In 1988, approaching what he called ‘the dawn of the twilight’ of his life, Jean-Luc Godard had cause to reflect on an earlier dawn – Parisian cinephilia during the 1950s, the little world of screening rooms, notably Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française, and journals, above all Cahiers du Cinéma, that incubated the coterie or movement known to the world as the French New Wave. The movies that poured into France after the Liberation were thrillingly rich and various and unfamiliar, but as he told the interviewer Serge Daney, they also provided a ‘deliverance’ from a source of ‘terror’ – ‘we felt, sitting in those screenings, that we no longer had to write’. In literature, there were criteria, inherited standards. In cinema, ‘you were allowed to do things without class, that made no sense.’ Watching Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), he thought: ‘A man and a woman in a car.’ Or just ‘a man and a woman.’ ‘I knew that I could do it.’
Richard Linklater’s shrewd and absorbing film catches this ‘feeling of freedom’ that Godard invoked. Shot in black-and-white with a French-speaking cast, it tells the story of the making of À Bout de Souffle, which Godard, a critic and reporter with a handful of shorts to his name, shot for little money over twenty days in the late summer of 1959. There was no script, only a set-up, derived by François Truffaut from a news story. Michel, after stealing a car from an American soldier at Marseilles Old Port, shoots a policeman who was trying to flag him down, then hitches a ride to Paris, where he steals money from his girlfriend Liliane and hangs around with his ‘favourite’ girlfriend Patricia, an American student and aspiring journalist, until she decides to turn him in. À Bout de Souffle is now a monument, as reflected in the existence of Linklater’s portrait, but its central properties are casualness and offhand intimacy. The director Roger Vadim claimed that when he bumped into Godard shortly before production began, all he had was a few phrases scrawled on the inside of a matchbook, among them ‘She has an accent’ and ‘It ends badly. Well, no. Finally it ends well. Or it ends badly.’
Nouvelle Vague begins in an auditorium, with Jean-Luc (Guillaume Marbeck), cigarette in hand, and wearing a suit jacket, tie and shades, sitting alongside his friends Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest). It is the première of La Passe du Diable – produced by Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) and distributed by 20th Century Fox – but talk at the party is dominated by Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, which appeared at Cannes the previous year, and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, about to screen at the 1959 festival. Jean-Luc is happy for his friends, but tells Schiffman that he is the last one from Cahiers to direct – ‘Rohmer even wrote a novel’ – and worries that his epitaph will read, ‘Missed the Wave.’ She tells him to either find the courage or shut up. So he sets about persuading Beauregard to let him take on Truffaut’s thief story, then pursues his lead actors. For Michel, he goes to Jean-Paul Belmondo, a pal and past collaborator, but for Patricia, he shoots higher: Jean Seberg, who Otto Preminger had discovered two years earlier, when she was an Iowa schoolgirl, during his nationwide hunt for a Joan of Arc and cast again in a similarly ill-fated – but in the eyes of the Cahiers crowd, even more dazzling – follow-up, an adaptation of Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse.
The bulk of the story told here concerns the film’s production, starting with the cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) assembling his 35mm Caméflex Éclair, and culminating in a handshake between him and Jean-Luc once they have finished working on the Marseilles scenes. The screenplay, originally written in English by Vincent Palmo and Holly Gent, draws dexterously on a range of sources for dialogue, detail and texture. Seberg’s claim, in a letter to a friend, that the experience was ‘so un-Hollywood I’ve become completely unselfconscious’ is delivered during the filming of what became the long – twenty-three minute – sequence of Michel and Patricia talking, kissing and mugging in her studio flat. An altercation between Jean-Luc and Beauregard is among many incidents derived from Claude Ventura’s superb documentary, Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède (1993).
Chronology and original context are largely set aside in the depiction of Jean-Luc’s tendency towards aphorism and gnomic utterance (amusingly mocked by the Seberg character, who also impersonates his Swiss accent). Godard’s letter to the producer Pierre Braunberger, written a week into the production, is filleted for phrases, such as Jean-Luc telling Raoul that they should shoot in direct sunlight so that the Ilford film stock will also appear ‘à bout de souffle’. ‘Shorts are anti-cinema’, Jean-Luc’s dismissal of his earlier film-making efforts, was one of the sub-headings of an extensive report on a festival in Tours from the February 1959 issue of Cahiers. Godard’s well-known response to a question about the violence in Pierrot le Fou (1965), ‘not “blood” – red’, is repurposed for the filming of Michel’s death scene – with little applicability, given that the gunshot wound is hardly shown and À Bout de Souffle is in black-and-white.
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Godard, after a childhood spent mostly in Switzerland, moved to Paris in 1950, aged nineteen, to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent most of the time reading poetry and novels, watching movies – and writing about them. Almost immediately he developed a position at odds with André Bazin, who as well as being the co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma and Truffaut’s de facto father, was the leading theorist of ‘cinema as the art of reality’ and, relatedly, a champion of techniques used by Renoir, Welles, Wyler, Bresson and Italian neorealism. In Bazin’s reading, the use of depth in focus (where the foreground and background are rendered with equal clarity) and the fluid long take displayed a reverence for the continuity of space and time. Godard, in ‘Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction’, which appeared in Cahiers in 1952 under the pseudonym Hans Lucas, promoted the future potential of the approaches that had dominated film in the silent era and the first decade of sound, the layout of scenes using techniques like the reaction shot, the ‘waist shot’ and the axial cut, as well as montage – what Bazin disparaged as chopping the world up ‘into little pieces’. It was, crudely put, an argument about the rival claims to supremacy of realism and artifice, camera and scissors.
Shortly after the essay appeared, Godard left France to avoid military service in Indochina, and there followed a period of almost four years in which he wrote no criticism. On his return, he published an ambitious restatement of his thesis, ‘Montage, my beautiful concern’, which appeared beside Bazin’s ‘Montage forbidden’. But like his colleagues Rohmer, Chabrol, Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, Godard also celebrated the tendency in American studio films towards extravagance – the invention of CinemaScope, the dominance of colour – that had developed during his hiatus. The position was often described as ‘Hitchcocko-Hawksien’, but for Godard, another director embodied the Hollywood of the mid-to-late 1950s. ‘If the cinema no longer existed,’ Godard wrote in 1957, ‘Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to.’
But his position began to shift. In articles like ‘Bergmanorama’, which appeared in July 1958, he expressed a newfound preference for openness over control, for – as if conceding defeat to the Bazinian aesthetic – Rossellini and Welles over Hitchcock and Lang. He took every opportunity to praise the ethnologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose docudrama about Nigerian immigrants in the Ivory Coast, Moi, un Noir (1958), he called ‘the great French film since the Liberation’. This wasn’t a recantation but a broadening. If Godard initially combatted Bazin’s essentialism with a version of his own – cinema isn’t all about realism, it’s about construction – now he was arguing that all techniques existed on a continuum. As he explained in a lengthy tribute to Moi, un noir:
All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend towards fiction . . . One must choose between ethic and aesthetic. That is understood. But it is no less understood that each word implies a part of the other. And he who opts wholeheartedly for one, necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey.
By the time he made his debut, criticism had taught him to admire both Rouch and the god of montage, Eisenstein: ‘we learned not to deny one aspect of the cinema in favour of another.’ Where Truffaut and Chabrol, in their first films, were making a more parochial intervention, attempting in different ways to rejuvenate French psychological realism, Godard was harnessing insights about the medium itself. And so he set out to illustrate his contention that a film could be anything.
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Nouvelle Vague makes little reference to Godard’s critical ideas. (Bazin, who died in 1958, receives no mention.) But Linklater gives a strong sense of his have-it-all sensibility and its origin in mid-century film culture. Jean-Luc receives pep talks from directors beloved by Cahiers: Rossellini, who cadges a lift home after delivering a talk to a crowd of critics and directors in the magazine’s office, and Jean-Pierre Melville, who replaced Rossellini in the role of the sleazy novelist Parvulesco, whom Patricia, along with other reporters, interviews at Orly Airport. The night before filming begins, after filing out of a Frank Tashlin comedy at the Latin Quarter cinema, Le Champo, Truffaut advises Jean-Luc, in what is surely an invented exchange, to be fast like Rossellini, witty like Guitry, musical like Welles, simple like Pagnol, wounded like Ray and insolent like no-one else. Rohmer and Chabrol urge him to retain the confidence of his collaborators, but also to be brave.
The portrayal of the production does a lucid job of showing the effects that Godard was seeking, and its effectiveness as a vehicle for different parts of his nature. He was to some degree the basis of the impulsive, larcenous rascal Michel (Godard often stole paintings, first editions and money from his mother’s wealthy family). But he was also the solitary, Faulkner-reading aesthete Patricia, and it’s thought he had stayed in the hotel where she lives. At one point Jean-Luc asks Jean, ‘don’t you get it yet? . . . You’re playing me.’ The nationalities of each character – Michel the Frenchman, Patricia the American – reversed these emphases. (Michel, pulling the sheets over the two of them, talks of a new ‘rapprochement’ between the countries.) The influence of Italy may be hinted at in Patricia’s surname, Franchini.
Godard later said that he thought he was making a ‘realistic’ film but ended up with Alice in Wonderland. In this account, his liking for Bergman and Rouch had been overwhelmed by his more established appetite for non-realistic devices. À Bout de Souffle is distinguished by disruptive editing, knowingness, eccentricity of tone and actors looking into the camera. A car chase is edited so that the drivers appear to be moving in opposite directions. Distance is forged by the use of the ‘iris’ lens and a shot, from Patricia’s perspective through a rolled-up magazine, which, as Jean-Luc notes with gratitude, was borrowed from Samuel Fuller’s B-movie western Forty Guns (1957).
Still, there is ample evidence of his other side. He had arrived at the idea that fantasy was more or less the same as documentary – that there was no call for explicitly ‘realist’ devices because the photographic image is inherently objective. (Bazin’s preferred term was ‘ontological’.) As an inter-title in Le Petit Soldat (1960) states: ‘photograph is truth, and cinema is truth twenty-four frames per second.’ But in practice – on screen – the old distinctions remain evident. After all, if you remove frames from within a shot, as Godard and Cécile Decugis (played in Nouvelle Vague by Iliana Zabeth) did to create the ‘jump’ cut, what remains will meet some definition of ‘truth’, but the spectre of what’s missing inevitably draws attention to a mediating process, and to the sovereignty – at least for that moment – of artifice over reality.
The point was not that Rouch and Eisenstein had a shared goal but that their work possessed equal claim to legitimacy. If À Bout de Souffle had realist credentials, it was not because, as Jean-Luc tells a passerby, he made a ‘documentary about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg acting out a fiction’. It was because he was shooting on location, in ad hoc conditions, with a former war photographer as his chief collaborator. At one point, as shown in Nouvelle Vague, he concealed Coutard in a postman’s cart and followed Seberg as she strolled along the Champs-Élysées peddling the New York Herald Tribune (the only sequence he had planned in advance). ‘The extras will be free’, Jean-Luc explains. ‘And they’ll be completely natural and realistic.’ (Godard’s younger colleague Luc Moullet, reviewing the film in the April 1960 issue of Cahiers, thought that one of Godard’s aims was to do for France what Rouch had done for other cultures.)
The critic Pierre Marcabru, writing in Combat, speculated that footage of the production of À Bout de Souffle would reveal continuity between the worlds in front of the camera and behind it, and this underpins Linklater’s approach. His own allegiances are plainly to the realist side of things. Nouvelle Vague – which shares its title with the most revered of Godard’s later films – is to a large degree a conjectural ‘making-of’, a lavishly dramatized DVD extra. But there’s no end of artifice in the film’s meticulous recreation of the streets and cafés of late-50s Paris and, at a couple of moments, the script diverges from the record altogether to make light-hearted homage to Pickpocket, La Dolce Vita, Bande à Part, Day for Night and À Bout de Souffle itself.
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Godard, perhaps unsurprisingly, set down his views on films of this kind. In May 1973, after seeing Day for Night, a comedy about the making of a farce called Je Vous Présente Paméla, he wrote to Truffaut calling him a ‘liar’. He complained that the recent press shot of the director having dinner with the lead actress, Jacqueline Bisset, had no counterpart in the film, and, being sure to bring the point home, asked why the character of the director – played by Truffaut – is the only one who isn’t shown ‘screwing around’. Then Godard proceeded to explain that he was making a film of his own, to show what really goes on: how the trainee ‘script girl’ numbers each shot, how the man from the lab carries the equipment, how Louis Malle’s account balances the books, and so on. Unfortunately, because of people like Truffaut, there was no money. Then, in a typical bit of perversity, he suggested that Truffaut sign on as a co-producer, in exchange for the rights to La Chinoise (1967), Le Gai Savoir (1969) and Masculin Féminin (1966). After all, the arrangement would help to reassure the public that we don’t ‘all make films like you’.
That project, to be called Un Film Simple, never came together, but life on set is depicted at various points in Godard’s work. A decade earlier, in Le Mépris (1963) – itself the subject of two making-of documentaries – Fritz Lang, toiling away at a doomed Hollywood version of the Odyssey, doesn’t have any affairs, though the screenwriter Paul exploits his wife to curry favour with the boorish producer played by Jack Palance. And roughly a decade later, Passion (1982) portrays the director embarking on affairs with a pair of local women before leaving town with another. It would be hard to say, bearing in mind these strictures and precedents, whether Nouvelle Vague would have pleased its subject. There’s certainly pronounced engagement with the minutiae of film production, including the frustration of the continuity girl, Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), faced with a director who didn’t care about continuity. (Not that Truffaut’s film had been short on that sort of detail.) But the director is not shown screwing around (though in an inadvertent irony, the Truffaut character is).
Godard might have struggled with the lack of conflict. According to his friend the critic Jean Douchet, he was annoyed with Truffaut for not inviting him to the Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows, but here he is just keen not to miss it – pocketing some cash at Cahiers and setting off. Though Jean Seberg gets a little annoyed with Jean-Luc’s pretentiousness and vagueness – and the lack of lines for her to learn – the battle is less fiercely fought than in reality (in a letter, she called the production ‘absolutely insane’), and, as a female lead, she is never as inscrutable, capricious or disloyal. Linklater’s Paris is an altogether gentler place: the only events that provoke fear or excitement are ones being mocked up for the film.
What about the triumphant ending? À Bout de Souffle was the blueprint for the death of the Godard hero or heroine in the closing moments (not always on screen). The final image of Nouvelle Vague, by contrast, is a freeze-frame of Godard and Truffaut, arms around each other, smiling. In the course of time, there were other emotions, more divisive – and less successful – films, a sterner attitude towards French society and American culture, but Linklater confines the future to a brief text-based epilogue, preferring to summon instead that point in Godard’s evolution when, as he described it, fame ‘had not yet begun to weave the shroud of our happiness’ and a work of art was not ‘the sign of something’ but ‘the thing itself and nothing else’.
Read on: Robin Wood, ‘Jean-Luc Godard’, NLR I/39.