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Self-Portrait
in a Shattered Lens
by
Richard Brody
In
February 1964, while shooting Band of Outsiders, Jean-Luc
Godard announced his plans for a film based on a crime novel,
Obsession, by the American writer Lionel White (translated
into French as Le demon d’onze heures — literally,
“The Eleven O’Clock Demon”). In an interview that month, Godard
described it as “the story of a guy who leaves his family to
follow a girl much younger than he is. She is in cahoots with
slightly shady people, and it leads to a series of adventures.”
Asked who would play the
girl, Godard told France-Soir in 1964: That depends
on the age of the man. If I have, as I would like, Richard Burton,
I will take my wife, Anna Karina. We would shoot the film in
English. If I don’t have Burton , and I take Michel Piccoli,
I could no longer have Anna as an actress; she would form with
him a too “normal” couple. In that case, I would need a very
young girl. I’m thinking of Sylvie Vartan.
Both
Burton and Vartan (a nineteen-year old pop singer) were unavailable,
and when financing proved difficult to obtain, Godard asked
Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom he had made a star with Breathless,
to step in. But Belmondo was, and looked, even younger than
Piccoli. So when Godard announced in New York in September 1964,
when he was in town for the New York Film Festival, that Karina,
his wife, would star alongside Belmondo, he was in fact creating
an even more “normal” couple and definitively reorienting the
tone of the film, as he subsequently explained in Cahiers
du cinema: “In the end the whole thing was changed by the
casting of Anna and Belmondo. I thought about You Live Only
Once, and instead of the Lolita or La chienne
kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last
romantic couple, the last descendents of La nouvelle Heloise,
Werther, and Hermann and Dorothea.”
The
casting of a worldly actress in her mid-twenties and a handsome,
vigorous leading man just over thirty did change the project
— but not nearly as much as did the personal significance with
which Godard invested the story. White’s novel, as its title
suggested, was a story of obsessive desire — specifically, that
of a middle-aged advertising man and failed writer for a teenage
girl, his children’s babysitter. This girl has underworld connections
and a feral aptitude for deception and manipulation; after he
leaves his family for her, gets caught up with her in a murder,
and goes on the lam with her, she uses, betrays, and abandons
him. Desperate and humiliated, he catches up to her and kills
both her longtime lover (who she had claimed was her brother)
and the girl herself. Godard — who had told Belmondo that the
film would be “something completely different” from the book
— turned the male lead into a failed intellectual who rediscovers
his literary ambitions along with his romantic passion. This
man, Ferdinand Griffon, beings to fulfill his vast artistic
plans when he and the young woman, named Marianne Renoir, take
to the road. Marianne has shady connections — to a shadowy and
violent group of arms traffickers and political conspirators
— but she proves nonetheless, at least for a time, to be Ferdinand’s
helpmeet and soul mate in his great artistic project.
Although
Godard’s woman uses and betrays the man no less than does White’s,
the effect provoked by Godard is even more extreme: in Pierrot
le fou, Marianne not only breaks Ferdinand’s heart but
also destroys what was to be his life’s work. The romantic exaltation
that Godard thought the casting of Karina and Belmondo had substituted
for the story of betrayal and depredation turned into an artistic
manifesto and a cry of resentment and pain: by the time he shot
the film, from May through July 1965, he and Karina had divorced.
For
Godard, the long interval that separated the conception of Pierrot
le fou from its realization had been a time of aesthetic
as well as personal transition. As a result, when he was finally
able to make the film, his original ideas about the project
proved to be of little use to him. Recalling the shoot, Godard
later said: “I remember that when I began Pierrot le fou,
one week before, I was completely panicked, I didn’t know what
I should do. Based on the book, we had already established all
the locations, we had hired the people … and I was wondering
what we were going to do with it all.”
In
his earlier films, Godard had relied on preexisting frameworks
to guide his spontaneous invention, whether Hollywood genres
(as in Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and
Alphaville ) or the intellectual modernism of Brecht
or Barthes (as in Vivre sa vie and A Married Woman).
But by the tie he started shooting Pierrot le fou, the film
noir conventions underlying it no longer inspired him, and his
theoretical references were in a state of flux due to his political
anger as the Vietnam War escalated. The result of Godard’s personal,
cinematic, and intellectual turmoil was an immediate creation
that reached, even for Godard, new heights of spontaneity and
lightning invention — and this was largely an effort to compensate
for his inability to be methodical even by the casual terms
of his own practiced methods.
Shortly
after completing the film, he told Cahiers du cinema:
“In my other films, when I had a problem, I asked myself what
Hitchcock would have done in my place. While making Pierrot,
I had the impression that he wouldn’t have known how to answer,
other than ‘Work it out for yourself.’” Godard had had trouble
working it out. Classic Hollywood forms couldn’t sustain him
as they had in his previous film, Alphaville, which
depended heavily on the conventions of the secret-agent and
science-fiction genres. Not only was his absorption o the entire
classical cinema of no help to him, but also his own experience
as a filmmaker was of little use. He said that, in making Pierrot
le fou, he felt as if he were making his “first film”;
he had lost his North Star of cinematic navigation, and was
out at sea.
Yet
this lack of mooring, this state of doubt and bewilderment,
had surprising results. Godard filmed the genre elements of
the story with an inert mechanicalness and a conspicuous boredom,
which he masked with elaborate editing, insert shorts, and voice-over;
but in the scenes of Godard’s own making, in which he did not
have to connect the narrative dots, he created a free and flamboyant
array of images that were filmed with a manifest burst of untrammeled
creation. He called the shoot “a kind of happening, but one
that was controlled and dominated,” and said of Pierrot
le fou, “It is a completely unconscious film.” In making
it, Godard gave unusually free vent to his emotions, and those
emotions were harrowing ones: Pierrot le fou was an
angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen
at how she destroyed him and his work.
After
the release of Pierrot le fou, Godard gave the public
a skeleton key to it: “The only scenario that I had, the only
subject… was to convey the sense of what Balthazar Claes was
doing in The Unkown Masterpiece.” The Unknown Masterpiece
is a novella by Balzac about a painter in seventeenth-century
France who has been working alone for a decade on a portrait
of a woman that he considers to be not only his masterpiece
but an epochal advance in the history of art; he shows it to
two artist friends, who find it to be an incomprehensible mess,
a blunder and a disaster, and he kills himself. But Balthazar
Claes is not a character in that novella (the painter is named
Frenhofer); rather, he is the protagonist of another work by
Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute. In that novel, an
alchemist in single-minded pursuit of the secret of nature brings
about his wife’s premature death, his financial ruin, and his
public humiliation. The two fictions by Balzac that Godard’s
memory had run together unite in Pierrot le fou, a
self-portrait of the artist on the verge of pushing a philosophical
inquiry into form, or rather formlessness, to an extreme that
destroyed not only himself but also his wife.
Exactly
as Godard intended, Pierrot le fou reflects appropriately
vast, cosmic, quasi-metaphysical artistic freams of a Balzacian
grandeur. Early in the film, Ferdinand sits in his bathtub and
reads to his young daughter a passage from the art critic Elie
Faure that beings, “Velazquez, past the age of fifty, no longer
painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the
air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows
the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible
core of his silent symphony.” The first scene thus announces
Godard’s own search for another kind of cinematic art, one that
goes beyond the visual presentation of objects and characters
to a higher relation of musical ideas. (It was a project that
would take him another decade and a half, many wanderings, false
starts, studies, sufferings, and personal transformations to
being to realize.)
The
core of the film is a scene that takes place in the tranquil
natural splendor of unspoiled lands in the south of France:
Ferdinand and Marianne live off the land, hunting and fishing
(albeit cartoonishly — like most of the film’s narrative action),
while Ferdinand (sitting with a parrot on his shoulder) beings
to keep a journal, which appears in extreme close-up on-screen,
and which is in fact in Godard’s handwriting. Among the passages
that Ferdinand reads aloud is a description of his ambitious
plans for a new form of novel: “Not to write about people’s
lives anymore, but only about life — life itself. What lies
in between people: space, sound, and color. I’d like to accomplish
that. Joyce gave it a try, but it should be possible to do better.”
The sequence is the crowning moment in Ferdinand’s dream: the
couple will exist together, in isolation at a wild seaside,
where the setting and the romantic idyll will inspire Ferdinand’s
artistic creation. The glory of nature and a life of shared
purpose with a beloved woman are, in Godard’s personal mythology
of that period, a natural pair. But soon thereafter — in the
famous scene in which Marianne wanders past him and whines repeatedly:
“What can I do? I don’t know what to do” — the dream, and the
art, are destroyed, by Marianne’s demands and, it turns out,
her duplicity. She drags him back to a corrupt civilization
and pulls him from his contemplative isolation into a vortex
of unwanted action.
Pierrot
le fou is filled
with art and its attributes, from Marianne’s last name (and
some paintings to go with it) to works by Picasso on walls and
as insert shots, Ferdinand’s repeated references to Balzac,
his lengthy recitation from a novel by Celine (whose first name,
Louis-Ferdinand, Marianne likens to his), a reference to Beethoven,
the film’s Mondrian-like scheme of primary colors and white,
Ferdinand’s daubing of his face with Yves Klein blue — all suggesting
that Godard rooted him film in a high artistic and literary
tradition that transcended the conventions and habits of the
cinema. Indeed, the many cartoonish references and devices suggest
exactly what Godard thought of the standard-issue narrative
that he used as an indifferent frame for his speculations and
accusations.
In
Pierrot le fou, Godard sought to accomplish something
that goes far beyond the bounds of the cinema, beyond its familiar
genres, conventions, and forms. The stakes are suggested in
a scene at a cocktail party, where Ferdinand meets the American
director Samuel Fuller and asks him to define the cinema. Fuller
responds: “A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action,
violence, and death. In one word: emotions.” Rather than have
actors act out emotions on-screen, Godard wanted to find a way
to signify emotion and thus to arouse it in the viewer — so
that emotion would go from the filmmaker to the viewer not analogically
but in concentrated, sublimated form, by means of style. The
rejection of naturalistic drama in favor of shards of images,
voice-over recitations, incongruous insert shots, and intrusive
music hall-like interludes is not a deflection or avoidance
of emotion but an attempt to evoke — to provoke — an intensity
and spectrum of feeling of an ineffably romantic scope, beyond
the small-scale personal identification with characters in filmed
melodrama.
The
film is filled with contradictions: sublime, overwhelming images
of nature and acrid gasoline haze (a big '62 Ford Galaxie convertible
that Ferdinand drives into the sea, smoke from a burning car
filling the sky abouve a verdant landscape); the Vietnam War,
repeatedly mentioned, suggested, viewed as newsreel footage,
followed by a clip of Jean Seberg in Godard’s own 1963 Le
grand escroc, which calls into doubt the veracity of documentary
filming; Joyce and Beethoven and Balzac and Celine alongside
comic books and music-hall comedy and Laurel and Hardy-ish pranks;
a gangsterish genre that Godard no longer believed in and a
new kind of form that he couldn’t yet find; the self-searching
of Ferdinand in the mirror, his allusion to Poe’s William
Wilson, about a man and his double. Pierrot le fou
was the work of a divided person whose film fell into
the abyss of his own character.
If
Godard was at war with himself, he was in perfect sync with
a time that was also at war with itself; and as his personal
crises mirrored those of the age, the age looked upon him as
its reflection. It was a bind from which only drastic measures
would free him. The romantically transcendent self-immolation
with which Pierrot le fou would end foreshadows an
age of political violence and self-abnegating ideological rigors
that would come to take the place of a lost faith, not least
in himself.
Pierrot
le fou was booed
when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1965,
but in Le nouvel observateur the influential critic
Michel Cournot wrote, “I feel no embarrassment declaring that
Pierrot le Fou is the most beautiful film I’ve seen
in my life,” and when it opened in France at the end of the
year, he virtually wrote in tongues to praise it. In Les
lettres francaises, the novelist and poet Louis Aragon
waxed dithyrambic in a front-page rave (“There is one thing
of which I am sure…: art today is Jean-Luc Godard”); these and
other critics recognized and mentioned the film’s intense and
intimate personal significance.
Pierrot
le fou proved a tough
ticket in Paris — but, more importantly, it inspired a generation,
and most famously Chantal Akerman, who, when she saw it at age
fifteen, decided at once to become a filmmaker. The self-destructive
romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically
unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool
self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity
and between symbol and reality, the overt cinematic breakdown
and breakup, were all of their moment. Pierrot le fou was the
last of Godard’s first films, the herald of even more radical
rejections and reconstructions to come — for Godard and for
the world around him.
Richard
Brody is an editor and writer at the New Yorker and the author
of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.
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