THE SEARCH FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE IN
THE FILMS OF JEAN LUC GODARD
FESTIVAL GUIDE
“A STORY HAS A BEGINING MIDDLE AND END, BUT NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER” Together Apart was created to exhibit the delicate and often complicated relationships in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. This is juxtaposed with his extensive knowedge of history, art, film, and politics, and as such each film becomes a small vignette of Godard’s world view. Godard seems to focus on the contrast, contradictions, and conflict of human relationships, and ultimately how fragile they are. Additionally, he looks at individuality and how that too can conflict with our relationships with others. One could say that Godard’s films are about sex and politics, and honestely that is a large part of his film
Together Apart was created to exhibit the delicate and often complicated relationships in the films of JeanLuc Godard. This is juxtaposed with his extensive knowedge of history, art, film, and politics, and as such each film becomes a small vignette of Godard’s world view. Godard seems to focus on the contrast, contradictions, and conflict of human relationships, and ultimately how fragile they are. Additionally, he looks at individuality and how that too can conflict with our relationships with others. One could say that Godard’s films are about sex and politics, and honestely that is a large part of his films. This film festival was created to celebrate this complexity of human relationships and the search each individual goes on to discover themselves. The answeres are as complex as the questions, and it is as much about the journey as it is about the outcome. As Jean-Luc Godard once said, “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 2
THE DIRECTOR
THE HISTORY
3 4 5
THE RELATIONSHIP
THE FILMS
THE FESTIVAL
1
The Director
INTRODUCTION
A JEAN LUC GODARD FILM FESTIVAL
A pioneer of the French new wave, Jean-Luc Godard has had an incalculable effect on modern cinema that refuses to wane. Before directing, Godard was an ethnology student and a critic for Cahiers du cinÊma, and his approach to film making reflects his interest in how cinematic form intertwines with social reality. His groundbreaking debut feature, Breathless—his first and last mainstream success—is, of course, essential Godard: its strategy of merging high (Mozart) and low (American crime thrillers) culture has been mimicked by generations of filmmakers.
Most questions derive from an interest or even from an obsession. In the latter case, they presuppose a protective, often rigid intellectual and emotional armor: one asks a question in order to affirm one’s own thoughts instead of as a means of looking around and discovering what is there. Thus, the structure of catechism and, in a sense, the questions in the following interview Having seen over fifteen of Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary feature films, I seem to have remained hanging on to that esthetic world created by Godard in which love, conscience, tenderness, and art (values implicit in films as late as Masculine-Feminine and Pierrot Le Fou) formed the silent horizon—the screen— on which one observed the players disjoined from their creator’s idealized perfections. As Godard once said: “Beyond the theater is life, and behind life, the theater. My point of departure was the imaginary
and I discovered the real; but behind the real there was the imaginary.” The “imaginary” is the world of love striven for, but the film attests to the impossibility of such striving and then marks death for those whose thin and pure elements gratuitously, violently, and naturally suffer to return to their extinction. Thus the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, heard in Breathless and Masculine Feminine, presages death for the wounded, innocent heroes “disguised as princes” (Pierrot Le Fou). And the circular camera movements ‘round that beautiful pastoral Mozart piano recital in Weekend signifies the end of this esthetic world. The hippie drum solo near this film’s conclusion ends the suggestion of “the film we had dreamed, the film we had carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live” (Masculine-Feminine).
Like a hallucinating child who sees a page or object that is no longer before him, I failed to realize that Godard was always attempting to break through that mirage in which cinema equaled life—a fantasy shared by his actors. “I know nothing of life except through the cinema,” Godard told Tom Milne in 1962. “I didn’t see things in relation to the world, to life or to history, but in relation to cinema. Now I am growing away from all that.... I thought Breathless was a realistic film, but now it seems like Alice in Wonderland, a completely unreal, surrealistic world.” As Susan Sontag has written: “Life—the world; death— being completely inside one’s own head.”
be free,” Godard once said. This is true for life. But when one questions (rightly) and then does away with the barest paradigms of the “spectacle” film — action, character, etc. — one finds ones self in undiscovered territory, and the chances of losing the way in the capitalist woods with only little red books in the basket are great. Godard’s new questioning of the relationship between art and politics reveals itself in recent personal confrontations such as when he asked the audience at last year’s London Film Festival to watch the uncut version of One Plus One outside the theater on a makeshift screen and return their tickets and send
“Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.” In Godard’s second feature film, Le Petit Soldat, the O.A.S. gunman protagonist
the refund to the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund. Put to a vote, only twenty persons
quotes Lenin’s dictum: “Ethics is the esthetics of the future.” Looking back now, we see that this exile and deserter, in search of his self, not knowing “where to give his heart,” ironically was pointing to Godard’s recent unswerving and uncompromising concern with using film as a way to “change the world.”
decided to walk out. Godard said: “You’re content to sit here like cretins in a church.” During the shouting that followed, he hit producer Ian Quarrier who later explained why he added to the end of Godard’s film a complete recorded version of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (“ten million teeny boppers in America alone.”)
There is no more joking self-consciously about the image of films— no more references to Johnny Guitar. Godard’s new films are not about politics in the way that Le Petit Soldat or Resnais’ The War Is Over are. Rather they present a political consciousness in the guise of quasi-documentary footage and thus attempt to make you watch-and listen and think. “To look around one’s self, that is to
One Plus One intersperses shots of the Stones creating Sympathy for the Devil (from a slow ballad to the final rhythmic holocaust) with scenes of Black Power militants in a Battersea automobile junkyard reciting texts by LeRoi Jones and Cleaver, shooting white night-gowned girls; an interview in lush green woods with Eve Democracy (Anne Wia-zemski) who replies yes or no to
questions defining the liberal temperament; a pornographic bookstore where Mr. Quarrier reads out from Mein Kampf while customers give the Nazi salute then slap two bandaged young men who chant “Peace in Vietnam.” Godard’s uncompleted new film, Some English Voices, apparently emphasizes one angle shots in an attempt to demystify image-making. The film is supposed to include a car factory production line, the camera conveying the sense of the monotony of automation; car workers at home talking about their life; a speech exemplifying fascist undercurrents beneath the liberal veneer; students talking about the Beatles’ “Honey Pie,” one saying: the more beautiful the music, the more counterrevolutionary the effect, the other saying: it’s only a song; Godard’s dying hand reaching—coming home — for the Red Flag, symbolizing revolutionary internationalism exemplified by Spanish Civil War and N.L.F. songs. While shooting up at the University of Essex, Godard encountered a manifesto published by the Situationists which concluded: “If you see a camera, smash it! It might be Godard.” Nietzsche wrote: “War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
2
The History
An increasing interest in left-wing thought was implicit in La Chinoise (1967; its title is slang for Parisian Maoists) and was confirmed by Godard’s active participation in the Paris student riots of 1968 and other demonstrations. Weekend, also made in 1967, was a hard-hitting denunciation of modern French society.
GODARD ON REBELLION
Godard was known to have Marxist sympothies, he was also known to be highly political. Although this developed later in his life, you see in in many of his earlier films as well. Paradoxically, Godard’s withdrawal from commercial cinema came at a time when the other best-known New Wave filmmakers, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette, were enjoying new levels of success and stability in their careers. Godard’s friendship with Truffaut was still strong at this time and he continued to see Rivette regularly. His vigorous defence of the latter’s breakthrough film Le Religieuse, which was initially banned by the French censor for its perceived anti-catholic sentiment, saw him orchestrate a campaign in support of the film and publish a letter to Minister of Culture, André Malraux, in which he described the celebrated writer as a coward for not speaking out against the ban. Early in 1968, Godard joined his erstwhile colleagues in the crusade to reinstate Henri Langlois to post as director of the
Cinémathèque, after he was sacked by government officials unhappy with his disregard for administrative norms. This resulted, the officials claimed, in deficits, unexplained expenses and chaotic warehousing of films. Within hours of Langlois’s sacking, filmmakers from France and abroad made their support for Langlois clear by refusing to allow their films to be shown at the Cinémathéque. On February 14, 2,500 people protested the removal of Langlois, with Godard and Truffaut in the front lines. Police charged and in the ensuing mêlée Truffaut was clubbed on the head and Godard’s glasses were broken. At a press conference two days later, Godard suggested that if the new administrators dared to reopen the Cinémathèque audience members should engage in ‘perpetual sabotage’. The mounting pressure from all parts of the motion picture industry finally paid
off. In late February Godard, accompanied by his wife Anne Wiazemsky, flew to New York to begin a lecture tour of American universities organized by the documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Godard was the cinematic idol of American university students, and the tour, coinciding with screenings of La Chinoise, was a great success. A young George Lucas interviewed by a Newsweek correspondent voiced what many felt: ‘When you find someone who’s going the same direction as you, you don’t feel so alone’. At Berkeley, La Chinoise played to twelve sold-out houses and Godard was cheered for commenting that he wouldn’t try again to get a visa to go to North Vietnam ‘because I think that the North Vietnamese will have won the war before I get it’.
During May 1968, as France erupted in a series of strikes and violent confrontations between students, workers and the police, Godard threw himself into the centre of the action. He took part in demonstrations and filmed them, contributing to the multi-authored Film-tracts – short 3 minute films of still photographs designed to contribute directly to the struggle. He also made a film called Un Film comme les autres (A Film Like The Others, 1968), which recorded workers and students discussing their views on the political situation.
3
The Relationship
“No, it’s true,” says Karina. “I had some bad times. We got married because, you know, I was pregnant. But then I lost the baby. Ups and downs. And then when Bande à Part came along, I was in a really bad shape. I didn’t want to be alive any more. I had tried to commit suicide and so they sent me to a crazy house.”
GODARD ON Love
Anna Karina on love, cinema and being Jean-Luc Godard’s muse: ‘I didn’t want to be alive any more’. I love the scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part where the stars dance the Madison inside a Paris cafe. I love its ramshackle energy and insouciant charm; its handclaps and its finger-clicks and the way that Godard keeps cutting the music, like a demented DJ, to tell us what each character is thinking at that precise moment. Godard was brilliant at creating such mischief. He liked lifting the bonnet to expose a film’s engine. He showed us the fictions and frictions behind the action on screen. Back in the day, Anna Karina was Godard’s inspiration: his private passion and his public play-thing (and sometimes viceversa). The pair married in 1961, divorced in 1965 and made eight films together, from Le Petit Soldat through to Made in USA. These roles would prove to be the making of her – although she, by the same token, was
the making of them. Whatever Godard required, Karina provided. She could be headstrong and wayward, gorgeous and broken. She was the effervescent free spirit of the French new wave, with all of the scars that the position entails. “ There were a lot of ups and downs in my life,” she concedes. “And the downs were, you know, very down. Very low.” More than half a century after snapping her fingers in Bande à Part, Karina is attending a Godard retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. She is now 75 and comes haring down the corridor like a fugitive from justice – swaddled in a trenchcoat and scarf, her head engulfed by a tan fedora. One hand clutches a glass of rosé wine. The other points the way to the green room and comparative safety. I think she does herself a disservice. Godard himself has described
her as a “woman of action”, an active collaborator in those early pictures. Her backstory, too, is full of gumption and grit. Born and raised in Denmark, Karina spent four years in foster care and then hitchhiked to Paris aged just 17. She begged neighbourhood priests to find her somewhere to sleep and then taught herself French by going to the movies. A talent scout spotted her outside Les Deux Magots, after which she began modelling for Coca-Cola and Pepsodent, Pierre Cardin and Palmolive soap. Back then her name was still Hanne Blarke Bayer. The designer Coco Chanel recommended she change it to something more dramatic. Click fingers, jump-cut: it is now the early 1960s. Karina has played a pro-Algerian activist in Le Petit Soldat and picked up an award at Berlin for her role in Une Femme est une Femme. She and Godard are the
city’s most fashionable couple, feted and fawned over wherever they go. It sounds like a fairytale, but the reality verged on a nightmare. An institution? “Well, yeah,” she continues. “And I wasn’t crazy at all. But it was a bad situation at that time for women – you could be there for ever. But an analyst helped to get me out. Then Jean-Luc came by and said, ‘Oh, you’re shooting tomorrow.’ Bande à Part. Crime movie. Heist movie. That movie probably saved my life.” Karina says that she always liked acting because acting involves becoming different people. Her life, she allows, has been one of constant reinvention. She fled Denmark for Paris because she disliked her home life (her mother ran up debts, her stepfather was abusive. “I can say all this now because everybody is dead”). It followed that she
would eventually move on from Godard as well. If Karina was a muse, she might have faded out at this point. Instead, it appears she went from strength to strength – collaborating with Serge Gainsbourg on a brace of pop hits (Roller Girl, Sous le Soleil Exactement), writing three novels and producing what may be her finest performance, in Jacques Rivette’s controversial La religieuse, playing a rebellious novice nun at loggerheads with the church. Karina’s eyes widen at the mention of this. “You remember that film?”
fun. One day in Los Angeles, I went to a museum and paid $25 and what did I see? White cubes! What’s going on? I go back to the ticket booth and said: ‘I want my money back. I don’t want to look at white cubes.’” She hasn’t seen Godard for years. She says he lives as a recluse; she doesn’t think he sees anyone. I ask what she would say if the director called up to suggest that they make one last film together and she laughs; she knows it is not going to happen. “I am the old story. L’histoire ancienne. But an old story can still be a good story, no?”
In 1972, she turned her hand to writing and directing. Vivre Ensemble was a flimsy,
Karina says that she always liked acting because acting involves becoming different people. Her life, she allows, has been one of constant reinvention. flyweight counter-culture comedy that played at the Cannes film festival and found itself hauled over the coals. “Lots of resistance. People really didn’t like it. ‘What is she doing here? This is not her job, she should stay being an actress.’ But I just wanted to see if I could do it, that’s all. And I wrote novels. And did singing – two albums, or did I say that already?” She makes a face. “I don’t sing any more. I guess I’m getting old.” Godard, of course, has moved on as well. Following his split with Karina, the director’s films became more experimental, more enigmatic, culminating in the jumbled Navajo English of Film Socialisme and the 3D jigsaw of Goodbye to Language. “I like the earlier ones better,” Karina admits. “The earlier ones are human, the later ones abstract. Like Cubist paintings – not so
4
The Films
A Bout De Souffle (Breathless)
A pety theif and an American Jouranalist hide out in a Paris hotel room, where their ideas of love, loyalty, and indepenedce are tested to the extreme. Date: 1960
Cast Jean-Paul Belmondo Jean Seberg Daniel Boulanger Henri-Jacques Huet Roger Hanin Van Doude Liliane David Michel Fabre Jean-Pierre Melville
The revolution starts here. A barely-there invigorating in 1960. He also shattered sub-Série Noire plot involving a vain notions of high culture and low, proving and nihilistic petty criminal (Jean-Paul that you could infuse seedy B-movie Belmondo) with a Bogie fetish, and his trash with Apollinaire and The Wild sometime American girlfriend (Jean Palms, Shakespeare and teddy bears, Seberg). He shoots a cop and goes on the Dovzhenko and Frank Tashlin. And run – sort of – and then gets shot himself. nothing was ever the same again. The real revolution is formal, stylistic. “To make a film all you need is a girl and Just as the Velvet Underground incorpoa gun.” Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted line rated the “accident” of feedback, Godard might have come from the mouth of any used the flaws and formal no-nos of contough-talking, American movie director ventional cinema to reinvent cinema. from Hollywood’s classic era. Shooting without permits, using no The fact that it was spoken by a 29-yearreal script (dialogue was post-dubbed), old Franco-Swiss intellectual from Paris and liberated by the same new lightsays much about the cross-cultural weight cameras that powered the 60s pollination that was so crucial to birth documentary boom, Godard achieved of the New Wave and to what is often an off-the-cuff, free-form documenconsidered its flagship film: À bout de tary feel that felt totally new and
“To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted line might have come from the mouth of any tough-talking, American movie director from Hollywood’s classic era. The fact that it was spoken by a 29-yearold Franco-Swiss intellectual from Paris says much about the cross-cultural pollination that was so crucial to birth of the New Wave and to what is often considered its flagship film: À bout de souffle. Indeed the film’s simple story resembles a classic American film noir, such as those made by Monogram Studios, to whom the film is dedicated. But Godard approached the story in ways that departed radically from past genre archetypes. His years as a critic, his immersion in both high and low
culture, his philosophical explorations, all impacted on his debut feature film. As he said in an interview, the film was the result of “a decade’s worth of making movies in my head.” The fact that he was relatively inexperienced and had little knowledge of the practical aspects of filmmaking proved unimportant. What he did have were an accumulation of original ideas, which he applied fearlessly to the aesthetic and technical elements of the film. The results were nothing less than a cinematic revolution. It was Francois Truffaut who, several years earlier, first sketched out the outline for what would become À bout de souffle. He had been inspired by a true story that had fascinated tabloid France in 1952, when a man named
Michel Portail, a petty criminal who had stolen a car, shot a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and then hid out for almost two weeks until he was found in a canoe docked in the centre of Paris. One aspect of the story that had appealed to Truffaut was the fact that Portail had an American journalist girlfriend who he had tried to convince to run away with him. Instead she turned him into the police. Truffaut had collaborated with both Claude Chabrol and Godard on the story but had failed to interest any producers. By 1959, Godard, now desperate to catch up with
Unimpressed by the director at their first meeting, describing him as “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look her in the eye when she talked,” she was, nevertheless, encouraged by her husband, a French attorney with directing ambitions of his own, to accept the role. Persuading Columbia Studios to lend her out for the film was less easy, but again her husband stepped in and managed to convince the studio to accept a small cash payment for her participation. As for Jean-Paul Belmondo, Godard had already promised him the lead role
Screenwriter Paul Javal’s marriage to his wife Camille disintegrates during movie production as she spends time with the producer. Layered conflicts between art and business ensue. his Cahiers colleagues and make a first feature film, asked if he might revive the project. Truffaut, buoyant with success after the ecstatic reception of Les Quatre cents coups at Cannes, not only agreed, but also helped to convince Georges de Beauregard to produce the film. With a low budget of 510,000 francs (a third of the average cost of a French film at that time), Godard set about casting for the film. He suggested to Beauregard that they hire Jean Seberg, the young actress who had made an uncertain start in pictures on Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, as the American woman. Although most critics had disparaged both films, Godard had written admiringly about Seberg in the pages of Cahiers du cinema.
in his first film. Belmondo, who was beginning to get lucrative offers from the mainstream film industry, ignored the warning words of his agent who told him, “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” and accepted the part. With his cast in place, Godard set about knocking Truffaut’s story outline into a screenplay. His original plan had been to use the outline as it was and merely add dialogue to it. Instead he rewrote the entire story, shifting the emphasis away from Truffaut’s portrayal of an anguished young man who turns to crime out of despair, to that of a young hoodlum with an existential indifference to common morality and the rule of law. Crucially, in the new version, the American woman Patricia comes into the narrative near
Le Mepris (Contempt)
Screenwriter Paul Javal’s marriage to his wife Camille disintegrates during movie production as she spends time with the producer. Layered conflicts between art and business ensue. Date: 1963
Cast: Brigitte Bardot Michel Piccoli Jack Palance Giorgia Moll Fritz Lang Raoul Coutard Jean-Luc Godard Linda Veras
At Cinecittà Studios in Rome, a film of The Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang himself (one of the four or five giants who locked down the grammar of cinema, lest we forget), and funded by Jack Palance’s crude American producer, is slowly failing to get made. The screenwriter’s (Michel Piccoli) marriage to a frequently naked Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is slowly being unmade. Shot in widescreen and color by Coutard, Contempt is almost ridiculously gorgeous to look at, inflected primarily by Godard’s career-long obsession with the color red (JLG loves red almost as much as Michael Powell did), and graced with enviably smooth and elegant tracking shots, some of enormous length and complexity. And despite working with a higher budget (from Carlo Ponti, of all people), one never loses the impression that Godard showed up in the morning with an idea or two, found a pre-existing set or locale, and just started shooting.
The result, however, is one of the masterpieces of French cinema. Le Mepris was the closest thing to a conventional movie that Godard had made and has remained one of his best- known and most celebrated works. As a reflexive commentary on the end of Hollywood’s classic era, it represented Godard’s view that the golden age of auteur directors working within the studio system was over. “Our tragedy,” Godard said, “was thinking that we were coming in the middle of something when in fact we were coming at the end of it.” Georges de Beauregard learned that France’s biggest movie star, Brigitte Bardot, had expressed a desire to work with Godard. The producer offered her the lead role in Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, about a screenwriter and his failing marriage.
Towards the end of 1962, Georges de Beauregard learned that France’s biggest movie star, Brigitte Bardot, had expressed a desire to work with Godard. The producer offered her the lead role in Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, about a screenwriter and his failing marriage. Bardot signed the contract in January of 1963 to play the part of Camille, the screenwriter’s wife. With such a huge star attached, Beauregard and his Italian partner Carlo Ponti were able to raise a budget of $1 million, much of it from the American producer Joseph E. Levine. For Godard the sum was unprecedented but meant working within the constraints of normal production, as well as dealing with the intense press and media activity that surrounded Bardot. In the event, the shoot which took place in and around Rome and Capri, proved much more difficult than anyone could have anticipated. Bardot
was the principle target of Italy’s paparazzi who created relentless commotion around the set. Meanwhile the mutual appreciation between star and director soon turned to disillusionment. Bardot felt unable to forge any kind of personal relationship with Godard, and she detached herself by locking herself in her hotel with her friends and entourage. Godard’s relations with Jack Palance, who played the fictional producer Prokosch, were even worse. The American actor became frustrated by Godard’s hands off method of directing actors and openly voiced his exasperation to a journalist: “We never know in advance what we’re going to do. There’s almost no dialogue. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had! It’s madness!” After a while, Palance refused to speak to Godard, passing his remarks through an Italian set decorator who spoke no English instead.
Godard’s stormy relationship with Karina added to his woes. During the shoot she visited him in Rome, where one evening they went to a nightclub. Someone invited Karina to dance and when she sat back down, Godard gave her a slap in the face in front of everyone. Their experience of marriage became the inspiration for the fictional characters in the film. The character of Camille was determined more by Karina’s personality than Bardot’s. Many of the lines spoken by Bardot were things that Karina herself had said to Godard. In one scene, Bardot wore the short dark wig that Karina had worn in Vivre sa vie and Godard even asked her to walk like Karina. At the same time Michel Piccoli, who played the husband, looked and behaved like Godard, even down to wearing his clothes. When the producers saw the first cut of the film they were disappointed. In particular they were disappointed that Bardot was not shown in the nude often enough. After a protracted battle lasting several months, during which the producers threatened to re-edit the film to their own satisfaction.
Bande à part (Band of Outsiders)
A young woman takes up with two criminal’s who plan to rob her rich aunt. Mostly they just lark about in the perfect Paris of 1964, riding cars, bullshitting in cafes, and generally failing at being crooks, with dire consequences. Date: 1964
Cast: Anna Karina
Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), are down on their luck and looking for a way to make some easy money. Falling in with Odile (Anna Karina), they devise a plan to rob a cache of loot hidden in a lodger’s room in her aunt’s house outside Paris. Killing time before the robbery, a love triangle develops between them. Meanwhile, things get really complicated when Arthur’s criminal uncle finds out about their scheme, forcing them to act out their plan before they’re ready, leading to disastrous consequences.
Danièle Girard Louisa Colpeyn Chantal Darget Sami Frey Claude Brasseur Georges Staquet Ernest Menzer Jean-Claude Rémoleux
The “cutest” and most accessible of all Godard’s early movies, Bande à part has ingrained itself into the international folk-memory of cinema, and is referenced in dozens of other movies, whether directly, as in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-enacts Bande’s famous nine-minute race through the Louvre, or indirectly, as in Tarantino’s production outfit, A Band Apart Films. At the centre is Godard’s then wife and 1960s muse, the utterly beguiling Anna Karina, who takes up with two criminals who plan to rob her rich employer. Mostly they just lark about in the perfect Paris of 1964, riding cars, bullshitting in cafes – including one moment when one character asks for a minute’s silence, and the entire soundtrack drops out for that period – and generally failing at being crooks. This is the approachable, antic, fun-loving Godard who largely vanished during his radical Maoist decade after May 68.
Returning to the crime story genre which he explored with A Bout De Souffle (1960), JeanLuc Godard created one of his most accessible and enjoyable films in this tale of a heist gone wrong. Based loosely on an American pulp novel Fools Gold by Dolores Hitchens, Godard packs the movie with enough cinematic allusions, literary quotations and exuberant pop culture riffing to sustain three films by anybody else. The result is both a freewheeling celebration of the gangster film and a meditation on the foolishness of youthful naiveté. Shot in black and white on location in a grey, overcast Paris, the film is rooted in the concrete reality of billboards, cafes and the metro. This gritty reality contrasts with the movie-inspired fantasies of the main characters, who play-act the part of gangsters, re-enacting shoot-outs in the street like school boys. As Godard himself says at one point, interrupting the action in voice over: “Franz thinks of everything and nothing. Uncertain if reality is becoming dream, or dream reality.” This interjection occurs during the film’s most celebrated set piece, a spontaneous dance routine in a cafe during which Godard intermittently stops the action to comment on the thoughts of the three characters. Other famous scenes include a breakneck dash around the Louvre, and an actual “minute of silence”. These spontaneous moments have little to do with the plot, but have everything to do with giving the film its offbeat charm.
VIVRE SA VIE (My Life to Live)
A young woman, hoping to become an actress, leaves her husband and becomes a prostitute. She is hell bent on her own independence and this ultimately leads to her demise. Date: 1962
Cast: Anna Karina Sady Rebbot André S. Labarthe Guylaine Schlumberger Gérard Hoffman Monique Messine Paul Pavel Dimitri Dineff Peter Kassovitz Eric Schlumberger Brice Parain Henri Attal
Nana (Anna Karina) works in a record store but dreams of becoming a film actress. After separating from her boyfriend, she drifts into prostitution and takes up with Raoul, a pimp, who teaches her the tricks of the trade. In time she falls in love with a young artist and attempts to break away, but Raoul is not about to let one of his most lucrative commodities slip out of his hands. The film begins with three silhouettes of Anna Karina, left profile, full face, right profile. With her Louise Brooks hairstyle, the actress looks like she might have stepped out of 1920s Berlin. This is no coincidence, the German playwrite Bertolt Brecht, a key figure from that era, was a major influence on the film’s style. Indeed Godard got the idea for dividing the narrative into twelve distinct chapters or theatrical tableaux from The Threepenny Opera and Brecht’s concept
of epic theatre and his use of “distancing effects” here become an intrinsic part of Godard’s method for the first time. A more immediate influence on the film’s style was motivated by an interview Francois Truffaut gave with a newspaper a few months earlier in which he had grouped Godard with a list of directors who treated film as spectacle rather than as a language. The first group, he argued, filmed the nature of actions, while the later used cinema to film ideas. Determined to place himself among the intellectual directors, Godard decided to make a film “of moral conflicts between characters who speak usually with their backs turned.” The opening scene, shot in a series of long, carefully composed shots, immediately puts this plan into practice by showing Nana from behind at the bar of a café as she talks with her husband who she is leaving for another man.
Godard’s approach to technique in this first scene, and throughout the film, marks a
which his camera would frame and allow to unfold in its own time. It also gives the film
significant change in style from his first three films. Feeling now that he had moved the camera too much in Breathless, he used heavier equipment under more traditional conditions, lit locations correctly, and captured direct sound at the time of filming, rather than overdubbing later. These more conventional methods required a larger crew, which made each set-up more time consuming to prepare. To save time and money, he worked more carefully, shooting long takes, many lasting more than three minutes. Godard told an interviewer that he wanted “to shoot on location, in natural settings, but without making a film of reportage. It will rather be a film in the theatrical spirit.” This way of filming, he knew, would allow Anna Karina, to give a sustained performance,
a more precise, classical feel than the loose, freewheeling approach of his earlier films, although, when Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard do move the camera, they do so with daring and purpose, such as the jump cut tracking shot that mimics the rattle of a machine gun. Godard conceived Vivre sa vie as a showcase for Anna Karina’s talent; an attempt also, perhaps, to save their marriage through cinematic collaboration. In the event, she does not disappoint, giving a performance both truthful and deeply affecting. Her sincerity and charm go some way to bridging the gap between the objective viewpoint of the camera and the subjective viewpoint of the character. Godard, a man still clearly in love, frames her like a painter, successfully
capturing her ravishing beauty and her fragile vulnerability. Despite their mutual achievement and the acclaim it brought, however, Karina was resentful about her appearance in the film. “She was furious afterwards,” Godard recalled, “because she thought I had made her look ugly, that I had done her a considerable wrong by having made this film; that was the beginning of our breakup.” A film that should have brought them closer together drove them further apart. Profoundly wounded himself by his wife’s infidelity, Godard derived much of the opening scene’s dialogue from their own relationship. She warns him, “If we get back together, I’ll betray you again,” and blames him for preventing her from fulfilling her ambitions as an actress. In the film’s eleventh sequence, Nana’s young lover reads to her from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “ The Oval Portrait”. It is not the actor’s voice on screen we hear but Godard himself who recites the passages. The story concerns a painter who grows so obsessed with a painting depicting his wife that he pays no attention to the real woman. When he is finished he looks at the work and exclaims, “This is indeed life itself!” Then turns to see his bride, and discovers that she has died and her spirit has transferred into the lifelike painting. The inference is clear; Godard saw it as fate th at he would lose the woman he loved as the price of their artistic collaboration.
Pierrot Le Fou (Pierrot The Madman)
A young man and woman, both escaping different pasts, run away together to the French Riviera, leaving a trail of crime and death in their wake. Date: 1965
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo Anna Karina Graziella Galvani Dirk Sanders Jimmy Karoubi Roger Dutoit Hans Meyer Samuel Fuller Princesse Aïcha Abadie
Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is unhappily married and has been recently fired from his job at a TV broadcasting company. After attending a mindless party full of shallow discussions in Paris, he feels a need to escape and decides to run away with an ex-girlfriend, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), leaving his wife and children and bourgeois lifestyle. Following Marianne into her apartment and finding a corpse, Ferdinand soon discovers that Marianne is being chased by OAS gangsters, two of whom they barely escape. Marianne and “Pierrot”—the unwelcome nickname meaning “sad clown,” which Marianne gives to Ferdinand during their time together— go on a traveling crime spree from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea in the dead man’s car. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run. Settling down in the French Riviera after having burnt the dead man’s car and sunk a secondcar into the Mediterranean Sea, their relationship becomes strained. Griffon ends up reading books, philosophizing and writing in his diary. Marianne becomes bored of the Robert Louis Stevenson-ness of their living situation and insists they return to town, where in a night club they meet one of their pursuers. The gangsters waterboard Pierrot and depart. In the confusion, Marianne and Ferdinand are separated, with her traveling in search of Pierrot and him settling in Toulon. After their eventual reunion, Renoir uses Griffon to get a suitcase full of money before running away with her real boyfriend, Fred (Dirk Sanders), to whom she had previously referred to as her brother. Pierrot shoots Marianne and her boyfriend, and then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head. Regretting his decision at the last second, he tries to extinguish the fuse, but fails and is blown up.
By the mid-1960s, Jean-Luc Godard was at a crossroads. In a mere five years he had made nine feature films, which, through their audacious brilliance, had made him the most talked about director in the world. By and large, these earlier films had relied on pre-existing frameworks or genres as a basis out of which their creator’s extraordinary knack for spontaneous invention could flourish. But by the time he started shooting Pierrot le fou, the film noir conventions underlying its source novel, Lionel White’s Obsession, on longer interested him. Instead, the rapidly escalating war in Vietnam, the break up of his marriage to Anna Karina, and his own self-doubt concerning the value of what he had achieved, spurred Godard on to new heights of creative originality. He said that, in making Pierrot
le fou, he felt as if he were making his ‘first film’; tearing up the old road map and setting out for unknown territory. Despite this declaration of a new beginning, however, Pierrot is, in many ways, a culmination of everything that had gone before. Indeed the publicity campaign advertised the film as: ‘A little soldier who discovers with contempt that one must live one’s life, that a woman is a woman and that in a new world one must live as an outsider in order to find oneself breathless.’ Once again there is a love affair that leads to disillusionment and death, quotations from literature and other movies, musical interludes, self-referential jokiness, coloured filters and car crashes. Characteristically Godard filmed the genre elements of the story with a conspicuous lack of interest,
focusing instead on the creation of unforgettable images and arresting sequences. He described the creation of the film as ‘completely unconscious’ and the shoot as ‘a kind of happening, but one that was controlled and dominated.’ The freedom of this approach allowed Godard to turn a standard pulp thriller into a deeply personal and emotionally raw statement about the state of the world, the nature of art, and most importantly, the breakdown of his marriage. The film packs an accusatory punch and the target of the accusation is, incredibly, the star of the film. Godard had married Anna Karina in 1961. Theirs had been a passionate but fraught relationship. In between the highs of their cinematic collaborations, there had been frequent arguments, bitterness, recrimination, the loss of a child, and suicide attempts. By the time they came to work together on the set of Pierrot le fou, they had already separated following Karina’s affair with Maurice Ronet on the set of Le Voleur de Tibidado. In the core sequence of the film, set in the natural splendour of their south of France refuge, the contradictions in their relationship are played out. While Ferdinand is happy to remain there in isolation like Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal and contemplating the universe, Marianne soon becomes restless. In a famous scene, she wanders past him, complaining over and over again, ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do’ – Ferdinand’s idyllic dream is thus destroyed by Marianne’s demands, and, as it later turns out, her betrayal.
But cinema too is celebrated in the guise of American movie legend Samuel Fuller, who offers his definition of the artform: ‘A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, and death. In one word: emotions.’ Godard thereby acknowledges the work of a hero but his approach is different – more that of an essayist than a storyteller. He composes in depth, rejecting naturalistic drama in favour of disconnected imagery, voice-over recitation, direct to camera speeches and set-piece interludes. It is as if he is trying to break out of the constraints of cinema, with all its familiar genres, conventions and forms, and take it to another level. Incredibly, in this endeavour, he is largely successful – the film is a milestone in the history of cinema whose influence has been immeasurable.
“WE USED TO LIVE IN A CLOUD OF UNAWARENESS”
Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is A Woman)
A Young Stripper decides she wants to have a baby, and proceeds to try and convience her boyfriend that its a good idea. Date: 1961
Cast: Anna Karina - Angela Récamier Jean-Claude Brialy Jean-Paul Belmondo Henri Attal
The film centers on the relationship of exotic dancer Angéla (Karina) and her lover Émile (Brialy). Angéla wants to have a child, but Émile isn’t ready. Émile’s best friend Alfred (Belmondo) also says he loves Angéla, and keeps up a gentle pursuit. Angéla and Émile have their arguments about the matter; at one point, as they have decided not to speak with each other, they pull books from the shelf and, pointing to the titles, continue their argument. Since Émile stubbornly refuses her request for a child, Angéla finally decides to accept Alfred’s plea and sleeps with him. Since she shows she will do what she needs to have a child, she and Émile finally make up so that he might have a chance to become the father. After a crime thriller and a spy film, Godard’s next film was a surprising change of mood. Une femme est une femme (A
Woman is a Woman) was a musical comedy but with a realistic setting and an unsentimental storyline about a stripper who is determined to have a baby and blackmails her boyfriend into committing to marriage and parenthood by having an affair with his friend. The film was budgeted at 2,177,00 francs (more than four times the budget of À bout de souffle), and would be Godard’s first Cinemascope and colour film. Taking the three staring roles were Anna Karina, JeanClaude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
The shoot was originally to have begun on
the scenerio to the film long before he met
November 21, 1960, in a real apartment in
Karina, originally intending it to be a light-
time at the Cahiers offices, or say he was
the rue St. Martin, but when the owners
hearted comedy, but the adjustments he made
going out for some cigarettes and return
discovered what changes were planned for
during filming made the story much more
three weeks later. Meanwhile, Anna was
their home, they refused permission, and the
autobiographical, especially in regard to his
often left alone in the apartment waiting for
shoot had to be relocated to a studio. Again
relationship with Karina.
Godard wrote the dialogue at the last minute, although this time he was unable to call out the lines to the actors from behind the camera because of the necessity of recording direct sound. This meant the actors had to learn their lines immediately, which when combined with the pressure of limited studio time made for a demanding shoot, not least for Godard himself. The stress was further heightened by the stormy relationship between he and Karina. “They tore each other apart,” Brialy later recalled, “argued, loved each other, hated each other, screamed at each other.” Godard had sketched out
The parallels between real life and the movie were further underlined when Karina became pregnant. A wedding in Begnins, Switzerland was hastily arranged taking place on March 3, 1961, followed three weeks later by another in Paris for the benefit of the couple’s Parisian friends and the press. The couple now had a regular social life, frequently visiting friends like Agnes Varda and her husband Jacques Demy to play cards on Sundays, and joining Karina’s friends on trips to nightclubs. Godard often seemed uneasy in these gatherings and rarely spoke.
Obsessed with work, he would spend his
the phone to ring. One night in the spring of 1961, Godard returned home to find her in great distress and covered in blood. She had miscarried, and her health was in danger. After a stay in hospital, she recuperated at home. However, Godard, unable to deal with the situation, left her in the care of friends for several weeks. On his return, he tried to make amends by renting a villa in the south of France, but while driving there he turned the car around saying he didn’t have time for it as he had too much work to do.
5
Festival & Location
WHat is this Festival about?
Together Apart was created to exhibit the delicate and often complicated relationships in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. This is juxtaposed with his extensive knowledge of history, art, film, and politics, and as such each film becomes a small vignette of Godard’s world view. Godard seems to focus on the contrast, contradictions, and conflict of human relationships, and ultimately how fragile they are. Additionally, he looks at individuality and how that too can conflict with our relationships with others. One could say that Godard’s films are about sex and politics, and honestly that is a large part of his films. This film festival was created to celebrate this complexity of human relationships and the search each individual goes on to discover themselves. The answers are as complex as the questions, and it is as much about the journey as it is about the outcome. As Jean-Luc Godard once said, “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
Godard’s Paris
France experienced a massive cinema revolution during the 1960s. The country’s post-war film industry was shaken up by a new generation of young Parisian filmmakers who called themselves the ‘French New Wave’. These filmmakers offered a newer, more original and intimate perspective of the French capital. As a result, Paris became an integral character in all of the films. The New Wave showed Paris from an alternative angle. The filmmaker walked the streets of the French capital with his camera on his shoulder, following the actors. The filmmakers’ determination to find an authentic perspective led to the creation of a documentary-style approach to the representation of places, people and everything in front of the camera lens. In Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’, Paris is depicted as if in a news report. The
famed director’s preference for realism was evidenced by a multitude of shots of busy Parisian streets, buildings, coffee shops and historical monuments. The soundtrack perfectly relays the outdoor cacophony of horns, engines, brakes, police sirens and other noises typical of a large city. We become submerged in a new world – a modern world in which the city is revealed to us. Paris was again immortalized by the camera in Rivette’s ‘Paris Belongs to Us’, which reveals diverse aspects and districts of the French capital. The Cinémathèque Française is a French film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris, the archive offers daily screenings of worldwide films.
For Godard, the Cinematheque is where he cut his teeth as a film critique and overall film lover. Rather than completing his studies
one of the largest collections in the world by the beginning of World War II, only to have it nearly wiped out by the German author-
at the Sorbonne, Godard became immersed in the film culture of Paris' Latin Quarter. He spent most of his time attending film screenings with his friends François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, who would also become important directors. Godard, Truffaut and their companions began publishing film criticism in such journals as La Gazette du Cinéma and Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s. As writers and directors, this group would become known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) of French filmmaking. Godard directed two short films, Operation Concrete and A Flirtatious Woman, in the mid-'50 History of Cinematheque FrancoisThe collection emerged from the efforts of Henri Langlois in the 1930s to collect and screen films. Langlois had acquired
ities in occupied France, who ordered the destruction of all films made prior to 1937. He and his friends smuggled huge numbers of documents and films out of occupied France to protect them until the end of the war. After the war, the French government provided a small screening room, staff and subsidy for the collection, which was first relocated to the Avenue de Messine. Significant French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, including Robert Bresson, René Clément, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jacques Becker frequented screenings at the Cinémathèque. Directors of the New Wave (la Nouvelle Vague) school — Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast — also
received much of their film education by attending the collection's screenings. After numerous incidents — including multiple relocations from one small screening room to another through the 1950s and a fire in its last premises — the Cinémathèque Française moved to 51, rue de Bercy in the 12th arrondissement of Paris and reopened its doors in a postmodern building designed by Frank Gehry, an American architect. A restaurant on the lower level is open to the public. The Bibliothèque du Film, which was created in 1992 to show the history of cinema, its production, impact and artistic strength, has recently merged with the Cinémathèque Française.
La Cinémathèque Française
Directions Subway - Bercy RER - Gare de Lyon Bus - 24, 64, 87
By car Take the A4, and the exit Pont de Bercy Vélib’ station is nearby. Parking is available at the Hôtel Mercure or at 8 boulevard de Bercy.
The Cinémathèque Française is a French film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris, the archive offers daily screenings of worldwide films. For Godard, the Cinematheque is where he cut his teeth as a film critique and overall film lover. Rather than completing his studies at the Sorbonne, Godard became immersed in the film culture of Paris' Latin Quarter. He spent most of his time attending film screenings with his friends François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, who would also become important directors. Godard, Truffaut and their companions began publishing film criticism in such journals as La Gazette du Cinéma and Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s. As writers and directors, this group would become known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) of French filmmaking. Godard directed two short films, Operation Concrete and A Flirtatious Woman, in the mid-'50s. History of Cinematheque Francois The collection emerged from the efforts of Henri Langlois in the 1930s to collect and screen films. Langlois had acquired one of the largest collections in the world by the beginning of World War II, only to have it nearly wiped out by the German authorities
51 rue de Bercy 75012 Paris +33 (0) 1 71 19 33 33 www.cinematheque.fr
in occupied France, who ordered the
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre
destruction of all films made prior to 1937. He and his friends smuggled huge numbers of documents and films out of occupied France to protect them until the end of the war.
Kast — also received much of their film education by attending the collection's screenings. After numerous incidents — including multiple relocations from one small screening room to another through the 1950s and a fire in its last premises — the Cinémathèque Française moved to 51, rue de Bercy in the 12th arrondissement of Paris and reopened its doors in a postmodern building designed by Frank Gehry, an American architect. A restaurant on the lower level is open to the public.
After the war, the French government provided a small screening room, staff and subsidy for the collection, which was first relocated to the Avenue de Messine. Significant French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, including Robert Bresson, René Clément, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jacques Becker frequented screenings at the Cinémathèque. Directors of the New Wave (la Nouvelle Vague) school — Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim,
–Patricia, Breathless
TOGETHER, APART A FILM FESTIVAL OF THE FILMS OF JEAN LUC GODARD