Two Or Three Things I know about Him: Eeverything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
By Richard Brody (Metropolitan Books, 2008, 720 pages)
by M. Lau
“I don’t think you should feel about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can’t kiss a movie.”
Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard’s 1966 film inspired by newspaper accounts of bourgeois women taking up prostitution for the disposable income, contains one of my favorite scenes in all his movies. In it a young boy tells his mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) about a dream he’s had. “I was walking all alone along the edge of a cliff. The path was only wide enough for one person. I saw two twins coming towards me. I wondered how they would get past. Suddenly, one of the twins went towards the other and they became one person. And then I realized that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united.” In the counter shot, the camera returns to Juliette lying on the couch, smiling blankly. Her son then asks, “What is language?” She replies, “Language is the house that man dwells in.”
Like so many of the scenes and sequences in Godard’s best work, this little moment is full of significance. To begin, the scene is definitely “spontaneous,” or, if you prefer, unrehearsed. But therein, paradoxically, lies its artifice, its appearance of design. When the young boy, who is hardly a child actor in the Hollywood mold, begins recounting his dream, he glances surreptitiously at the camera framing him in a close-up, says “Voila!” to himself, and then stumbles through his lines. There is humor and charm in this innocent playing at acting. The dream itself has the structure of a joke: at the beginning it seems to be a nice fable set in a fairy tale world, but by the end it has become so topical that it is doubtful the boy knows the meaning of what he’s saying. This is humor, too, with a left-wing political charge, which makes it even more attractive to people who might share some of Godard’s sympathies about the evils of modern empire and capitalism. Then, as is customary with Godard in moments of humor and gentle leftist propaganda, the conversation suddenly gets deeper. After her son asks a question worthy of either children or philosophers, Juliette replies by quoting one of Heidegger’s great metaphors for man’s relationship to language. As if her son will accept this answer with no further comment, the scene abruptly ends.
Or at least this is how I would have analyzed this precious minute of absurdity before I read Richard Brody’s exhaustive new analytic biography of Godard, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. Now, I know better. You see, Godard, as Brody’s main thesis runs, was almost always making a movie that was, in one way or another, an allegory for his messy personal and professional life. In this case, the case of the Two or Three Things and Marina Vlady, even the case of this little scene, Godard’s desire for love and marriage with Vlady (who rejected his proposal during filming) is everywhere on display. Vlady had children from a previous marriage and this moment shows what they might have become, the very dreams they would have had, with Godard for a step-dad. And as surely as the child’s dream is Godard’s, so too is Vlady’s quotation from Heidegger, who Godard would have read either in the unfiltered original or distilled through any number of sources in the great French intellectual milieu at mid-century, most probably Sartre. An adorable, politically conscious son and a beautiful, philosophically literate wife, these were the things the renowned director wanted in the wake of his crushing break-up with his first wife, Anna Karina.
Allegory is probably the simplest and therefore the most complex of all literary concepts. When we ask what the moral of the story is we are asking a question every child learns to ask and the question that for Plato was the only one worth asking. Traditionally, aside from the moral reading, allegorical interpretation serves two other tasks. It is called on to reconcile explicitly disparate texts. Ever notice, for example, how Jesus’ name doesn’t come up a lot in The Old Testament? That’s really not a good way to plan for a sequel. To obviate this problem that has bothered a lot intelligent Christians, allegory became crucial. Sure he’s not there in the letter of The Hebrew Bible, St. Paul might say, but he’s there in a more important dimension, in its spirit, which is the source of the life of the book anyway, the community of believers who believe in it and in him. St. Augustine had a more interdependent formulation for the problem. “In The Old Testament, The New Testament is concealed. In The New Testament, The Old Testament is revealed.”
The other task of allegorical interpretation since biblical times has been the black art of the bookmaker, prophecy. Maybe Daniel was just playing it safe when he told Nebuchadnezzar that the dream he’d been having meant that from his Kingdom would come a line of civilizations that would hold sway until the end of time. After all, the guy had threatened to liquidate all the intellectuals in Iraq if they couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it’s because things worked out so well for Daniel, or because people just love speculating and dreaming, but at least since then, reading the present and the past as signs of the future has been a good job, if you can get it.
Brody’s allegorical thesis does a lot of work in his book, which is hardly surprising, since it is a work of biographical criticism. There’s really no disputing the idea that Godard’s movies are intensely personal. But the irony of Brody’s reliance on allegory is that he arguably doesn’t use it enough. The forms of traditional allegory that I’ve mentioned are all at stake in Godard’s work. You want prophecy? As Brody explains, Le Chinoise is “widely understood” to be just that: “1967 was a year of political confrontation, and 1968 a year of legendary upheaval, especially in France. The film expressed the latent proclivity for violence among the highly politicized youth of France and suggested that their opposition went far beyond the local concerns of the university, extending to revolution in the literal sense.” Furthermore, “the coming transformation that Godard foresaw and helped to foster was one of art as well as politics. In Le Chinoise, Godard was doing more than exploding the conventions of the cinema: he was expressing despair that the radical politics of the time had surpassed the radicalism of his cinema.”
What about morality? Godard was, in Brody’s view, a deeply conservative revolutionary. This is Brody’s explanation, for instance, as to why Godard changed the ending of Vivre Sa Vie from a sardonic Brechtian one, in which Nana (Anna Karina) is thriving as a high class call girl and concubine, to the actual ending in which she is shot and left for dead in the street, after the deal to trade her from one pimp to another goes wrong. The lesson here is that Nana should have stayed with her husband whom she abandoned at the beginning of the film. And the lesson in Godard’s life is for Anna (note the “Annagram”), who hated the change to the brutal ending: she could not go unpunished for her infidelity the previous year, even if she had already attempted suicide out of guilt.
Godard’s Marxism, too, was tinged with refined and not-so refined male-chauvinist biases. American style consumer capitalism seems to be corrupting women above all in many of his films. As Brody details, there is, along these lines, an often overlooked ambiguity in reading one of Godard’s most legendary phrases. In Masculine Feminine, Godard summed up the post-war generation in the title cards. “‘This Film Could Be Called/ The Children of Marx Coca-Cola/ Understand Who Will.’” The question is “whether these children are the product of Marx and Coca-Cola both, or whether these are two different groups – that is, the children of Marx and the children of Coca-Cola.” To add to the difficulty, “Godard himself glossed it both ways.” On the one hand, all the characters in his hymn to ‘60s youth culture could have come from families where the mom was “Mrs. Marx” and dad was “Mr. Coca-Cola.” On the other hand, in the next breath Godard says, “Jean-Pierre Leaud (the boy) and Chantal Goya (the little ye-ye [pop] singer) represent the left and the right, respectively.” While the Left was becoming the “New Left” at the cinema and in the lecture hall instead of in the factory and on the barricades, the Right seemed to have had the insight that if it could monopolize enjoyment no one would recognize it as a politics anymore. At the end of the movie, Leaud’s character falls off his apartment building. Today, Chantal Goya is a popular entertainer for French children.
Which brings us to allegorical interpretations that unite disparate texts: it seems to me, this has always been one Godard’s defining turns of thought. It has assumed many guises in his work. In his film criticism and later in his films he set out to reconcile high art and popular culture. This took the form of arguing for the artistic merit of commercial cinema through the now canonical theory of the film director as an author not of stories, but of a certain mise-en-scene. In his films he unites art and pop by letting them be alone together, by quoting from philosophy and literature and quartets and sonatas in ways that underscore their distance from consumer society. When he went to work as a professor, starting in the ‘70s in Montreal, he began to consider his own work in relation to “classical Hollywood” in a way that reminds me of biblical typology. The New Testament is to The New Wave as The Old Testament is to Hollywood. The analogy is apt if only because taste in film, for one, seems to have been born again because of The New Wave. Film critic Andrew Sarris’ conversion in the early ‘60s is emblematic: “‘I began seeing a lot of American movies through French eyes… To show you the dividing line in my thinking, when I did a Top Ten list for the [Village] Voice in 1958, I had a Stanley Kramer film on the list and I left off both Vertigo and Touch of Evil.’”
But there is also another, more disquieting way in which the analogy between the Bible’s two halves and the diptych of Hollywood and The New Wave holds: through what Brody sees as Godard’s troubling flirtations with anti-Semitism. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Godard’s family pedigree predisposes him to this regressive ideology. They were collaborators with the Nazis; his mother’s father, one of the most powerful bankers in all of Europe, was openly ant-Semitic. In an infamous argument with the producer Pierre Braunberger, Godard called him a “dirty Jew” (Truffaut never forgave Godard for this incident. He even cited it in a vituperative response to a request by Godard for money in the mid-‘70s. The exchange ended what remained of their personal and professional relations). And, of course, Godard is a critic of Israel and a supporter of the Palestinian struggle.
But because of how this books ends, by drumming up charges of anti-Semitism against Godard for Notre Musique, his most recent feature film, I think Brody unintentionally emphasizes this supposed anti-Semitism too much. Of course, Godard is wrong to equate the plight of the Palestinians with the Holocaust (for the record, Godard denies ever claiming this). To Brody, it seems like a regression to some of the most tendentious and unappealing political moments from his early films, when in the midst of a lecture to film students in Sarajevo about shot and counter-shot, Godard’s examples stray from a textbook juxtaposition of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to two shots of inmates in a concentration camp. The first he labels “Jew,” the second “Muslim.” Godard’s commentary takes it from there: “In 1948, the Israelites walked in the water toward the Promised Land. The Palestinians walked in the water toward drowning. Shot and counter-shot. The Jewish people rejoined fiction. The Palestinian people, documentary. One says that the facts speak for themselves, but Celine said, ‘Alas, not for long.’”
What if the facts did really speak for themselves? Then justice would probably flow like a mighty stream and a whole lot of artists would be looking for work. But until that day poet-prophets (i.e. crazy people) like Godard will keep confronting us with their allegories, their reflections of the facts, personal and political, into art and demanding that we further allegorize them, i.e. transform them with our interpretations and in our actions. If there was ever a salient criticism of Godard’s achievements, it is that they are ultimately not allegorical enough, not transformative enough. As Stanley Cavell put it long ago, Godard criticized slogans and advertising with more slogans and advertising. “If you believe that people speak in slogans to one another, or that women are turned by bourgeois society into marketable objects, or that human pleasures are now figments and products of advertising accounts and that these are directions of dehumanization – then what is the value of pouring further slogans into that world (e.g. ‘People speak in slogans’ or ‘Women have become objects’ or ‘Bourgeois society is dehumanizing’ or ‘Love is impossible’)? And how do you distinguish the world’s dehumanizing of its inhabitants from your depersonalizing of them? How do you know whether your asserted impossibility of love is anything more than an expression of your distaste for its tasks? Without such knowledge, your disapproval of the world’s pleasures, such as they are, is not criticism (the negation of advertising) but censoriousness (negative advertising).”
Godard once said the horror of the bourgeoisie could only be countered with more horror. I think the atrocities committed in the name of Communism in the last century show us what this claim amounts to. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind and then we won’t be able to go to the cinema. So for now, we’ll have to find solace in the fact that the revolution will be available on DVD.
