Hommages
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JR: But there's a contradiction: your films are all set in the country now, but their culture is city culture. JLG: To shoot on the Champs-Elysées or on 5th Avenue was something new, it was a new kind of shot. That doesn't mean that if a young moviemaker shoots with a girl and boy on Champs-Elysées now that it might not be interesting. But it's not new. For us it was a kind, of freedom recovered. We had to do that, because it was simply forbidden. It was an escape, just as it was an escape for Cassavetes to go where he did when he shot Husbands. And what I like about the way that Rob Tregenza goes into the street [in Talking to Strangers] is that it's new again, there is a necessity to go into the streets that way. It's not done in other young pictures. Godard's historical impulse can already be seen in a mocking juxtaposition of shots reportedly eliminated by the French censors from A bout de souffle -– a cut from Charles de Gaulle in a car following Dwight D. Eisenhower in a car in a procession down the Champs-Elysées to Jean-Paul Belmondo following Jean Seberg down the sidewalk. This conflation of the sexual with the military/political rhymes with the rude simile proposed in chapter 1a in Histoire(s) du cinémaover a frenzied montage synthesizing a musical number ("Ladies in Waiting") from Les Girls, Max Ophüls, Molière, Madeleine Ozeray, Louis Jouvet, and even Bogart: "1940, Geneva, L'École des femmes, Max Ophüls. He falls upon Madeleine Ozeray's ass just as the German army takes the French army from behind." The reference is to Ophüls' unfinished filming of a stage performance of the Molière play, and the significance here is again the simultaneity of what's happening in cinema and what's happening in the world outside — a point made equally in the same chapter when Godard rhymes a figure in a skeleton costume at the masked ball in The Rules of the Game (1939) with concentration camp victims, or when, in 3a, he links Elina Labourdette's penultimate line in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945),"l struggle," to de Gaulle saying to the free French, "We must struggle," around the same time. This latter linkage has prompted Godard to call Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne the "only" film of the French Resistance, and even if one chooses to reject such a notion, it becomes possible to appropriate it as a critical insight into the early films of Robert Bresson. For it might be argued that some of Bresson's most important identifying traits as a filmmaker — such as his uses of off-screen sounds to replace images, or the sense found in all his films of souls in hiding, of buried identities and emotions –- might be traceable in part to his nine months (1940-41) in a German internment camp and his subsequent experience of the German occupation of France. This applies not only to his masterpiece about the French Resistance, A Man Escaped (1956) — where the sounds of the world outside Fontaine's prison cell create as well as embody his very notion of freedom — but also to his other early features. Such an interpretation can of course be debated, but it seems to me a far more fruitful approach to Bresson's style to see it growing out of concrete and material historical experience than to treat it as a timeless, transcendent, and ultimately mysterious expression of abstract spirituality. (Judging from Michel Ciment's recently published interview with Bresson in Positif no. 430, Decembre 1996, Bresson may share this bias himself: "To treat me like a Jansenist is insane: I'm the opposite of a Jansenist, I search for an overall impression. When I'm on the grand boulevards, I ask myself straightaway, 'What sort of impression do they make on me?' And in fact this impression is of a jumble of legs which makes a sharp sound on the pavement. I've tried to render this impression with sound and image.") And Godard's historical linkage, without actually propounding this critical argument, at least points us in the proper direction. It's a way of saying that cinema is concerned with the world, not with an alternative to it, and that cinema belongs to the world, including us. In terms of the overall myth of Histoire(s) du cinéma, the cinema and the 20th century — almost interchangeable in Godard's terms — are contextualized by two key countries (France and the United States), two emblematic studio chiefs (Irving Thalberg, Howard Hughes), and two emblematic world leaders (Lenin, Hitler); two decisive falls from cinematic innocence (the end of silent film that came with the talkies and the end of talkies that came with video); two decisive falls from worldly innocence (World War I and World War II); and two collective cinematic resurgences that took place in Europe, affecting the moral and aesthetic of the rest of the world (Italian neorealism and the New Wave). JR: There's a sequence from Que Viva Mexico in chapter 2a that seems edited in a very Eisensteinian way. Is this editing yours? JLG:No, it's Marie Seton's. In a sense, I think I'm virtually unassailable in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. I used Marie Seton's because it was the very first one that we knew about, Time in the Sun. Jay Leyda had not yet done his critical work on it, and I never saw that version; it was the kind of movie we never saw. And so, since I was speaking of the New Wave, it has to be Marie Seton. Because Marie Seton belongs to the same epoch as Jean-Georges Auriol, who was so fond of Marie. If it was another episode, maybe I would have edited the footage myself. I'm not ashamed to re-edit another filmmaker. Everything came from the New Wave. First it was spreading and then it disappeared. That's why I said to Anne-Marie [Miéville], "At the time of Jean Vigo, it was the same as it is for us now: 'difficult,' a flop, no one's seeing it." But because of what happened at the time of neorealism and then at the time of the New Wave — because of the theory of all that — attendance went up. And now it's going down again. It's always been like that. I say what I mean in the third episode of Histoire(s) du cinéma: it's evident that movies are capable of thinking in a better way than writing and philosophy, but this was very quickly forgotten. So this is what happened. The New Wave was a miracle. It was a crystallization of what James Agee wrote about. |
Q (at the press conference): Did you and Truffaut have the same views on filmmaking? JLG: In the end, no, totally different. But we were younger, we were French, we were fighting, we had no money and we tried to survive, full of hope and faith. And as soon as we began to do pictures, the pictures showed we had different tastes, and then we began to disagree. I thought – and I still think – that François was not a good director. He was a great critic, a great agitator and polemicist...the successor of Diderot, Malraux, Bazin – better than [Serge] Daney. To be a successor of Diderot is to be much better than I am; I'm not even a successor of Malraux. But he was more commercial, and there was a difference between him and me. I came from a very rich family, he came from a very poor family, with divorced parents. To have a success was very important for him and I didn't need that. My first movie [Breathless] was a success, but I never thought it could be; then I made a second one [Le petit soldat] that was first censored and then, three years later, it had no success – and that protected me from success. Because success is corrupting; it's very difficult to avoid that. For me, the way to succeed was to be unsuccessful, bit to make a living on that. François was the exact contrary. But he was representing us [the New Wave], and because of his success, especially in America, he was in a sense protecting us. Since Day for Night was a success, it protected me in a way to make a picture like King Lear, which was considered a disaster even by my American friends. We couldn't be attacked because of François. He was like a battering ram. *** How much of a historian is Godard? A complex question, almost as complex in a way as asking the same question about James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. "That which has never taken place is the work of the historian," reads an early title in chapter 2a. Much of Godard's work since the 80s is concerned with amnesia — a subject that becomes especially important in his King Lear (1987) and 2 x 50 ans de cinéma français — but there are times when Godard's own amnesia seems as much of an issue as everyone else's. Case in point: The epigraph of Contempt, attributed to André Bazin and appearing also in the beginning of episode 1a and in For Ever Mozart, is, "Cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires." But to all appearances, neither the quotation nor the attribution is correct. A more probable source is a sentence that appears in "Sur un art ignoré" by Michel Mourlet (Cahiers du cinéma no. 98, août 1959, nine months after Bazin's death): "Since cinema is a gaze which is substituted for our own in order to give us a world that corresponds to our desires, it settles on faces, on radiant or bruised but always beautiful bodies, on this glory or this devastation which testifies to the same primordial nobility, on this chosen race that we recognize as our own, the ultimate projection of life towards God." Another example: in excerpts from a document (published in English in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, edited by Raymond Bellour with Mary Lea Bandy, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992, 132) written and assembled by Godard alongside Histoire(s) du cinéma — an early version of a book scheduled to be published by Gallimard at the same time that the complete video series premiered in Cannes — Godard incorrectly describes Howard Hughes as the "producer of Citizen Kane". False quotations and false attributions are, of course, quite common in film criticism. Although Godard himself is correctly credited for having made the famous remark, "Tracking shots are a matter of morality," what is almost invariably omitted from this attribution is that Godard was merely inverting a sentence by Luc Moullet published four months earlier: "Morality is a matter of tracking shots." Godard's version of the epigram is perhaps the more memorable of the two, and it's theoretically possible that Moullet was only paraphrasing something he heard Godard say at an earlier date. For that matter, Mourlet may (or may not) have been paraphrasing something he might have read or heard from Bazin. The point, in any case, is I don't know, and the history of film and film criticism abounds with such cases of not knowing. A surfeit of not knowing, however, produces only confusion, and the advantage of false or at least dubious quotation and attribution in this case is that they produce some form of history — or, more precisely, histoire(s)....Is it true, as Godard asserts in 2b, that F.W. Murnau and Karl Freund invented Nuremberg lighting while Hitler still couldn't afford a beer in a Munich café? Whether true or not, it is certainly a form of history, poetry, and criticism, transforming the object of our gaze. (to be continued) Jonathan ROSENBAUM
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