The 1959 film remains. Its light has not wavered yet, though that may be thanks to the mercy of black and white and the way film emulsion has a life of its own. It looks and sounds as fresh and questioning as ever. Begin the picture, and its haunting night returns you to the underground river that flows between Nevers and Hiroshima. Yes, there was a war once that linked the two places, but the war was only the superficial bond. The more enduring tie was the way lovers touch and the woman remembers. The thing she is most afraid of is not a bigger bomb than Hiroshima but the chance that she may forget. The thing she cannot bear is the thought that life might be without links or significance in the dark.
Sometime in the magic of 1958–59, François Truffaut remembered his friend Jacques Rivette saying to him, “We’re going to make films, we all agree, we’re all going to make films.” You can guess the exuberance of the moment, the musketeer-like contract. Truffaut was born in Paris in 1932. Once the word autobiographical had been applied to his first feature film, Les Quatre Cents Coups, it became an axiom of foolish media that Truffaut had had a rough upbringing and that, really, the wolfish young actor he had found, Jean-Pierre Léaud, was playing him. I’m sure such dreams were exchanged, and Truffaut never really abandoned Léaud, even after his limits as an actor had been exposed. But every kid thinks he has a hard time. Not everyone puts it to such use.
Truffaut dropped out of school; he had an adoptive father; he was a semi-vagrant; and in 1946 he met André Bazin (the Spencer Tracy to his Mickey Rooney). Bazin (born in 1918) was a film critic and writer, the organizer of cine clubs, and a benevolent if not saintly figure. He talked to Truffaut; he kept in touch. François entered the army and was imprisoned for desertion. Bazin got the kid released, and he and his wife gave Truffaut lodging. Bazin found him a writing job at Cahiers, where Bazin was founder-editor. That’s where, in 1954, the young man published his attack on the old guard in French film—and before his own pictures, Truffaut was one of the best critics we have ever had. At Cahiers he was part of a gang—Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Luc Moullet, Jean Domarchi, Charles Bitsch—people you haven’t heard of. And names you may know, the “we” Rivette referred to: Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Rivette himself.
Cahiers was founded in 1951. Its essential rival, Positif, began in 1952. One fiery magazine must have a rival to say it’s talking rubbish. And that contest was sustained by several things that simply did not exist in, say, Los Angeles, the proclaimed capital of moviemaking: a great range of cinemas reviving old films, all of them versions of the Cinémathèque Française, an archive and a theater for the history of film, founded in 1936 by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju, and a hotbed of wartime conspiracy in the effort to keep its treasured prints out of German hands. It had been a private enterprise until 1945 but then it became protected by the state. Why not? If a culture requires the keeping of publications in a library of record, should it not preserve its films? Moreover, since 1943, Paris had had a school, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. IDHEC, as it was called, was so lofty it would decline Jean-Luc Godard as a student—so he went to the movies instead.
The school was for filmmakers, of course, if they weren’t watching or making films, but it was a measure of a culture that took it for granted that film should be discussed, as theory and practice. It was the case sometimes in 1959–60 that the nouvelle vague was depicted as a sudden flourish of youth. It was, but the youth had been raised in a culture that believed in the cinema. By contrast, as the same French kids reckoned, America had invented the mainstream movie but never taken it seriously or embarked on a proper cultural conversation.
It’s not that Truffaut, or any single figure, led the way. The first feature film from the group was Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958). A year earlier, Chabrol and Eric Rohmer had collaborated to write Hitchcock, the first attempt to convey the genius of that director, and one of the earliest critical books on film. Chabrol had two films in 1959, Les Cousins and À Double Tour. Jean-Luc Godard made short films, Tous les Garçons S’Appellent Patrick (1957) and Charlotte et Son Jules (1958), which used a young actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Rivette had made a short, Le Coup du Berger (1956), and he had plans already for a fictional panorama of Paris beset by a paranoia that came from McCarthyism, the blacklist, the Bomb, the Communists and an unshakable belief that the world was like movies, especially Fritz Lang movies. That would be called Paris Nous Appartient, but it wasn’t done until 1961.
Every pot was bubbling. In 1957, Truffaut made his own short, Les Mistons, about a gang of country kids observing a teenage romance with casual cruelty. The young actress Bernadette Lafont was the star, and the first object of Truffaut’s habitual, gazing question “Are women magic?” No one really doubted his answer. Truffaut might be the harbinger of the new in media commentary, but he had instincts that came straight out of movie tradition, such as getting involved with most of his actresses.
But in October 1957, Truffaut married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, a Hungarian Jew who had come to Paris, survived during the war, and become a respected distributor in French cinema—with most of his work serving the old guard Truffaut had attacked. But he got on with Truffaut and said he would finance a feature film for him to the extent of 400 million old francs. Claude Chabrol’s debut film had also relied on family money. Always, the money has to come from somewhere—if you can get it.
Not that Truffaut intended an extravagant film. He wanted to make a movie about a kid (fourteen or so) in Paris, bored with school and on the edge of delinquency, neglected by parents—a slice of life. You could not simply opt to direct a film then, even with a friendly father-in-law. Truffaut had to prove to the unions that he was competent. There had to be a script. For that he enlisted the aid of a novelist and screenwriter he knew, Marcel Moussy, and for his crew he got Henri Decaë, an experienced cameraman (he had shot Bob le Flambeur for Jean-Pierre Melville and Elevator to the Scaffold for Louis Malle), and Philippe de Broca as assistant director. In June 1958, Truffaut would write to Moussy:
I won’t conceal my anxiety from you; you’ve understood everything about my film so clearly and so quickly that I can’t imagine being deprived of your collaboration. Working on these memories, I have in a sense turned into a “first offender” again; I feel insecure and rebellious once more, overly vulnerable and completely isolated from society. It was Bazin who, ten years ago, straightened me out by becoming what you might call my guardian; talking to you, I felt at the same time guilty and rehabilitated, you are like Bazin in so many ways. Just as he helped me “go straight” in life, you’re going to help me make a film that will be more than just a whiny, complacent confession, a true film.
Jean-Pierre Léaud was found as an “unmanageable” kid of fourteen. His screen tests weren’t overwhelming, but Truffaut liked the sharp-faced mischief in Léaud and he began to see ways of making the character, Antoine Doinel, more than an imprint of himself. André Bazin died of leukemia in November 1958, just as Truffaut started the shoot. The film would be dedicated to Bazin.
It is a film with new names and faces, but it is conventional, too, full of fondness for an awkward adolescent. That warmth extends to Paris: the New Wave loved their city and helped make a cult of it that includes Moulin Rouge, Inception, and Hugo—as well as Boudu Sauvé des Eaux. Decaë managed to shoot in bad light—in winter, at twilight, using fast film stocks that got a viable image (just like Sweet Smell of Success). The film quoted from Jean Vigo, Renoir, and even Ingmar Bergman. It was funny, sad, tart, and wry and it had what would become a Truffaut signature: strong sentiments cut short out of shyness or fear. It was another sign of that modern worry: Can the movies really be so moving without turning maudlin or trashy?
At the very end, when Doinel escapes from reform school, he runs forever with the steady company of a tracking camera. But then as the boy reaches the sea—it was shot near Villers-sur-Mer, in Normandy—and runs down the sloping beach, the cam
era backs off and adopts a very beautiful track that is more lyricism than scrutiny. The boy steps into the sea, turns, and the film ends on a freeze frame as he gazes at us and wonders about the future.
Les Quatre Cents Coups was always a heartbreaker and a crowd pleaser—and Truffaut was never really comfortable if not winning an audience over. Previews were so good the Cannes Festival got word of it and persuaded André Malraux, minister for cultural affairs, to make it an official French entry. The irony was not missed that in 1958 Truffaut had been denied press credentials to Cannes because he was such a troublesome, aggressive critic.
Truffaut and Léaud arrived at the Carlton Hotel without so much as a poster for their film—and Cannes has always been a marketplace. Already the picture had been sold to America for $50,000, enough to cover the production budget. It screened for the festival on the night of May 4, 1959, with Jean Cocteau, the president of the jury, as host. There was great applause, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, in a rented tuxedo, was carried aloft out of the theater. Truffaut won the Best Director prize. The press went wild, from Le Monde to Elle, which proclaimed, “Never has the festival been so youthful. So happy to live for the glory of an art which youth loves. The twelfth film festival has the honor of announcing to you the rebirth of French cinema.”
It opened on the Champs-Élysées on June 3, and 450,000 tickets were sold that summer. By November it was playing in London and New York. (It got an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, but it was one more film trounced by Pillow Talk.) Truffaut’s income multiplied by a factor of twenty. He bought a sports car and felt he was like James Dean. Les Quatre Cents Coups remains a true and sweet film, with enough of a sour edge on the sweetness. By the end of 1959, Truffaut was shooting Tirez sur le Pianiste, with the singer Charles Aznavour, a figure in French show business. And every would-be filmmaker decided that Truffaut was like them.
As Les Quatre Cents Coups opened in Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard was kicking his heels in Paris. “It’s disgusting,” he told an acquaintance. “Everyone’s at Cannes. What the fuck am I doing here? I’ve absolutely got to get the money to go down there…Truffaut is a bastard, he could have thought of me.”
The two men had been allies at Cahiers du Cinéma. They saw film history in the same light. They had codirected a short film together in 1958, Une Histoire d’Eau, and Truffaut had once told Godard a simple story—about a thief who kills a cop and tries to hide out in Paris with an American girlfriend. Godard thought it might make his own feature debut. So he raided the petty cash at Cahiers and caught a train to Cannes. Once there, he told the story to Georges de Beauregard, a producer, and got Chabrol and Truffaut to assure de Beauregard that he could use their names—“story” by Truffaut, with Chabrol as “artistic supervisor.” Beauregard was agreeable but he had no money. So Godard went to a film financier, René Pignières, and won a promise of around $100,000, because the business was suddenly alert to these kids in the excitement of Les Quatre Cents Coups.
Godard was born in Paris in 1930, but most of his childhood and youth was passed in Switzerland, at Nyon, where his father, a doctor, had taken the family when Jean-Luc was four. He entered the Sorbonne planning to study ethnology, but he spent his time watching movies. In the early 1950s, he visited America, to avoid military service, and then worked his way back into the Cahiers group. He was never as readable a critic as Truffaut, but he was often inspired, aphoristic, and abrupt. From the outset, it was likely that Godard would not be content to work as a regular storyteller, or as a director fond of his own characters. As a young man he had stolen from his family, including a Renoir painting, which he sold for funds.
The story of À Bout de Souffle, or Breathless (1960), was as Truffaut had suggested, and no one remembers seeing a full script. Instead, it was pages or bits of paper delivered sometimes day by day. Raoul Coutard was hired as cameraman. He had done hardly anything previously and he was asked to film as simply or as directly as possible—no lights, handheld, nothing much in the way of equipment or crew—in a vérité manner. Coutard had too much natural feeling for light and motion to be as visually brusque as Godard wanted, but this was a film in search of a radical reappraisal of moviemaking. When the look proved too gentle or pleasing, Godard would embark on a savage editing to deconstruct the old fluency or pleasure.
He had promised the lead part, Michel, to Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he talked the actor out of a bigger picture on offer in return for a mere $800. For the American girl, Patricia, however, he suddenly thought of an American star, or a quasar, who happened to be there in Paris. Jean Seberg had been discovered in Iowa in the hype of a national search by Otto Preminger for someone to play the lead in Shaw’s St. Joan. She was the one, from among eighteen thousand, who got the part! Many critics felt the role was beyond her, but Preminger—tough on her in person yet saving face in public—then took her to France to play the lead in his film of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse. And there she had flowered, moving in the one picture from an awkward adolescent to a precocious but fatalistic young woman, and winning this ecstatic review from François Truffaut:
When Jean Seberg is on the screen, which is all the time, you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect…In the blue shorts slit on the side, in pirate pantaloons, in a skirt, an evening gown, a bathing suit, a man’s shirt with the shirttails out, or tied in front over her stomach, or wearing a corsage and behaving herself (but not for long), Jean Seberg, short blond hair on a pharaoh’s skull, wide-open blue eyes with a glint of boyish malice, carries the entire weight of this film on her tiny shoulders.
This may be the best review she would ever receive, and it must have helped persuade her to do Breathless. (She had sent a thank-you letter to Truffaut.) But Seberg had been trained in Preminger’s Hollywood. She found Godard “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look me in the eyes when he talked.” She didn’t think Patricia was likable in any way and she believed an actress’s characters should be sympathetic. But her new husband, a French lawyer, François Moreuil, negotiated a full quarter of the film’s budget for her, so she said she would do it. The shoot wasn’t reassuring. The film was full of talk, but all the words would be dubbed in later.
“I’m in the midst of this French film,” she wrote to a friend, “and it’s a long, absolutely insane experience—no lights, no makeup, no sound! Only one good thing—it’s so un-Hollywood I’ve become completely unselfconscious.”
Yet here was a picture where Belmondo’s character begins by trying to imitate Humphrey Bogart as seen in a movie poster. And surely Patricia was meant as a bridge to the international market and because Godard was fascinated by Hollywood actresses, American girls—and what François could see in them. (Jean-Luc was never that generous to players.) As a critic, he had been devoted to American style—to Nick Ray, Sirk, Fuller, and the other Cahiers auteurs. As Richard Roud put it (and this fits so many crime films over the ages), “À Bout de Souffle was modeled much more on Scarface [Howard Hawks, 1932] and other American thrillers than on any direct knowledge Godard had of the underworld milieu.” It’s not just that Belmondo aims at the would-be American hoodlum with such existential zest; Godard is there in support, urging on the nihilist assault on moribund European values.
When the film was edited it proved too long and too slow: not much happens in stretches of sophomoric talk that are timid or evasive about sex. Breathless promised a blunt confrontation between attractive kids. It had a prolonged bedroom scene, under the sheets, yet Godard showed no instinct for having “it” happen on camera. Hitchcock’s Psycho—a film of the same moment—was far sexier, far more voyeurist.
So to make its length manageable, Godard the cutter invaded his own film, showing a kind of contempt for his flimsy story and the whole scheme of narrative or moral development. He refined/degraded his own movie, letting jump cuts interve
ne where smooth editing once ruled the day. It was as if he was sneering at the viewer: you’re not actually watching this as if you believe it or care, are you? But enough viewers responded to this curt treatment for a revolutionary style to be acclaimed and regarded as modish. Breathless played at ninety minutes and it felt like a revelation. In a seven-week Paris run in the spring of 1960, it sold more than 250,000 tickets. It won the Prix Jean Vigo and made a profit of fifty times the budget. Then it became an international sensation. Observers outside film felt compelled to comment. Jean-Paul Sartre said it was “really very beautiful.” Referring back to Alexandre Astruc’s essay of 1948, proposing the “caméra stylo,” Gerard De Vries said Breathless was a full-fledged work made in that approach.
The truth was more complicated and less organized. Godard’s deconstruction of a narrative film’s form was not too far from those American films of 1959 that were abandoning narrative sincerity for parody or an explosive camp reappraisal. But Rio Bravo and Some Like It Hot still ran smooth; their subversion lay in their ironic attitudes. Godard sensed more, spurred on by the anthology called television, where the audience had seen everything—so make it different. In advance of the remote-control device for self-editing with television, Breathless had a scattered dynamic that said, next, next, hurry on. More than telling a story, Breathless had the world-weary attitude “let’s get this over with,” and so the film was always plunging toward the last blank look on Patricia’s face as the dying Michel tells her she is “dégueulasse.”
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 42
