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I haven't been part of the distribution system for a long time
and therefore I am not where you think I still am.
I have lunch at Cordelia's and we share silence.
I don't have my heart in my mouth anymore.
"And even if nothing were as we had hoped,
it wouldn't change our expectations."
Places, everyone!
- We're going to shoot the Nausicaa! - Get on the Nausicaa, everyone!
Everyone!
Is the camera rolling?
- Are they going to undress? - Of course.
Cinema is wonderful.
We see women, they wear dresses, they make movies, we see their asses!
Godard is undoubtedly the most famous of filmmakers.
His name is not only associated with his films,
it's blended with cinema.
Do you see my feet in the mirror?
Yes.
- Do you find them pretty? - Very much so.
And my ankles, do you like them?
Yes.
Do you like my knees too?
Quiet, we're rolling! Quiet!
Odyssey, 701, third!
Action!
With more than 140 films,
to this day he has pursued an absolute quest for cinema,
an uncompromising quest
made up of shifts, ruptures, utopia and loneliness.
He has taken every possible path. He has been everything and its opposite.
Whether you worship him or hate him,
Godard is a legend and we almost forgot the man.
And yet, behind the legend, there can only be a man.
GODARD CINEMA
I'll introduce myself first. I'm Macha Méril.
Hello.
CHAPTER 1
That's very Godardian.
He liked that but we weren't looking into the camera.
We were looking above, like when you're at the cinema.
He said: "You have to look like that".
You know, there's one thing you can't choose, it's your date of birth.
I was 20 at the time of the French New Wave.
Are you going with me to Rome?
It was an absolutely essential moment that changed society and the world.
- Why don't you ever wear a bra? - Listen, don't talk like that!
Well... I apologize.
You have to go back to that time when everything was new,
the new cuisine, the new architecture, the new novel.
All of a sudden, in the cinema, we were doing things
as contemporary as what painters, sculptors and architects were doing.
Cinema, which comes from the theatre, from the novel, a little traditional,
all of a sudden became an art at the level of others.
That's really Jean-Luc, that's really Godard.
He is the New Wave after all.
Godard is the heartbeat of the 60s.
It is a catalyst for the spirit of the times.
If you want to know this first half of the 60s, you have to go through Godard.
Even if you're a sociologist, even if you're not a film buff.
If you want to know a little about what was done,
what was the subject of that time,
the depth, we could say, of that time,
you have to watch Godard's films.
The Jean-Vigo 1960 prize for feature films
has just been awarded to Mr. Jean-Luc Godard
for "Breathless".
Do you think movie awards matter?
Yes, because they attract, perhaps, they draw attention to cinema
to the detriment of other arts that today I find less important,
or arts that are "out of breath", whereas cinema is not.
If you don't like the sea,
if you don't like the mountains,
if you don't like the city...
fuck you!
RATED R
I have seen "Breathless"
and I find that much effort is being made to soil things and people unnecessarily.
He usually tries to shock middle class people, as usual.
It was disgusting!
I think it's really the cinema that has shown the truth. Life as it is.
What is a little terrible is that I know young people
and among them, I find some among the characters in this film.
It's a film that was made as a reaction against everything that you didn't do,
almost pathologically or systematically.
You don't do a close-up with a wide-angle lens. Well, we'll do it.
You don't do a tracking shot by hand. Alright, we'll do it.
And it corresponded to a desire to do what...
To show that everything was allowed.
With "Breathless",
Godard immediately became the emblem of the New Wave
and totally revolutionized cinema.
Rare are the first films to have had such an impact
and to have marked the history of the seventh art to such an extent.
It is a break in the history of cinema, but it is very particular,
because it is not done on a monumental mode
or on a mode of aesthetic affirmation.
There is something much more in contraband,
much more risky.
- What's "faire la tête"? - Doing like this.
There is an art of imperfection, of casualness,
which is very striking in him.
I find this very, very good.
- He wrote his dialogues every morning? - Yes, every morning.
When I signed for the film, I was given only three small pages,
where that just said that he leaves Marseille,
steals a car
and wants to sleep with the girl again but she doesn't want to.
And in the end, he dies or he leaves. And eventually we chose for death.
Cinema can do anything.
There are no rules yet, you have to find them.
This is what I claim.
There are obviously those famous jump-cuts,
those shot cuts that he made because the film was too long
and that he had to shorten.
I'm in love with a girl with a very nice neck,
very nice breasts...
All of this is done so that the spectator says to himself:
"Ah yes, I'm at the cinema! I don't forget that I'm at the cinema.
I don't forget that it's a movie,
that these are characters and that's not reality."
What's "dégueulasse"?
He will suddenly become a kind of cinematographic poet,
since it is a question of highlighting the cinematographic dimension of the scene
rather than dwelling on a plot.
Yes, the subject of Godard's cinema is cinema.
It is a permanent search for what is cinema?
What interests him is what cinema can,
what only cinema can.
And that's what also made his genius, his permanent invention, in the 1960s.
He always wanted to be apart.
He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought.
Do you feel that in his youth,
there were things that designated your son to do the kind of films he did?
No, his inheritance on both sides, of his father and grandfather,
is a fairly intellectual and at the same time very literary legacy.
It was in the fashionable neighbourhoods of Paris that Godard was born in 1930.
He grew up between France and Switzerland.
His father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank.
When I wrote "Godard par Godard",
I asked him for a photo of his childhood and he told me he didn't have any.
So I didn't insist, he didn't have any.
And I wrote in Les Cahiers du Cinéma
an article entitled "Has Godard ever been a child?"
And I explained that it was impossible to find a photo of Godard as a child.
Godard said very little about his childhood.
But this sentence is revealing:
"I remember being told that I would be a lawyer.
I was very argumentative.
In French-speaking Switzerland, they say:
'What a naughty boy, he talks back all the time.'"
My father is very unhappy because there was a rupture.
Because he left, because he wanted to make films
and that in the family, it was considered...
perhaps not quite in the family line,
where you study, you become this or that.
But he was considered as a so-called artist and...
He left for good. That is to say that he no longer received any money.
It was the call of cinema.
It was a sufficient driving force to make him leave.
Godard refused his inheritance
and the breakup with his family is severe.
In 1954, his mother tragically died in an accident.
Godard is 24. His family didn't want him to attend the funeral.
Well, when I was at the Sorbonne in propaedeutic, the first year,
little by little I became interested in cinema.
I discovered film clubs and the Cinémathèque.
I met at the Latin Quarter film club,
guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol...
Truffaut, he looks like he's sixteen and Godard has all his hair.
It was at the beginning of the 1950s.
On the seats of the Cinémathèque,
thanks to its founder, the charismatic Henri Langlois,
Godard and his fellow movie fans
established the unusual idea that cinema was an art in its own right.
What has always struck me is that the cultured and intelligent class
does not yet accept cinema as an art.
We still see newspapers writing articles
which, in fact, are asking if cinema is really an art.
There was also in him some sort of anger
that was expressed by something rather peculiar that we have to speak about.
It's the fact that he stole.
He was kleptomaniac.
He stole when he was a young man, he stole from his friends.
On these images that were found very recently,
Godard was 20 years old.
In addition to playing a role in it, he partly financed Jacques Rivette's film,
thanks to the money he stole from one of his uncles.
And so there were legends.
Well, he validated them.
He ran off with the takings of the Cahiers du Cinéma
or he sold his grandfather's books.
Well, little things like that to get by.
It was by becoming a critic at Les Cahiers du Cinéma
that the young man prepared his revolution.
When writing in the magazine,
young critics already feel like filmmakers.
They have an idea in mind that they will impose on the whole world.
Through his direction,
the author of the film is an artist who expresses himself personally.
During the 1950s,
they criticized the classic post-war cinema
and wanted to destroy all "false legends", as François Truffaut wrote.
No creation without destruction.
At some point it was also a political posture
and it joined an essential idea of Godard's aesthetics.
Godard said:
"We don't have the right to start from harmony.
We must start from chaos
and we must clear harmony from chaos."
"Through my education and training,
I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,".
Godard writes.
This spirit of contradiction is constantly at work in him
and particularly in the choice of his second film.
"The new wave is criticized for only showing people in bed,
so I'm going to show people who are in politics
and don't have time to go to bed."
I feel I love cinema less than I did a year ago,
just because I made a movie and it was popular.
So I wish that my second will be disliked a lot
and that it will make me want to do cinema again.
- Now, people trust me completely... - Does it bother you?
So I hope to disappoint them, so they won't trust me anymore.
I'd rather work with people I have to fight against.
Filmed in Geneva in 1960,
"The Little Soldier" tackles a real taboo
the Algerian war.
Godard is provocative.
By directly staging scenes of torture, the film could not be more contemporary.
It's above all a film against "Breathless".
Deep down he may already feel a form of celebrity coming,
and he breaks that right away with a film that is going to be banned
and which will not be viewable for several years.
The real subject of "The Little Soldier"
is the barging in of Anna Karina in Godard's filmmaking.
When he was making Breathless, he had seen me in an advertising.
He had asked me to come to the office
to do a little something in "Breathless".
What impression did he make on you?
He was a weird, shy man, with those dark shades.
He scared me a little.
It's not like the others.
What Godard was looking for at that moment was someone who was a virgin,
not in the strictly sexual sense but in the cinematic sense.
He wanted his Lilian Gish, his Ingrid Bergman.
He wanted his muse.
- Where do you want me to stand? - Anywhere. I don't care.
Do what you want, I'll take pictures.
Here, I'm going to ask you questions and you will answer me.
- You look scared. Why? - I'm scared.
I think it's like the Police were questioning me.
During the screen test, he looked at me, he circled around me.
Photography is the truth
and cinema is the truth 24 times per second.
He didn't say a word. I didn't like that at all.
He examined me from top to bottom.
Right now, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about me?
Yes.
What do you think of me?
Why don't you answer me?
You really look scared.
One evening, after dinner, he handed me a card.
He had written: "I love you.
I'll be waiting for you at midnight at the Café de Paris in Geneva."
And at midnight, I was there with my suitcase.
I liked him.
What did you provide him? Stability?
He's not as shy now as he used to be.
He used to slam doors. He never said hello.
- You taught him all that? - I don't know but I gave him confidence.
The wedding took place in 1961.
He will film Anna in seven films.
In the press, Anna Karina became.
"The bride of the New Wave".
It happens to me very often.
I know what I want to say.
I think before I say it to check if that's what should be said.
At the moment of saying it, I'm no longer able to say it.
A great passion, surely that means something to you.
It would be a shame if it didn't.
Do you know he can laugh out loud like no one else?
He likes to do things right away.
He never says: "Tomorrow, I'm going to Rome."
He says: "In five minutes, I'll be on a plane, I'm going to London".
Ok, we'll do one more. That's it.
Very good, the more we have, the better it is for me.
Rolling!
"Breathless", anarchy.
"The Little Soldier", confusion.
"A Woman Is a Woman", the musical.
"My Life to Live", emotion.
"The Carabineers", war.
"Contempt", cinema.
"Band of Outsiders", tenderness.
He made an incredible number of films in a very short time.
He shoots nonstop.
It's a series of movies.
There's no time when you say: "He's thinking, now he's..."
I don't know. It seems like he's always on the move.
I don't even see in the history of cinema
who could compare to him from this point of view.
Speed is very important. The tempo, we could say the rhythm, is essential.
It's the most important thing about him.
Why do you make so many films?
Why don't you take a break?
Because I think I'd stop if I...
Like the soldiers in the Russian War who kept marching, and marching.
And they knew that if they laid down, they wouldn't get back up.
Godard. Second.
The sound was bad the first time, it's the television.
If none of his films achieved the same success as "Breathless",
very quickly his unique personality seduced the cameras.
How are your characters different,
how do they stand out from the others?
I would rather say that they are normal people,
and it's the people who can tell the difference.
I like to stand apart and my characters do too.
All his life, he made films
and he made the legend
of his work and his films, until now.
Sometimes, I hear what he says
and it's clear that he has always loved creating his own legend.
Where he creates a role like that, totally unique.
Rolling! Pierrot, 18/22, first!
On "Pierrot le Fou", for example, in all the interviews, he said:
"I left, I had nothing.
I had my two actors, we didn't know where we were going."
This is absolutely false. This was a fully prepared film.
It means that he himself played the improvising genius.
There was the private Jean Luc, who was a very funny man,
told lots of jokes and did a lot of English humour.
And then the public Jean-Luc with his little hat, dark glasses
and who said sentences.
What is your greatest ambition in life?
Becoming immortal and then die.
And he always unsettled the person
he talked to with a weird phrase, which he shifted
and blasted the interview.
I'm a painter who does literature, if you like,
or I do literature, but with paint.
He had a sort of a disconcerting nature at first, but he amplified that.
All these "enigmatic phrases",
Godard also placed them in his films
by whispering in the ear of his actors.
First of all, we didn't have a script, we didn't have a screenplay.
I had an earpiece covered by my hair.
All the actors had an earpiece,
and he was directing us from behind the camera.
He said: "At that moment,
you say to him these famous philosophical-political phrases etc."
Annie. I am very careful crossing the streets.
I am very careful crossing the streets.
I think of the accident before it might happen.
Except my life ends here.
Unemployment.
Illness.
Old age.
Death, never.
It's terrifying because we're totally depending on the earpiece.
And we have texts in the earpiece that are very, very complicated.
No one today is able to know what tomorrow's city will be like.
Part of the semantic wealth we had in the past will be lost,
for sure.
So, we were always listening,
with a totally dumbfounded head, we all had the same expression.
And there, we were kind of robots directed by an earpiece.
It's not an autobiography,
it's a kind of an unveiling of his being.
He reveals himself, he shows who he is, and he reveals all of his states of mind.
I dreamed that I was walking alone, on the edge of a precipice,
on a path where there was only room for one person.
I remember that there is a line that I ask my mother
in "Two or Three Things I Know About Her".
My mother was Marina Vlady. And I said to her...
Mom, what is language?
Language is the house where man lives.
She didn't know, and neither did I, that she was quoting Heidegger.
So it was always him...
It was his words, it was his personality that we all expressed.
What did they say in the... I can't remember.
I was talking about the sailor and the little girl, right?
Off the set, quotes from philosophers are of no help to communicate with others.
Jean-Luc had invited me to dinner once
in a bistro that looked a little like this one.
That's the only time he invited me to dinner.
I think it was Coutard who said to him: "You have to invite her to dinner once."
So we had dinner,
we ordered an egg mayonnaise.
We remained quite silent face to face. We had nothing to say to each other.
That's because he is elsewhere.
He's been somewhere else for a while now.
But maybe he was somewhere else all the time,
and not quite among us.
I think he has great friends, people who love him, women who loved him.
But he is pure spirit.
He's a man who is not in the flesh.
Why do you look sad?
Because you speak to me with words while I look at you with feelings.
I can't have a conversation with you.
You never have ideas, always feelings.
As soon as we were happy, he tried to harm us.
One would have thought he was irritated by happiness.
I had met Anna Karina at a time when she had not said much about Godard,
about their relationship. A little bit, but not much.
She didn't hide that there had been
very complicated moments in their private lives,
like suicide attempts, that sort of thing.
The fact that she had had a miscarriage.
She didn't say it all,
but anyway, she said enough for us to understand that it hadn't been easy
and that she had also made him suffer, that she had also suffered, that's all...
The most disturbing were his silences and his absences.
He could keep quiet for several days.
There is nothing to explain. I don't love you anymore.
Why? You still loved me yesterday.
Yes, very much.
Now it's over. I don't love you anymore.
Regarding Jean-Luc,
I think it was a very important time for me.
For Jean-Luc, I don't think it's over,
because for those who liked the films he made with me,
it's something that remains.
What is most important for me
is to understand what's happening to me.
It was when he had just separated from Anna. He was very unhappy, I think.
Or he was acting as being very unhappy.
And artists, these men, at that level, they invent their feelings, their...
So, he wrote her letters every day.
There was a friend named Patricia Finaly, who took the letters...
to Anna, and back.
And me, I was a kind of a copy of Anna.
- Cinema is great! - We have fun with love scenes.
The hands should be over there.
This film is a special film because I'm in all the shots.
If not me, there's a piece of me, a knee or an eye.
Like that, you can with a finger, stroke his finger.
His wedding ring.
Like that, like that, yes, that's it.
- No, just a finger. - A finger.
That's right.
Alright, come on, let's do it like this. Announce it, good God!
A Married Woman, 7/15th, take one!
Godard doesn't look at women like other filmmakers,
he always maintains a certain distance.
It's a Calvinist film, it's absolutely and tremendously cold,
but that's what's troubling.
He treated me like an ornithological plate.
The lab results are positive.
You are about three months pregnant.
In this film, we talk about birth-control pill when the pill didn't yet exist.
You could find it in Switzerland and Belgium and cost a fortune.
The scene with the gynaecologist, the poor thing was a real gynaecologist.
I bombarded him with impossible questions.
"Sir, I have a lover, a husband. I'm pregnant. Who is the father?"
So, the guy...
And so these were questions that all women asked themselves.
There is the question about sexual freedom, it was starting.
We were very careful.
This question, he immediately understood that it was crucial in the lives of women
and that if we talk about emancipation, we are only talking about that,
owning our own body.
Is physical pleasure wrong?
Physical pleasure is not wrong,
since it must normally lead to this conception which is sought.
He was rather misogynistic, if you ask me about his relationship with women,
I think he didn't like women very much.
He worshipped them, which is worse because that means he didn't like them.
But that, he understood. He knew that women were going to change.
He had offered me "The Lily Of The Valley".
So when I went on vacation before the shooting,
I told him of an article about women who prostitute themselves in big cities.
I said to him: "Did you read the article in L'Obs?"
The newspaper "L'Observateur".
He said no and we talked about it on the way to the airport.
We saw each other all the time to prepare "The Lily Of The Valley".
When I came back from vacation,
he said to me, "We won't shoot "Le Lys dans la vallée"
but "Two or Three Things I Know About Her"."
And that's how it happened.
She's a girl and we see her in the evening at home, taking care of her children.
And the next day, she leaves for Paris. She does a bit of prostitution.
- Don't look at me undressing. - Why not?
- I don't want you to. - In two minutes you'll be totally naked.
It's not the same.
We did a screenplay based on a fact
that was happening when we were shooting.
It's happening today.
Godard sets his film in a rapidly changing Parisian suburb.
Once again, he captured the spirit of the times
by pointing to what will soon be called
"the consumer society".
"Two or Three Things I Know About Her" is really communist.
In it there is a communist commitment. We shot at La Courneuve.
There was really the desire to make a connection with social struggles,
with the anger that was rising too in "Two or Three Things I Know About Her".
And then, he becomes much more critical.
There are still a lot of things around the Vietnam War in the film.
It's not the same Godard.
Everything he experiences is also projected into art.
The Vietnam War.
Starting with "Pierrot le Fou",
Godard cannot help expressing in every film
his condemnation of American imperialism.
We campaigned together against the Vietnam War.
One day, we were in a restaurant
and a big American guy came in with his cameras and all.
He was over 6ft tall.
And little Jean-Luc threw himself at him saying: "Peace in Vietnam."
And he was really...
He was a revolutionary.
We were doing demonstrations and all that, we were right in it.
He was a precious friend to me and a sort of brotherhood for me, really.
For me.
For him, apparently, it was different but I didn't understand that until later.
And after we had this very Godardian scene
when he asked me if I would marry him and I said no.
I was going to Romania to meet a lover.
He said: "Don't answer now. Answer when you're back."
And the whole time, I thought: "What happened?"
And that was it.
From the moment I said no, he stopped talking to me.
In just a few years, Godard managed to embody
the figure of the "author" more than any other.
François Truffaut wondered:
"Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,
that is to say just a little less than the Beatles?"
Godard will soon do everything to leave this unprecedented place for a filmmaker.
One day, I was eight years old
and Jean-Luc arrived home with a crate of the Little Red Book
since he had gone to pick it up at the Chinese Embassy in Paris
which had just opened thanks to General de Gaulle.
And Jean-Luc, on the day of the opening, went to get some Little Red Books.
He put them down, then he took one out, gave it to me and said:
"Here, Christophe, you'll explain it to your parents."
CHAPTER 2
This is Radio Pekin.
One day in June 1966,
I wrote a short letter to Jean-Luc Godard addressed to Cahiers du Cinéma.
I told him that I really liked his last film,
"Masculin Féminin".
I told him that I loved the man who was behind it, that I loved him.
Yes...
At the beginning of the film, she's little girl,
and by the end of it she is still a little girl.
He was proud to have me at his side.
Proud to love, and to be loved by a young student
and on top of that an actress for Robert Bresson.
On the landing, there was an envelope containing a book,
"Jean-Luc persecuted" by the Swiss writer Ramuz.
As usual, he used books as a medium for messages.
He changed the title.
"Thanks to Anne, Jean-Luc is no longer persecuted".
France's most prolific filmmaker
Jean-Luc Godard has just completed a film called "La Chinoise",
the story of a French student who reads Mao Tze-tung.
For a long time I had the idea to make a film
about students,
who are the only people with whom I feel I have a little affinity.
I feel like an old student, if you will.
I had wanted for a long time to make a film
about the politicisation or de-politicisation of students
and to make a film about what I called
"the Robinsons of Marxism-Leninism", so young people who, from the start,
are influenced by the Red Book and quotations from Mao Tze-tung.
Revolution is an uprising, an act of violence
by which one class overthrows another.
I am in philosophy class.
Jean-Luc looked at me tenderly.
"I ask you to tell me everything you will see and hear at Nanterre."
Apart from a few leaflets I brought back without having read them,
the few discussions I tried to take part in
were about Michel Foucault, Althusser and Lacan,
considered the only great intellectuals of the time.
At the time when he started "La Chinoise",
it was after discovered and deciding to make a film
which documented the appearance of a political current,
the Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth,
a new pro-Chinese or Maoist group
very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.
So it's a way of using both fiction and a documentary
to find out how to situate oneself in the present.
From a strategic point of view, all enemies must be despised
and from a tactical point of view, fully take them into account.
His political coming out is "La Chinoise",
it's "La Chinoise" for us.
There is something inexplicable.
You are against capitalism, ok.
You are against the authoritarian regime...
I have decided...
Of De Gaulle's France
and you take as an alternative
the Cultural Revolution.
It's organised massacres.
So how can we explain that Jean-Luc,
of an incredible sensitivity about the phenomena of society,
was engulfed in this dogmatism?
We were in the red white blue,
a sentence of Mao lined up in black letters on the back wall.
"You have to confront vague ideas with clear images."
That goes for you, too, Coutard.
His political radicalisation,
his increasingly affirmed political commitment
encouraged him to seek in the history of the arts, not only of cinema,
in the history of political arts
what thoughts, what artistic experiences
can nourish him in order to reinvent
a political, revolutionary, communist, Maoist cinema.
I have the impression that I am only beginning to tell stories.
It's traditional cinema
that's not telling anymore.
Next to "Doctor Zhivago", I think I tell stories.
He has a certain radicalism
that allows him to perceive things.
All of a sudden with Maoism, with this structure of explanation,
he has an explanation for the world.
Last day of filming for Jean-Luc Godard for his film "La Chinoise".
- Shall we use the clapperboard? - We'll come and call it a wrap.
He is going to hasten a sequence
in which Jean-Pierre Léaud distributes the Little Red Books to motorists.
It's this desire, at an intellectual's moment,
to have, in German we would say a "Heimat",
a homeland.
That's my hope.
I, Romain Goupil, registered with the Revolutionary Communist Youth,
think that Godard must be condemned for his film "La Chinoise".
He betrayed Marxism-Leninism.
Secondly, he does not have the excuse of fiction.
And third, he made activists look like neurotic cases.
I'm doing this interview, I say bad things,
really head on, I'm very young, I am sixteen.
I hated that movie, but anyway, I still hate "La Chinoise".
Except that I now find...
a kind of madness in that film.
"The Chinese at the embassy hated it.
They told me that I knew nothing about their country,
their revolution or the Little Red Book.
They told me that my film was the work of a reactionary moron
and that if they had the power, they would forbid me to call it La Chinoise,"
he said in a gloomy voice.
I held back my desire to laugh
because I understood that his pain was sincere.
"I'm so disappointed" he said.
Today the aesthetics of cinema
has become an aesthetic that must be called capitalist and American
since 90% of the films made in the world
are American films.
So, as a...
Filmmaker in the West, who makes films, our problem is totally contradictory.
We want to make revolutionary films
but we are not in a revolutionary situation,
even outside of cinema.
And besides, as a filmmaker,
I'm forced to work all day with people who hate me
and whom I despise.
And yet I'm forced to practice peaceful coexistence.
All day at the Lido,
I spend my time smiling at people who aren't even...
who aren't anything, who shouldn't even exist
or that I would send to prison.
He was a victim of his Jean-Luc Godard aura.
He suffered from it
and I believe it was very deep.
He suffers from being provocative,
from being a rupture.
But this rupture isolates him and he suffers from this isolation.
"Let's get married. Everything would be so much simpler", Jean-Luc said.
"If I propose to you, we'll be considered engaged, and we'll be left alone."
"Fine, but you have to ask for my hand for real."
"To whom?" "To my grandfather."
"To François Mauriac?"
Jean-Luc was cute, so cute.
He had a bouquet of flowers in his hand
that was the spitting image of Buster Keaton in "Seven Chances".
Jean-Luc was a light, funny, inventive and tender man,
with whom I never got bored and who continues to charm me.
My mother told us that our marriage was announced in Le Figaro.
We were dumbfounded.
As soon as we were in the street
we were surrounded by several photographers and journalists.
They bombarded us with questions.
Godard wrote:
"I always wanted both at the same time,
to make myself known and keep a low profile."
He felt less and less in his place.
The cinema, by its organisation and its production,
was no longer compatible with his revolutionary convictions.
His anger grows and it's on the screen that he will express it.
For me, Weekend is the film that says:
"Let's not forget our enemies, the middle class. They are appalling."
So it's a cry of rage against middle-class cinema.
Come here! Poor guy! You morons!
Mireille Darc was presumably hired for this reason,
since she embodied this Lautner, Audiard cinema that Godard hates.
It's a film that's mean, that's tough, that's...
We are also evil characters.
But it is very difficult to tell this story.
As with many of Godard's films, when you try to recount them,
you don't say much about the experience you have when you watch them.
It's about a middle-class couple
and they obviously both cheat on each other.
Each would like for the other to die over inheritance issues.
The actor is like cattle.
He tells them to go left or right, to open this door, to do this or that.
He is using us, which is very good because you are going to see a Godard film.
You are not going to see such-and-such in a film.
We think we know him at times,
but in the end, it's very difficult to talk about him
because I don't know, we know nothing.
We think we feel him at times and then, two minutes later, he's so different
that you feel you were wrong about your impressions.
One of the fun facts that was remembered a lot about "Weekend"
is that Godard did what was presented at the time,
as the longest tracking shot in the history of cinema.
I believe it was 300 yards long.
Godard had to rent all the tracking rails that were available
from equipment rental companies in France.
And so, no filmmaker in France could do a tracking shot
since he had rented all the rails.
And hastening, of course, to cut it in editing.
So, there was no need
to put 300 yards of rails,
if it was to cut this tracking shot in editing
but Godard is a great punk.
He is unruly, undisciplined,
he will never walk in single file.
Incidentally, there are very often some queues in his movies
and it's always the sign of oppression to take his place in the queue.
That is his critical sense of society.
He sees the consumer society, the so-called escape society.
His sui generis hatred... his hatred is always there.
My bag!
My Hermes bag!
"We are driven by an infernal logic that leads us straight to destruction."
Another sentence contradicting that, which I have always held onto:
"If we, cinema people, are still claiming the title of artist,
we must not forget that it implies the strict respect of this rule:
there is no true morality that does not involve a fierce resistance to tyranny."
As if he had once again entered into resonance with society,
Godard will very quickly have the opportunity
to put into practice this "fierce resistance to tyranny" apart from cinema.
FEBRUARY 1968
In Paris, there was a lot of unrest.
On February 9, the president of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois,
was replaced by government decision.
François Truffaut's telegram said in essence:
"Come home immediately, we need you".
INTEGRITY, FREEDOM OF SPEECH
NO COPS IN FILMS
Things went very quickly with Jean-Luc, Truffaut and Rivette.
I was part of the demonstration between Jean-Luc and François Truffaut,
impressed and dizzy by their determination.
I was hanging on a fence, a little above,
to observe.
Jean-Pierre Léaud read a statement.
He thought he was at the Palais Bourbon during the French Revolution.
He was delivering this and that...
The police charged for a moment, so I intervened.
The shock was violent.
The police responded with their clubs and the fight became general brawl.
The Gaullist government did not measure what it had done
but to attack Langlois was to attack a guiding light,
a spiritual father.
And it worked. It was a victorious mobilisation.
On May 6th,
strikes and demonstrations broke out in many universities in France.
This is the first time we have seen this. We are occupying the Sorbonne.
It's the final fight...
"How beautiful this youth is", Jean-Luc euphorically said.
He filmed the arrival of the demonstration with a Beaulieu 16mm camera.
Strangers recognised him and shouted at him:
"Godard, are you with us?"
Then began the races to escape the police
during which I found out how scared I was.
Jean-Luc wasn't afraid of anything.
The violence of the police was driving him mad
and the rudeness of his insults surprised many.
He looked like a boxer in an American film,
a samurai in a Japanese film.
The Cannes Film Festival had started on May 10th,
and the idea of interrupting it was beginning to spread.
It's a matter of showing, with a delay of a week and a half,
the solidarity of the film industry
to the student and workers movements that are taking place in France.
The only practical way to do that is to immediately stop...
I'm talking about solidarity with the students and the workers
and you're talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups.
You morons!
THE REVOLUTION
Cinema 6, scene one, take one.
Since his return from Cannes, something sad emerged from him.
Where had his enthusiasm of the first couple of weeks of May gone?
For me, what happened in May
really opened my eyes.
As a director, we were,
if we accept to be that, we were only a cultural product
or required as such by the State, tolerated by...
Tolerated by the imperialist ideology.
There are various forms of imperialism and that's one of them.
Cultural imperialism.
Second clapperboard, Cinema 6, scene three, take one.
So what is the solution?
The solution is to stop making films
for imperialism.
If you work for French TV stop making films for them
or just make movies that right now they can't broadcast.
Just keep shooting, that's what I'll do.
This is a major rupture for Godard.
He goes in search of a cinema that doesn't exist yet,
a cinema that will be made differently
and that will be at the service of social struggles.
The constant awareness for Godard
that the legacy of Langlois is "cinema is an art"
and it is therefore a different activity from politics.
And if you want to make political cinema,
you have to invent how to create a meeting point between the two.
It was in this state of mind that in June 1968,
Godard began filming what he considered to be his last "bourgeois film".
Under the impulse of Mick Jagger, the Stones sought, improvised.
The movie was called "One Plus One".
Jean-Luc found himself obliged to film with them. He was devastated.
"I didn't want to.
I had completely forgotten that damn contract I signed."
I played Eve Democracy,
a young woman harassed by a television crew
who wants to interview her at all costs.
When I asked him what it would be about,
he replied with this sentence that I had already heard him say:
"Democracy means slowly dying."
Jean-Luc, from a certain point on, did not believe in democracy.
All that is not going to work
and we are going more and more towards the abyss.
Jean-Luc wants to get nowhere.
He wants to describe his despair in front of a despairing world.
At the end of the movie, they executed Eve Democracy.
Jean-Luc himself came into the shot and sprayed me with haemoglobin.
They put me bleeding on the board of a cinema crane
which rose towards the sky.
Last image of the film.
The break with his past work had to be complete
and with no possible return.
He wrote: "Middle-class people created a world in its own image.
Comrades, let's destroy this image!"
Once I mentioned, we were together,
"Breathless" or "Pierrot le Fou"...
I thought I was going to lose him.
"Are you talking to me about this shit? I'd like all these films to disappear.
Why are there still the negatives? Why they didn't burn the negatives?"
He had a score to settle regarding a time
when he thought he made aesthetic concessions,
he said they were political concessions, but, that's nonsense.
He thought he made concessions in the story, in the screenplay.
He fought against himself.
At his request,
we went to meet Dany Cohn-Bendit at his home in Frankfurt.
They had planned to make a political western together,
but they talked so much, constantly interrupting each other
that almost nothing came of this first meeting.
Yes, that's absolutely true. It's a crazy and incomprehensible story.
I don't know how I had the idea of making a western with Godard.
It was an idea, it was a childhood fantasy.
He had found an Italian producer.
So we met in Rome where we collectively discussed
the film we were going to make.
Well, then, this is a general assembly. The camera is available to everyone.
Godard tried to make "political films politically",
and began by abolishing the very notion of author.
So he had to do with a painful and complicated contradiction
that is how to continue making films without giving up
on the requirement of cinema as art,
orienting it in favour of the current revolutionary movements
and without being the boss on the set.
Hold a general meeting because doing it was still the best way to talk about it.
Jean-Luc was a bit lost in this. He was listening.
For us, yes, it was a game and for him, it was serious.
This shooting will become a real chaos
of confrontation among the political currents.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit at the time, was an anarchist
and refused any professionalization of politics.
Gian Maria Volonté who was close to a somewhat heterodox current
of the Italian Communist Party.
And Godard, who brought all his young Maoist friends from Paris.
Cinematographically, nothing was created.
Hence the call for backup of Jean-Pierre Gorin.
It's the Little Red Book...
He is very ambitious, he wants to make movies.
He has direct militant experience that Godard does not have.
So it's a privileged dialogue because Gorin has a cockiness
that will never allow him to be told off by authority.
And that is what Godard is looking for.
Therefore, he is looking for people who have no problem
dismissing him in a certain way,
since that is what he wanted to do with himself
and with his own previous movies.
And the arrival of Gorin on the set of "East Wind",
will originate the utopia of founding a group, Dziga Vertov,
of no longer signing the film under the name of Godard,
but of having a common flag.
The idea being that Vertov must embody an additional degree
of political and aesthetic radicalism.
Jean-Luc Godard was an author,
he's still is and he tries to fight not to be an author and it's difficult.
So you have to stop filming me now, in close-up, just because I'm speaking
you also have to film the people who are listening,
because we're trying to work as a group
and working as a group is political work.
We stopped talking about cinema in general.
We know that a film is an ideological product
and that it is part of a struggle.
And we are on a certain side, the revolutionary faction,
it says absolutely everything about our future activity.
STRUGGLE
But Dziga Vertov... this time, he told me.
He sets up the editing table and said: "Romain!"
We voted to find out if the shot was going to be edited or not.
We voted by majority
and so if the majority agreed, I tossed the shot.
So it's the complete opposite of cinema, the opposite of Jean-Luc.
Jean-Luc is a poet.
Fortunately, each time he avoided the pitfalls of political films.
He passed by and made works of it.
But there was a distressing black period, but now who cares,
it serves as testimony, that's all.
We were doing a press conference
because all of us were out on parole.
The financing of these films of the Dziga Vertov Group
is only possible thanks to the notoriety of Godard,
that is to say by raising orders of television channels in Europe,
in the United States.
So he plays on the ambiguity that his author name
gives him the material means to live and make the group live
and produce films that must dissolve his author name
in the collective Dziga Vertov Group.
What... what are we in, there?
Well... we were... in a context of suppression.
He has to go...
to the end of the militant madness.
They make films... It's not even for 100 people.
It's for no one.
Some leaflets, "Cinétracts" of 1968 to the films of Gorin,
they got into a myth of militant cinema
that is like the militant newspapers that no one can read.
And obviously, each time, the sponsors see a Maoist political film coming
and more often than not, give up broadcasting it.
The films of the Dziga Vertov Group
will remain almost invisible for several decades.
It was when he was filming and creating that I liked Jean-Luc the most.
I whispered to him that I was in love with a filmmaker,
not an activist, coupled with a political commissar.
A large part of my problems with Jean-Luc date from the arrival of Gorin.
Gorin brought the worst to Jean-Luc,
dragging him towards a cinema which, profoundly, was not his.
He created a void around him.
I left for this
because Gorin ended up living with him instead of me.
Our final separation came after more than a year, almost two.
It was extremely painful for him and for me.
The unfortunate end of our story became commonplace and private.
I ceased to be a privileged witness of the time.
I won't write it.
Godard completely dissolved in the collective.
He chose to disappear.
What happens during the 1970s?
This is a question that comes up regularly.
Out of sight,
after the disintegration of revolutionary utopias,
he will find the way to a reinvention
by questioning everything, starting with himself.
What's wrong with television is that we're all alone.
And yet, we're still three on television,
the transmitter, the receiver and the TV set,
and we are still at -0.
We are before the birth of television.
CHAPTER 3
Seven years later, Godard will settle in Switzerland,
in the village of Rolle, close to where he grew up.
He is one of the very first to try to put video tools
at the service of cinema.
After collective hopes,
comes the time of technological autarky.
We always want to do that.
At times I want to do this or that, but not always that.
I do research, I've never hidden it.
I should be registered with the CNRS but they always refused my application.
I should be paid by Mr. Chevènement to make movies,
he should allocate a budget, I make a film and I'll refund him every year.
However, in cinema, research is prohibited.
It's funny because the viewer is entitled to the pursuit of pleasure,
but the research itself... I never denied it.
That's why I'd rather say I'm a scientist and we laugh about it.
Godard has always been fascinated by technique,
he has always liked to invent, to discover...
The technical discovery is something that, with his complicity with Raoul Coutard,
gave rather incredible moments of filmmaking.
And from the moment Godard will settle alone in Rolle in 1977,
he will build in his house a real studio
where he will be able to satisfy
his fantasy of making movies by himself.
It's a small thing,
but it's one of the most technologically advanced places
in the film industry.
It's really a cutting-edge tool that Godard has made for himself
and he will be able to bring together images, closer,
like some kind of wizard in his laboratory.
You see, that's it, it's just that simple...
It's simple because there are no more things, only machines.
Things, machine, see? Me, thing, well, it's my relationship with a machine.
And then man-woman, thing-machine.
"Numéro Deux" opens around this strange boss.
As he says: "I'm a boss and my workers are the machines
and I'm in the middle of these machines
and it's my way of working now."
It's really a moment when Godard allows himself for the first time in a long time
to say "I"
and this is what allows him to start again,
rid of everything that had prevented him from saying "I" for so long.
The "I" is anti-militant.
There is a guy who was called Jean-Luc, then everyone gave him another name.
People said "Godard".
However, it was written "Jean-Luc" and people read "Godard".
Who are the scammers?
The one who says "Jean-Luc"? Or those who read "Godard"?
To get there, as often, Godard burned all his boats.
On June 9th 1971, he was the victim of a serious motorcycle accident in Paris.
"It was my civil war, my prison.
Someone was in the Vietnam War. I was in hospital."
He almost died.
Multiple fractures of the pelvis,
his skin torn from the entire lower body.
He spent a week in a coma at the Laennec hospital
with multiple operations, pins in all directions.
Some pretty serious consequences.
And Godard was on the verge of letting go.
The accident of 1971 is the obvious, almost cruel, physical sign
of Godard's political failure.
And it's also, in a way, the beginning of a rebirth, a rebirth but as a couple.
And that, obviously, is something that allows Godard to accept a new life
and to bear in a certain way his loneliness as a creator.
It's the first time in his life that Godard really needs someone.
Godard met Anne-Marie Miéville just before his accident.
She took care of him throughout his recovery.
Like him, she is Franco-Swiss.
Like him, she is politicised.
She manages a bookstore in Paris that defends the Palestinian cause.
Do you have the impression at times that cinema is...
an art or an institution, all kinds of things at the same time,
something to respect when you're working or not?
Godard has always said that he was very impressed right away
by the intelligence and the rigor
of Anne-Marie Miéville.
Anne-Marie Miéville truly becomes Godard's interlocutor.
It's the only time that Godard manages not only with a woman,
but with someone to talk,
to introduce a dialogue like that over the long term.
I think it somewhat bothers you to talk about Godard?
- Not at all. - Not at all?
No, not at all. If we know how to leave it in his place, no, not at all.
I don't have to hide that in fact
I went to a kind of school.
I did both set photography and editing
as well as co-screenwriter and co-director.
They say that he is a very demanding director, very difficult on a film set.
Is that your opinion too?
Yes and no.
Once recovered in 1973, Godard fled, accompanied by Anne-Marie.
He left the capital to make himself scarce.
He headed for Grenoble
where he settled for three years in a housing project in the new town.
It is a real exile that Godard
imposes on himself, but it is an exile rather desired.
Both to flee and to be reborn.
Godard has really left everything behind.
He founded a new company in Grenoble, Sonimage, his first audio-visual lab.
In Grenoble, we were called Sonimage.
We will do otherwise with sounds and images.
We are going to make soup with sounds and images
but we are going to try to find other soup recipes.
A prisoner of war. Or a political exile.
A violent fire.
A story, a long story, Scheherazade.
I remember one day we had a shooting problem,
we had a directing problem.
And at one point, Jean-Luc said:
If it was Renoir, what would he do?
Renoir would put the camera there,
a 50 mm lens at eye level
and have people enter from the right side and exit on the left side.
If it was Hitchcock, what would he do?
If it was Lang, what would he do?"
And then he said:
"What would be the opposite of all that?"
It's not easy to find the opposite of all that.
But we went on a lot like that.
In fact, he always dreamed of almost unattainable things.
He asked for them as if it were a metaphysical horizon.
Maybe in a perfect world
things won't be called.
We will experience them.
And we will not be there to just say: "We will experience them".
The last person who made cinematic language evolve was Godard.
But on a mixing, editing table level.
Now with audiovisual, with the video recorder,
Godard is going to be the Griffith of cinema.
All morphogenesis comes from a conflict.
- What's morphogenesis? - Any formation of forms.
He kept abreast of all the stuff that came out in every company worldwide.
Camera, video companies... He subscribed to everything.
Sometimes he drove us nuts.
He was really terrible at soldering but he wanted to solder cables.
He did a lot of terrible stuff
but he wanted to do it all the time.
A whiting.
Well no, it's the capitalist system.
A light bulb.
No, a dream.
I was sixteen and a half, I was pregnant. I was expecting a child.
- What do you call old age? - Retirement. Old people's retirement.
If you make pictures of friends, why wouldn't that make you satisfied?
Yes, I happened to make a film about my friends.
We put in the usual fertilizer, which is quite a lot.
Well, we've harvested
about a quarter of the grass we're used to harvest.
The 1970s were marked by two major series
produced with Anne-Marie Miéville for television.
Godard sets out to meet his contemporaries,
whom he listens to and films at eye level.
He holds up a mirror to all those with whom he shares the present time.
It's clear that I exist, but it would be dark because it will be at night.
Even at night, it will be clear to you that you exist.
Yes.
Are there things, can you give me examples of obscure things in your life?
The night.
What moves me of Godard is a form of generosity
in relation to the weakest, often,
or to the victims of History.
Godard was never on the side of the powerful.
He has always been on the side of those who are somewhat the losers in History.
It was not easy to be close to him and Anne-Marie.
It's not easy at all.
Because it was necessary to provide them a contradiction, all the time.
And so, after a while,
it was a soccer game every day.
Does the fact that I make images instead of having children
prevent me from being a human being?
When you manage to get close to him,
you realise all the burdens he carries with him,
his badly healed wounds.
And then at the same time,
when I think of him,
I think back to his extraordinary childish smile.
Sometimes he has incredible smiles.
Or sometimes when you manage to make him laugh, which is not easy,
then all of a sudden, he laughs and it's a real laugh.
I loved his laughter.
Everything could have gone on like this,
but Godard never quite seems to be where he wants to be.
In 1977, he leaves Grenoble for the shores of Lake Geneva.
It's in Rolle, land of his childhood, that a new desire will arise in him.
CHAPTER 4
I called him not too long ago
to let him know I was thinking of him and to find out how he was doing.
And I was happy to hear him. He was adorable.
I told him that I was probably going to come to Lausanne
and that I would be glad to see him.
There was a long silence and then he said:
"No, no, I'd rather not, Nathalie."
I totally respected that.
This morning I learned to feed the animals.
There was a calf with a hole in its back and everything it ate came out from there.
For me, it's people.
What do you mean?
They have a hole in their mouth
and there are words coming out.
People often talk about the great director
and they often say things that are hard to swallow, a little harsh
but I...
But he was always incredibly kind to me
and I was always very happy when I worked with him.
I don't really know what "Every Man For Himself" means
but I like the title.
"This is the second time that I feel like I have my life ahead of me,
my second life in cinema or the third, rather.
The first was when I wasn't making movies, when I was going around it.
The second was from Breathless
up to the years 1968-1970.
And then there was the ebb or flow. I don't know how to call it.
And the third is now."
That's "Every Man For Himself".
"Every Man For Himself" Jean-Luc and life.
"Every Man For Himself"...
Like he said,
this is his second "first film".
He was very unsure of himself
when he said he wanted to do a fiction again, he wanted to work.
And he actually thought it wasn't going to happen.
It's because I don't have the strength to laze around that I make films.
For no other reason.
This is the truest of all that I can say about my business.
Undeniably, Dutronc is him, he plays Paul Godard.
He says: "I am a finished man but likely to start all over again".
At that time, he returned with the means of television, with the means of video,
with the means of the electronic image,
to ways of writing totally forgotten in cinema,
like slow motion, saccades, freeze frames
which suddenly gives an image
that is not cinematic,
but an image of, I don't know, something else.
It's probably paint.
Besides, I remember, there was the critic at the time, Pascal Bonitzer, who said:
"Every Man For Himself" is not the "pen camera",
it's the "brush camera".
Each sequence was a small film.
When you prepare a film, you strip the scenes
and then you organize the working plan according to all the constraints.
I quickly understood that it was not going to work like that at all,
that we had to take a sheet
and mark as much as possible what we were going to try to do during the week.
And very quickly, the team only had what was going to happen the next day,
if that.
As always with Godard, when there is a date for the first day of shooting,
and in general, we don't shoot the first day.
Then the second day we don't shoot, neither the third day.
This is what happened in any case for "Every Man For Himself".
But is it your program or mine? Will you answer me, damn it?
- Listen, Denise. - Is he going to answer?
- Is this fascist going to answer? - Take it easy.
The fight, the rehearsals...
And there is a scene...
It's the elephant scene.
Nathalie Baye, the actress, is cycling in a forest.
Her bicycle has a flat and an elephant comes out of the forest,
takes her with its trunk.
It takes Nathalie Baye and it leaves the shot.
There, we see, we will go and look with the mahout.
And then the mahout speaks to Nathalie to give her gestures.
Can you imagine Natalie Baye?
We shoot the scene. Rolling.
And he says: "Yeah, that's perfect. It won't be in the movie."
But it will. He must not work against the film.
At the Cannes screening for "Every Man For Himself"
I was with Jean-Luc.
And when we left the theatre, there were people who called him a genius.
But there were people who were horrible to him
and called him names.
And I will always remember, I took his hand like that.
I was angry
and very, very emotional.
I found it very, very hard.
The film was poorly received
and, against all odds, the movie is a success.
Basically, it's a theory film for the general public.
It's a lesson of avant-garde filmmakers
who joins the cinema of the general public,
which is actually rare in the history of cinema.
There he heavily insists about the fact that he now works as a painter.
And the cinema does not recover from the passage of Jean-Luc Godard
as the painting does not recover from the passage of Picasso.
In fact, Godard's problem, like all great artists,
is to make cinema, his art, do something for which it is not made.
Films are made. The images are made there.
They are made when you can't see them.
The invisible, it's this, it's what we don't see.
The incredible, it's this.
The incredible is what we do not see.
And cinema shows the incredible.
A new period is beginning for Godard.
He continues his visual and narrative research,
but reintegrates the classical production system.
It was in the early 80s that he shot some of his major works
such as "Passion", with Hanna Schygulla.
You cannot fail to remember
everything you experienced with Godard
since he is so unique.
And that is really the real situation, that I listen to this music?
He told me: "There will be a love scene
but I don't want it to be a love scene.
I would like Jerzy to take your head
and shake your head.
It can also sometimes be brutal.
Or else very caressing."
I said to myself, we say that love
makes you "lose your head",
maybe that's it.
It may be a very poetic transcription.
He assumes that it's better not to eat your fill
and not to understand everything,
especially that.
Yes, he does.
Yes, because as soon as you think you've understood, a window closes.
I understand...
I still don't understand you very well.
Maybe it's not so useful to understand...
It's enough to stand.
A worker is fired by her boss.
She falls in love with a foreigner who is shooting a film in the region.
But the boss' wife
also falls in love with the foreigner
and he can't find a story for his film,
when there are so many around him.
He always used to complain.
No, no, nobody was...
Nobody was ever really with his film.
While everyone was really with his film.
So there were like childish wounds that you could feel...
in him, but that you couldn't really...
Anyway, I would never have talked to him about that.
But he loves pain too, I think.
And he likes to feel it, I think. And he likes to give it too.
We are in an operation
where, we make the film, they are paid, we are together,
we are a family, we eat together.
The film is over, no one asks about me anymore.
Does anyone want to know how I'm doing anymore?
Maybe vaguely about the film a week later, if the editing goes well.
But no one cares.
This is how he functions, hyper bad faith.
And so, he is in a kind of isolation that he creates himself,
which means that the only relationships he has is when he's filming.
I know what I need. It's because I'm all alone
and I don't see anyone.
And that I only see the cinema to meet someone quickly.
If I'm in a waiting room at the station and I'm all alone,
if a girl and a boy come in like that and I want to talk to them.
The only way, a direct way, right now,
is hiring them for a film.
It's true. This way I can talk to them. Otherwise, I can't.
I can't say: "Who is your mother? Who do you love? Who is your boss?"
And besides, there is total silence in the waiting rooms.
Hello, hello? I can't hear you.
Yes! Now I can hear you again.
It's interesting because the first film I made was with Godard.
I was 14 years old.
- What class are you in? - Year 9.
Are you a good student?
Well, I'm average.
What do you want to do later?
I want to make movies, well, I want to be an actress.
The set of "Detective" was a very intense experience.
For me, to communicate with him was not a problem
but for someone it was impossible.
I saw it, I saw how difficult it was for him and for them in return.
I saw how things were going with Bruno Nuytten, it wasn't easy.
Bruno Nuytten was director of photography.
We have rarely seen many technicians invest in production, I'm sorry.
We have rarely seen many technicians inventing equipment.
Nagra was not invented by a sound engineer.
You didn't invent Arriflex.
We have had a funny relationship with you for five weeks.
Yes, and I also have a funny relationship with you.
I know.
And you have a funny relationship with the sun.
With Johnny, for example, he was incredibly considerate and kind.
Anyway, as Johnny was very calm, very happy to shoot with Godard.
He was calm and who was watching all this
because for him, it was like a science fiction thing.
Godard, even by himself, apart from his films,
is one of the people who doesn't leave anyone indifferent.
It's either you hate him or you love him.
And in general, when you hate him, I hated him sometimes during the shooting,
then he smiles at you and you start loving him.
If you're a bit humble and intelligent, I think,
you accept that you don't know anything and that you always have to search.
He puts himself in the position of researcher and student.
That's why somehow he got along well with Johnny,
with me, with people who weren't in a state to say
"I know everything, I'm a great actor, a great actress",
a great actress",
he hated that.
He liked people who weren't actually fully actors yet,
not fully cinematographers, not fully this or that.
He agreed to bear his name again,
to once again become for the world Jean-Luc Godard, the great filmmaker.
His aura keeps growing.
He also exposes himself in his own films,
giving himself the role of filmmakers in full doubt or of a mad inventor.
His characters oscillate between burlesque and tragic
which make porous the border between the reality of a man
and the fiction that this man
has made of his life.
People who don't have all the cultural references
that may be necessary to understand your films.
- We only talked about references. - You did, not me.
Personally, I grasp your film instinctively,
but I lack a whole background of references
that people around you have.
You are lacking nothing, aren't you?
- I asked you something. - Tell me what you lack.
In the film, I mean.
Jean-Luc Godard, considered a revolutionary of cinema...
It is also the beginning of international recognition.
In 1983 at the age of 53,
he received the Golden Lion in Venice for his film "First Name: Carmen".
He made quite shocking films.
I know "First Name: Carmen",
sexuality and all were very... And he got a pie in the face.
A pie in the face from someone who didn't appreciate
the nudity of the Virgin Mary in his film "Hail Mary".
Where does Jean-Luc Godard stand today?
He spoke in the media, he went on talk shows
where they only talked about anarchists
and crazy stuff.
Philippe, any text written by Mistic has this force,
this violence in relation to the body.
And that's how the newspaper... That's how it is.
Every audience member who enters says the title of the film,
and says "Hail Mary".
At that point, he gets a ticket, he gives the money and...
I'd rather talk to Vitez because...
I understand.
Otherwise, I'm going to say bad things about you that it's not worth it.
For no reason.
Absolutely, for no reason.
- Thank you, goodbye. - Goodbye.
- Did they put foundation on you? - No, I have it naturally.
It's my beard.
There was something with Marguerite Duras too, right?
Listen Jean-Luc, this disability you have, maybe that's it.
Maybe that's what you have to endure.
They argued a little, but at the same time, there was love.
It was complicated, it was weird.
He can be mean, but there is still a lot of love.
I am not a human being.
I am being alive and I follow myself as a human being.
Thank you, Isabelle.
Of course, thanks to the professionals in the profession, as I said.
The "professionals in the profession".
And thank you, since I spoke of shadow and light, to the invisible.
Thanks to Gaumont's switchboard operator.
There was this thing where they always gave
the César d'honneur to someone who was going to die.
I think he spread the word that he was sick.
I really think so,
to poke fun at them a little.
You, the eternal marginal of cinema, right?
Yes, you know, the margin is what holds the pages together.
I think Godard is really an introvert.
Like he has this particular social thing.
I think people like that are constantly creating,
otherwise they go nuts.
Anyone?
Is there anyone?
And...
There would be somewhere.
And here is the light.
Here are the soldiers. Here are the bosses. Here are the children.
And here is the light. Here is the joy.
Here is the war. Here is the angel. Here is fear.
And here is light.
Here is the universal wound. Here is the night.
Here is the Virgin. Here is grace and here is light.
And here is the light and here is the light.
And here is the mist.
And here is the adventure. And here is the fiction.
And here is the real.
And here is the documentary. And here is the movement.
And here is the cinema.
And here is the picture.
And here is the sound. And here is the cinema.
Here is the cinema. Here is the cinema.
Godard during his first period did not talk about his childhood
or of childhood.
At this moment "JLG/JLG" arrives and I see the photo
of Godard as a child.
The story of the photo
is as if, all of a sudden, he was trying to understand
who he was and where he came from.
It usually starts like that,
death is coming.
And then we start to mourn.
But I did the opposite. First I mourned.
First I mourned.
But death did not come.
That's undoubtedly why I had that somewhat devastated look in the photo.
Which did not come from a pair of slaps or a sprain.
No. I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion.
I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion.
I thought it looked like the picture of the little boy from the Warsaw ghetto.
The difference between Godard, a child in his rich environment,
and the little boy of the Warsaw ghetto is seminal.
His father is French and his mother is French,
but they were rather on the side of Pétain.
Well, Godard says that they were more on the side of collaborators.
There is some shame even if he has nothing to do with it.
He will end up saying it:
"Yes I was very protected
and that's why I started to take an interest in history.
That's why I looked for documents.
When I was a boy, I saw, knew nothing, nothing was explained to me."
This return to his past
became the beating heart of a vast undertaking
that Godard initiated at the end of the 1980s,
"Histoire(s) du Cinéma".
He says to himself:
"I can tell my story
if I articulate it with the history of cinema and the History."
The history of cinema.
The Gulag Archipelago.
In the 8 episodes of this large amount of images and sounds,
Godard stages himself as a demiurge creator.
His ambition is to make History visible
and, thanks to editing, to transform the visible into knowledge.
You don't have to tell history, you have to see it, you have to show it.
Telling history is literature, it's a screenplay, and so on.
He said: "That's bad cinema.
I have stories, but I don't tell them, I show them."
It really is an art of collage.
He asked many friends and collaborators
to bring him their most damaged tapes,
tapes that had lost their colour.
When they asked me and I brought DVDs,
he found them too neat, too clean, too good.
"Don't you have tapes whose colour would be lost?
That you had recorded from television?"
If past history is to be told, it must be told with the ruins.
So, for him, the ruins of cinema are excerpts, fragments.
That's what's left of the movies. It's the memory he has of it.
Only cinema can be legitimate
for telling a story made up of nothing but ruins.
For me, "Histoire(s) du Cinéma" is one of the major works of the century.
And maybe we have said enough about the amount of work that it represents.
I don't know if there are many works,
even in the other arts, that have had this importance.
To compose this total work,
Godard used fragments from 495 films and 148 books,
to which he added newsreels, photographs and paintings.
The work spreads over ten years.
The last episode of "Histoire(s) du Cinéma" was completed in 1998,
almost a century after the invention of cinema.
What is cinema? Nothing What does it want? Everything.
What can it do? Something.
Then Godard will gradually disappear again.
To put the work forward, the man withdraws.
Comes the time of mystery shrouded in melancholy,
the time of enigma, the time of the hermit of Rolle.
At over 80 years-old,
he parted with his archives, his machines, his books,
his film collections.
Once again, he wipes the slate clean of his past,
as if he were still trying to lighten up and start over again.
And even if nothing was to be as we had hoped,
it wouldn't change our expectations.
The expectations would remain a necessary utopia.
Later too, the expectations would flare many times over
stifled by the stronger enemy.
They would constantly awake
and the domain of expectations would be larger than our time.
They would extend to all continents.
And even if nothing was to be as we had hoped
it wouldn't change our expectations.