film might end up his lover. There was a recognition all through the New Wave that even on a shoestring budget you made movies to get girls. Karina said she didn’t like Godard much at first, but she took the part and then they were inseparable—until they separated.

  In the next few years, Godard embarked on one of the most creative periods in the history of film. One by one he made pictures that took the surviving genres and ideals of American film and broke them apart before our eyes: Le Petit Soldat (a political thriller), Une Femme Est une Femme (1961, a romantic comedy according to Lubitsch), Vivre Sa Vie (1962, a woman’s picture), Les Carabiniers (1963, the war film), Le Mépris (1963, a movie about movies), Bande à Part (1964, the young gang), Une Femme Mariée (1964, a woman’s picture with sociology), Alphaville (1965, science fiction, or liberty threatened by occupation), Pierrot le Fou (1965, a noir in full sunlight, escape leading to death), Masculine-Féminine (1966, sexual politics), Made in U.S.A. (1966, noir), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967, prostitution and society), La Chinoise (1967, world politics, infant Marxism), Week-End (1967, automobiles, society equals traffic, the crash as destiny). Karina was in seven of them, made before and after their breakup.

  That remake scheme isn’t tidy or exact: as always with Godard, the cynicism spilled over into the romanticism. Montage meant interruption and self-contradiction; it allowed anything you could think of. Moreover, in the years of Godard’s surge, there was a sexual revolution, the onset of Vietnam, the aftermath of Algeria—its independence was gained in 1962—and the discovery of torture, an era of assassinations, the growing disquiet with the United States in Europe, the use of drugs (though that was always missing from the ruthless sobriety of Godard), the dawn of feminism, and the flooding of a culture by television, to say nothing of the decline of conventional Hollywood confidence. This would also build toward the events in France of 1968, the attempt at a revolutionary alliance between students and workers, the street demonstrations, and the government attempt to remove Henri Langlois from leadership of the Cinémathèque Française. Plus the marriage between Godard and Anna Karina broke up. These newsreel items may seem obvious, but you will not find them in Truffaut or most other filmmakers of the period.

  Godard was fire and ice, without much prospect of reconciling the two. So Vivre Sa Vie (1962) is not a story but a series of numbered episodes with a dispassionate essay on the facts and logistics of prostitution. But when the film crosscuts the face of Karina beholding Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc it is impossible to miss the director’s love for her or for the process of watching and desiring that is the original essence called cinema.

  The finale of Vivre Sa Vie is casual, an untidy shootout on a shabby street—don’t bother with the big noir setup; haven’t we seen it so many times?—but when Karina dances to the jukebox in the café, she is as exhilarating as a teenager imitating Cyd Charisse. There is an agonized rapture at work that says, I love this woman, I love this thing called movie, but I can hardly believe in it any longer because I’m too postmodern. Truffaut would not have dared interpose so analytical an intelligence in his films. In truth, the critic in Godard was battling the storyteller. The film is called Vivre Sa Vie, and to a point it is feminist just as it made an icon of Karina, but it is also nagging away at this other riddle, How Do I Make My Film?

  With contempt was the eventual answer. Yet Le Mépris/Contempt is an anguished rhapsody in color, wide screen, camera movement, and the elegy of the music by Georges Delerue (who had become Truffaut’s composer) laid over the elegant Capri villa that is the picture’s chief location. It is one of the most beautiful films ever made, and that includes its mocking use of the naked Brigitte Bardot (a contractual obligation) at a time when we suspect Godard would never have shown Karina naked; she is always treated chastely in their films together. The producer in Le Mépris is a florid monster, played by Jack Palance as a brother to his Attila in Douglas Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan (1954)—but this is Attila in an Italian suit. The director is Fritz Lang as himself (aged seventy-three), surveying his own humiliation. And the screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) has pimped his wife to assist his career. Le Mépris knows the filmmaking process is inherently corrupt.

  Then there is Pierrot le Fou (1965): it’s a disenchanted husband-meets-old-girlfriend story, and a reworking of the Godard-Karina breakup where she is asked to gaze into the camera with remorse, recrimination, and ultimate defiance: look at me, I’ll lie to you, she seems to say. (She is Vivian Rutledge from The Big Sleep cut with the bad sister Carmen.) Her face suddenly exposes the hurt
boy in Godard posing as a brilliant intellectual. Karina and Belmondo (Marianne and Ferdinand) make love with a bloody corpse in the next room: terror and torture have begun, so we have new insight into why lovers might cry out in their sleep. But in the film’s rapturous descent into the South of France and summer (moving “like spirits through a mirror”) there is maybe for the last time a sheer delight on Godard’s part with movie itself—the convertible driving into the sea and its brief arc of rainbow, the girl playing tennis, the movement in space, animal locomotion, the colors, her hair, their skin at sunset, the jazzy combo of parrot and fox; the songs (music by Antoine Duhamel); the bitter island idyll; Belmondo doing Michel Simon (if anyone remembered Simon); Karina as a noir nymph, the more treacherous the more she is watched (the first pressure of Godard’s misogyny); and a stranded Samuel Fuller at a Paris party (a soiree for the exchange of advertising clichés), proclaiming the need for “emotion” in film above all else. What makes Pierrot crazy is not simply his self-destructive romanticism; it is the archaic faith he still shares with Fuller for action cinema, the nostalgia that on-screen resolution might count toward anything. So there are vivid action scenes and isolated fragments of storytelling (the holdup scene codified by references to literature—Godard still read!). Ferdinand wants to read and write, but Marianne tells him, “You talk to me with words and I look at you with feelings.” It’s such a considered line from a spontaneous woman.

  The critic and essayist in Godard is telling us, this cannot go on much longer. This world is too ghastly for us to tell ourselves we are being entertained by movies still. It is an end to cinema, sometime around 1968, but because Godard was perverse, cruel, and brilliant, it is delivered as breathtaking beauty. As Week-End finishes, the titles announce, “End of film…End of cinema.” Yet if we are going to lose this, aren’t we losing a lot? Preston Sturges does rescue the director in Sullivan’s Travels, and we hope that lofty chump is going back to Paramount to make more comedies. But Godard would not save himself.

  The Godard films of the early 1960s are a compressed history of the medium, and revivals over the years have usually played well with new audiences. It is fanciful, I fear, to claim that any body of work since has surpassed it or made so clear-eyed a commentary on movie history and its pathology. There has seldom in any of the arts been anyone with such a command of beauty and so wilful in his urge to eliminate it. The topic of “contempt” is pervasive and so rich it covers Godard himself and us, the audience. Like most chronic romantics, he turns into an unendurable pessimist. He is alive still and he goes on working, and there have been valiant attempts to say he is as interesting and as important as ever. I fear it’s wishful thinking. Godard had always guessed his frenzy in the 1960s might serve to undercut his own faith in the mass medium. The “End of Cinema” was not just a cheeky aside; it was a foreboding. There was a period—fifty years, if we are generous—in which the light was enlightening and moving and even transforming. But then a change set in where the shining light might become a mockery of enlightenment and a means of imprisoning the mass.

  There is a moment in Vivre Sa Vie when Anna Karina’s character, Nana, writes a letter. It is in episode seven of the film. The letter is an application, pen on paper, to join the staff of a brothel. The actress, or is it the character, actually writes the letter. So it takes time. As one watched this scene for the first time in 1962, it was impossible not to think, “Ah, a letter-writing scene. He’ll show the start of the action and then he’ll cut to the finished letter. It’s just a matter of a couple of shots and editing them together. That is how movie works.” But then you watched, and the action of writing stretched out in time. It became the scene. So you could resume an amiable analysis by saying, “Ah, this is his way of showing how naïve, how uneducated, yet how diligent Nana is. It’s an opening up of her character.” And that was fair enough. But then something else dawned on the viewer: Godard was saying, just look at the now of it, look at her presence, her being. Isn’t this movie? Isn’t this something we might call “vérité”?

  But here was what ended up an eighty-five-minute movie, and whole minutes were ticking away. The London Film Festival press screening occurred at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Going into the film and its dark, critics made nervous jokes that this might be the last film they’d ever see. So these moments of passing duration (unstressed as narrative), these minutes of observation, felt unusually precious or nerve-racking. It made us think of the film’s title and the sophomoric question—are you living your life or passing time?—which can still be compelling if you’re twenty-one.

  It happened that Elia Kazan visited the set of Vivre Sa Vie one day. Here was one of the top directors in the world, on the cutting edge when it came to handling performance, and shooting material in the approved Hollywood manner: master shot, close-up, crosscut close-up—matching the action and making it seamless, an accepted coded version of reality. But Godard’s script girl, Suzanne Schiffman, reported this: “It was a very long take, a fixed-focus shot. The camera didn’t move, the actors entered and left the frame, they continued acting and talking outside the frame. Kazan asked me, ‘Which angle will he shoot the action from next?’ ‘No, he never shoots a scene from more than one angle.’ Kazan didn’t understand.”

  The Godard of the cryptic interviews had his slogans, such as “cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second,” but he was subtler than that, and interested in something more profound and more direct. He was getting back to the origins of film and photography. He was as eager to be astounded as Eadweard Muybridge or his spectators the first time the photographer showed the run-on stills that recorded a woman opening a parasol or a man tossing away a jug of water. D. W. Griffith and the practitioners of his era had done the great service of seeing there might be camera angles—useful, insightful—that could be cut together. But Godard was in love with the primacy of seeing and of an age before angles, when we were amazed. He could sound very modern, but he was a romantic, too, harking back to originality and the nowness that came and went every second, or twenty-four times a second. No, it wasn’t truth; it was mortality—and that’s why the Cuban missile crisis was providential.

  There are several sequences in Vivre Sa Vie that adopt a similar approach: the first conversation in the bistro where Nana is leaving Paul, filmed from behind their backs (with reflections in a mirror); and then the lengthy conversation with the philosopher (Brice Parain). Those scenes were written, or they had a script basis, but their stillness (and their openness to distracting ambient sound) is dedicated to the idea of the event, the human presence, the “being” of it all, the liveliness of lived life. The technology was palpable. Going beyond the handheld, sound-free athleticism of Breathless, Coutard now had a heavy Mitchell camera, lights, and a microphone that had to be carefully placed and that picked up talk, background, and even the sounds of the crew. You can almost feel the weight of the machinery—and yet Godard often gains an amazing lightness or momentariness in the film. “What I want,” he said, “is the definitive by chance.”

  You can say this was all because he loved Anna Karina. I hope so, but Godard seldom did one thing at a time. For all its stress on immediacy and being, Vivre Sa Vie was very formal—the numbered episodes, the camera’s gravity, the use of genre scenes (the musical number, the final shootout), the philosopher-meets-whore set piece, the use of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Oval Portrait,” and the whole notion (beginning with Falconetti as Joan of Arc) that this tart has a soul. In all the scripted scenes, Anna was still herself. Some observers said, well, yes, she’s very pretty and “the camera loves her, et cetera,” but is she really an actress? This was another version of Kazan’s wondering which angle came next?

  In the same year, 1962, a film was released of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It is usurpassed filmed theater. Sidney Lumet directed with devoted skill and sympathy. Boris Kaufman photographed it in black and white and delivered the fog-bound house as w
ell as its inner fogs. Richard Sylbert made the interiors believable and claustrophobic. The central actors were Jason Robards, Dean Stockwell, Ralph Richardson, and Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone. People call it a master class in acting, but that’s unfair. It’s a family, not a class. The enacted text is so complete, so moving, you feel you are caught in its emotional atmosphere. Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress (she lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker). I mention this to admit that Anna Karina could never have played Mary Tyrone. She was the wrong age, she was not fluent in English, she was “too pretty,” she was bad “casting,” and she never had the resources that Hepburn possessed as an actress. She was not even quite an actress in that old sense. And yet…her being in Vivre Sa Vie is more immediate, more cinematic, and some of that is simply because she was the director’s girl and wife and because he had a new understanding of “vérité” that was vital to the moment. Katharine Hepburn was spectacularly accomplished. But Anna Karina was trying, and she was letting herself be photographed. It was another suggestion that acting, especially “great” acting, might be archaic.

  Godard’s biographer, Richard Brody, has spelled out the ways the director emphasized this, with an element of unkindness:

  Vivre Sa Vie suggests a disturbing analogy between Karina as an actress and Nana as a prostitute—between prostitution and acting, in general. The film is studded with references to Nana’s desire to pursue a career as an actress. She complains to her spurned husband, Paul, that he did not help her pursue her dream, and she mentions having appeared in a film with Eddie Constantine (as Karina had done in Varda’s Cléo).