Jean-Luc Godard has always had a great and original literary ambition that can be defined as follows: he always wanted to be a reader. Moreover, by Jean-Paul Belmondo reading Elie Faure in his bath in Pierrot le fou, after quoting the four strokes of Symphony No. 5 striking the brains of César Birotteau, to the filmmaker himself reading the Idiot in take care of your right, his films are populated by readers. William Faulkner and wild palm trees have appeared since Breathlesswhen, between sorrow and nothingness, “I choose sorrow”. But Godard wants to be a reader like the narrator of the Time regained translator: this is how he can pick up the thread of the world, this is how his work acquires its meaning.
To read also, the disappearance of Jean-Luc Godard
Of course, there was a time when the future filmmaker saw himself as a writer, but it was more a social dream than a strictly literary one. He recounted on several occasions the prestige acquired with him by Maurice Scherer, the future Eric Rohmer, by having his name on a Gallimard cover. Which house retained a certain prestige for him since, in History(ies) of cinema (of which she is incidentally the editor), after mentioning Howard Hugues “producer of Citizen Kane and boss of the TWA”he adds : “As if Méliès had directed Gallimard at the same time as the SNCF.” Besides, literature will often be an element of comparison for him, but in the literal sense, in that it provides him with his metaphors. He compares with the literature not to standardize but to differentiate. In 1988, in Releasehe tells Serge Daney that the cinema falls on him, freeing him from this ambition to write: “What we felt in front of the films shown was a deliverance: that there was no more to write. And writing was terror. How did you want to write better than Joyce or Rilke? While in the cinema, it was allowed. We had the right to do “classless” things, without anything, without head or tail. Just the fact that they were made that way had value. Whereas in literature or even in painting there was still justice, judges who judged.
“I don’t know who Shakespeare is”
It’s not the writing that has to do with the cinema, and Godard will speak ill of the novel contempt to justify having brought it to the screen: “When I adapted Moravia, I had strength: I used its weaknesses to take its base.» “I don’t know who Shakespeare is”he says before tackling King Lear. No, it is with reading that his own work is confronted, as he explained in 1967, when the Chinesepour the notebooks of the cinema : “Finally, I believe that the most extraordinary thing about filming is people who read. Why doesn’t any filmmaker do it? Filming someone reading would already be much more interesting than the majority of films that are made. Why wouldn’t the cinema be just filming people reading beautiful books? […] And those who know how to tell, to invent, like Polanski, Giono, Doniol, would invent and tell in front of the camera. We would listen to them, because when someone tells a story, and if it pleases, we listen to it for hours…”
Godard does not seek the sacredness of writing but the daily life of reading. “In literature, I have the feeling that if you don’t live in the same house as Cervantes or Dostoyevsky, it’s not worth writing. In the cinema, you cannot say that one film is not worth another. In a way, they are all equal, even if there are big ones and small ones. It’s the same as for men in a way. In literature, this is not the case. Modiano may tell you he’s a good writer, but he’ll admit he has nothing to do with Shakespeare. In the cinema, yes: we are in the same place in any case. When Pierre Bourdieu’s attempt to get him a chair at the College de France failed, Godard recounted in 1997 that it was “the literary” who did not want him (the “scientists” supported him), “and yet there is no one more literary than me”. “Usually, you are criticized for being too much. There, you were not enough! points out Alain Bergala to him. And Godard: “They think we shouldn’t treat books like that, that we shouldn’t talk about them in the cinema like that.”
A work full of quotes
How does Godard treat books, how does he talk about them? Excerpt (interspersed with images) fromHistory(ies) of cinema : “nothing is / as convenient / as a text / and nothing is / as convenient / as a word / in a text / we had / only books / to put / in books / what would be -this / when it is necessary / in a book / in the book / put reality / and in the second degree / when it is necessary / in reality / put / reality. Godard’s films have a respectful casualness towards literature that Michel Piccoli and Jean-Paul Belmondo first show and that the director later took on as his own, stuffing his work with quotations which he himself claims no longer know, at the end, which one is from whom, nor even if they are not truncated. “I’m just the one who connects Raymond Chandler and Fedor Dostoyevsky in a restaurant, one day, with small actors and big actors.” And, to Marguerite Duras (who is part of her “gang of four” admired, writers and filmmakers, with Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol and Jean Cocteau), at the end of take care of your right : “I certainly shouldn’t have put words in, but I couldn’t find anything else.” We read a lot with Godard, this “we” being in the first films the characters, then the spectators since the filmmaker writes so many words on the screen.
As such a good reader, Godard can take himself for a philosopher, never for a writer. It is by reading that one becomes a filmmaker, that one learns where one belongs. Excerpt fromHistory(ies) of cinema (to which we add a bit of punctuation): “There was a novel by Ramuz which said that one day a peddler arrived in a village and that he became friends with everyone because he knew how to tell a thousand and one stories. And now a storm breaks out and lasts for days and days. And then the peddler says it’s the end of the world. But the sun finally returns and the inhabitants of the village hunt the poor peddler. This peddler was the cinema.
Farewell to language is full of quotations and literary references and yet marks the limit of what can be granted to words. “Soon everyone will need an interpreter to understand the words coming out of their own mouths.” Et : “Words, words, I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
All the interviews quoted in this article are from the volumes Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc Godard (Editions Cahiers du cinema).