He said it as early as 1962 in the notebooks of the cinema : “My position towards the actors has always been half that of the interviewer in front of the interviewee. I run after someone and ask them something. At the same time, I’m the one organizing the race. If they are out of breath, I know they will not say the same thing as in other circumstances. The young filmmaker with already recognized genius continued his reflection as follows: “I believe that I rather start from the documentary to give it the truth of the fiction. That’s why I’ve always worked with professional and excellent actors. Without them, my films would not be as good.” All is said. The need for fiction to capture a fragment of reality, but also, despite sometimes intense conflicts, that of “stars”. Can we just imagine contempt without Bardot? Or Breathless, without Jean-Paul Belmondo, propelled for eternity to the cinema thanks to the gamble that was this first feature film? As for Jean Seberg, if she becomes, by the grace of her character, the enduring incarnation of modernity, a student in jeans and short hair, the film allows her to escape from the Hollywood jail and her exclusive contract. with Columbia.
Jean Seberg on the bill is Godard’s first explosive foray into the star system, which he is already working to derail. In the detailed biography that Antoine de Baecque devotes to the filmmaker (1), the historian quotes letters from the young woman who landed in Paris who is seriously considering leaving the set after her first day with this “tramp” unable to look at her in the eyes. However, it identifies the essential: “It’s such an un-Hollywood movie that I’m becoming absolutely natural.” Fifteen days later, she notes that he is “very pleasant to play comedy without being dazzled by spotlights. With the Godard system, we lose little time, we do not repeat the same scene indefinitely, we do not worry about the sound. Jean Seberg, a vulnerable star if ever there was one, made by Hollywood but not very malleable, understood everything. Unlike Belmondo’s agent, who congratulates himself in advance that A breathless be unusable. According to him, such a film would destroy the career of his foal.
Subsequently, Jean-Luc Godard will tacitly maintain a documentary aim with regard to the stars he films – and not only in One+One with the Stones at work or take care of your right with the Rita Mitsouko. But his relations will rarely be as fluid as with Jean Seberg. Godard’s second massive and indisputable foray into the star system is of course Brigitte Bardot in contempt, in 1963, a mythical film by its subject, its material – primary colors – and its cast, the monster Fritz Lang playing his own role, while Michel Piccoli is an alter ego of Godard. And Bardot? What is she doing there? If the actress is then the most prosecuted woman in the world, Carlo Ponti who co-produces the film would have preferred to impose another star, his wife, Sophia Loren, character as little Godardian as possible. Jean-Luc Godard and producer Georges de Beauregard care about Bardot, that is to say what they project onto her. When he wrote reviews, Godard always defended tooth and nail the naturalness of the young actress and, there again, the filmmaker strives to film her washed of all tinsel, as if it were a question of catching her character. irreducible beyond appearance. During the promotion, a sequence remained famous, which illustrates under the joke this desire for stripping. It was a question of persuading Bardot to agree to lower the height of his sauerkraut. The filmmaker launches a challenge to the actress: he walks on his hands, and each of his steps corresponds to a centimeter of height of bun removed. The filmmaker then gets up from his seat to add words to gestures under the dumbfounded gaze of the journalist.
Anna Karina with beating heart
As Anna Karina would repeat throughout his life, Jean-Luc Godard is a “athlete, with a beautifully made body”able to do better “everything Jean-Paul [Belmondo] was doing in his films”. Bardot does what Godard asks of her: she displays an indifferent opacity, lists insults with detachment. At the first team screening, Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine are furious. They have the feeling of having paid Bardot very dearly, for nothing. The star does not undress. It was to respond to this fury that Godard invented one of the most famous scenes in the film, where the camera obeys the producers’ orders by detailing the naked body of the actress under bluish or red lighting, while masking it. , since this device makes it invisible as a whole. Did Godard run behind Bardot in an interviewing role, according to his first statement to the Cinema notebooks? No doubt he did not feel the need during the shooting. At the time, the only star of Godard’s films, the one who was their beating heart and their sensitive emanation, was obviously Anna Karina, to the point of having given her name to part of her filmography. And it is a unique fact in the history of cinema that an actress alone sums up a flowering of films.
For “Save who can (life)”, Isabelle Huppert bends to all the rules of Godard. She likes to buy the character’s clothes with the filmmaker, gets hired as a worker in a watch factory, whether or not it is used for filming.
We scrutinize and recruit the credits of Godard’s films, we take them at random or chronologically, from Two or three things I know about her with Marina Vlady in 1966, at Week-endthe following year, with Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc (mistreated stars, since Godard openly insults them during the promotion), of Save who can (life) with Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye and Jacques Dutronc at Detectivewith Johnny Hallyday and Jean-Pierre Léaud who is already returning to the cinema. Or New wavewhere Delon in 1990 is seen as a “tree”. And also alas for me in 1993, with Gérard Depardieu.
And we can see that Jean-Luc Godard has made little use of names that sparkle for commercial reasons alone. In other words, the stars are rarely substitutable between them, they are not loss leaders. When Isabelle Adjani leaves the set of First name Carmen, because she finds herself ugly, not wearing makeup, it’s a completely different film that the filmmaker resolves to shoot with two strangers – Maruschka Detmers and Jacques Bonnaffé. Isabelle Huppert, in Save who can (life) et Passion (where Hannah Schygullah and Michel Piccoli also play), is curiously perceived in a type of job: that of the proletarian, in the world of prostitution or in the factory. The young woman, who has just filmed with Pialat and Cimino, then bends to all the rules. She likes to buy the character’s clothes with the filmmaker, gets hired as a worker in a watch factory, whether or not it is used for filming. A replica of Run for your life is his viaticum, which today seems to resonate with all the research of the filmmaker and his tumultuous links with his stars: “Don’t pretend” launches Jacques Dutronc to the young prostitute she plays. After Save who can (life), Jacques Dutronc, whose character is called Paul Godard like the filmmaker’s father, and who gives a lot of himself to the film, falls into depression.
Oracles duly interpreted
There is indeed a star that Godard will try to stifle during these years of comeback to cinema and glory, for lack of being able to assassinate each of his admirers one by one: it is himself. His press conferences arouse a stir worthy of a Beatles concert, his words turn into duly interpreted oracles, which horrifies him at the same time as he plays them. He struggles to get into the fray. It was also during this period that the filmmaker acted in several of his films – First name Carmen, Take care of your right – rather comical roles. “Cinema stars are a light which, like the stars, reaches us already extinguished”,he said in essence during a press conference in Cannes to New wave. He will have to leave again. Today, unfortunately, it is final.