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Made in USA
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“As Tears Go By”, sings Marianne Faithfull a cappella in her fluttery, late-teenage
voice: a plaintive, melancholic, lyrical scene in the typically Nouvelle Vague
setting of a bar. In the Godardian context of 1966, however, tears should also be heard/read as rips – and there are plenty of them
going by the spectator of Made in USA.
It’s a film of fragments, bits and pieces, a collage
submitted to a (radical) montage. Jacques Rivette remarked of it in a 1969 Cahiers du cinéma symposium that “Godard leaves the impression of an earlier
film, rejected, contested, defaced, torn to shreds: destroyed as such, but
still ‘subjacent’ …”. (1) It was invented very quickly (three weeks from
the first phone call to the start of shooting; made, completed and more-or-less
released at the same time as the far richer Two
or Three Things I Know About Her – “Now I am going to drag along the
fatigue of my twin films during the next two at least”, he wrote near the end
of ‘66) to help out a producer pal, Georges de Beauregard, who was in a fiscal
fix after the official banning of Rivette’s The Nun. (2)
Ian Cameron was right to characterise Made in USA, in 1967, as “a film with
little at its centre but with a very strong periphery” – exactly the kind of seemingly deep (or, at the very least, busy) movie that whips up a troubling
storm of incomprehensibility and drives critics to “either blanket adulation or
invective” in their desperate grasping at a “value judgement”. (3) One has, in
fact, rarely encountered a work in which there is such a rift between its
nominal centre – a story of political and investigative intrigue – and everything
that surrounds that centre: for want of a better word, its texture, the material from which it is woven in what Marie-Claire Ropars
dubbed a “symphonic recomposition”. (4)
There is not really a discrepancy or contradiction
between these levels; the economy of Godard’s films has never worked in that
more-or-less classical way. But Made in
USA, more than anything else by Godard, gives the impression of being
conjured from almost nothing, improvised on-the-fly – and, as he remarked ruefully
20 years on at the time of Détéctive (1985), when you’re exhausted, you draw and what you already know and what
you’ve already done. Hence, and again more than anything else by Godard, Made in USA relies on self-quotations,
reprises of set-ups and devices, formal doodles and stylistic squiggles
borrowed from the full gamut of his previous 11 features. People talk into the
camera; death throes are histrionically mimicked (by Jean-Pierre Léaud); Anna
Karina recites poetry in close-ups; cinephilic allusions to American action
genres and their prize auteurs (Ray, Fuller, Aldrich, Preminger) abound.
By the mid ‘60s – as Suzanne Schiffman, his indispensable assistant in that era, often recounted (5) – Godard would regularly ask aloud on set how many minutes of the prospective feature-length he had so far filled; if the count was lacking, he would have the performers read out newspapers, tell a joke or recite a literary passage (perhaps whispered into an earpiece to speed up the instant memorisation process) – anything to trigger an extended long-take – and a great deal of this appears to have occurred in the making of Made in USA, with its stretched-out set-piece blocks (which are then dutifully chopped up and sometimes redistributed in the editing). Godard had exactly this impression of it when he rewatched it 12 years later for the lectures transcribed in Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television.
It’s an odd kind of embroidery, designed to keep
Godard and us amused while the plot “machine” at the centre splutters on (“I
have respected story continuity for the first time in Made in USA”, he rather weirdly boasted in ‘66). (6) What is that
centre? The film stages the crossing of two items that were uppermost in JLG’s
mind when the project suddenly arose. First, triggered by a randomly chosen
“Parker” novel by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake), there was the amorphous
history of American crime-action-noir cinema that he had already mined at least
four times since À bout de souffle (1960), but now détourned to a near-hysterical pitch of
anti-Americanism (Ropars took it as “an attack on America … accomplished
through a violent destruction of American cinema”), (7) as well as
hero-gender-switched. Second, “a marginal episode from the Ben Barka affair”
(as Godard evoked it) (8) involving Georges Figon, a journalist (Time magazine unfussily called him “a French ex-convict and freelance barbouze [undercover agent]”) who claimed to have witnessed Mehdi
Ben Barka, a Moroccan politician, being tortured (with the alleged aid of
French police) and left to die by General Mohamed Oufikir, a former Moroccan
Interior Minister. Once the story broke, Figon was, in turn, soon found dead –
having killed himself when cops arrived at his door, or so the official account
ran.
In the film, Figon becomes Richard Politzer (whom we
never see), the ex-lover (in True History,
this character is intriguingly misremembered as a “daughter”, since Godard knew
Figon’s daughter) of reporter Paula (Karina). Godard makes direct use of a
popular line from the satirical magazine Le
Canard enchaîné (still going today) that this unlikely hero “committed suicide with a shot fired against him from
point-blank range”. Speculation about the Ben Barka affair and its complicated
global tangle of players (French, American, Moroccan, Israeli) raged until the
publication of Ronen Bergman’s exhaustively researched Rise and Kill First in 2018.
Does that sound like the basis for a
reasonably lucid political parable? Although often hailed (or damned) as
inscrutable and deliberately impossible to follow (in the vein of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep [1946]), there actually
isn’t much that’s hard to figure out in Made
in USA: Paula meets a string of people, most of them die along the way, and
ultimately either the killers confess, or Paula ferrets them out – before
herself firing a trusty gun to end their lives and careers in this shady
netherworld of power and manipulation. Who’s ultimately to blame, who’s really
calling the shots? Things get fuzzy on that level, just as they were for an
earlier, right-leaning Godard in Le Petit
soldat (1960). Yet form and content, centre and periphery, never truly
mesh, or find a mutual resonance here. It ain’t Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021), which truly comes
on like a shredded, finely ambiguous clash of possible, reversible, hyperreal
scenarios.
As Cameron remarks, Paula talks Left but
acts Right: like a proto-Dirty Harry (or, a model from further back, Mike
Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly [1955] and I, the Jury [1982]), her bullets decide who the
villains are and condemns them accordingly – and Godard simultaneously mocks
and enjoys this hardboiled reflex. (9) Yet, by the same token, Paula the
Righteous Avenger also seals the lid on the Truth of the case ever coming to
light. The film leaves her literally out on Paris’ West highway (the drive-off
is an Alphaville [1965] reprise)
conversing with another journalist (real-life muckraking writer and later
filmmaker – a bad one, according to JLG – Philippe Labro) about how “we can no
longer pose the equation [of politics] like that”, in the old Left/Right terms.
How, then? In 1966, for Godard, it’s an open question without the glimmer of an
answer. The confusion may have been sincerely expressed at that precise
historical moment, but it’s also a mystification and an evasion; there’s an odd
continuity, across five-and-a-half decades, between the stylishly generic and
amoral international-power-play fun-and-games of the TV series Killing Eve (2018-2022) and the
exhausted, muddled crime story of Made in
USA.
Cameron made no bones about classing Made in USA as (up to ’67) Godard’s “slightest
film” (10); Godard in ’78 didn’t rank it much higher. What does it have going
for it? An incredible palette of Pop Art colours (something of which, years
later, Godard remained proud) courtesy of cinematographer Raoul Coutard, surely
owing a good deal to Agnès Varda’s experimentation the previous year in Le Bonheur (1965); what evolved into a
running gag (thanks to censorship) of contentious dialogue references (names,
especially) blotted out by roaring planes, ringing telephones and clanging slot
machines (Luis Buñuel borrowed that joke and played it cooler in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972]); an orgy of deframed bodies and heads placed offside of vast negative
spaces; passages of strangely beautiful, sudden silence, mixing-board faders
pulled down as the mouths flap on; wild, fragmented edits timed to the tiniest
cues wrested from Beethoven or Schumann. In this spirit, Ropars inadvertently
channelled Manny Farber when in ’67 she evoked the “lacerating flashes of a few
telescoped shots in which people are thrown against a wall and pinned there,
along with freedom”. (11) There’s also a particular sociology of place, or what
would later be called non-place, to
which Gilles Jacob well attested.
It is the meeting places (bars, cafés, swimming pools), the places you
pass through (garages, airport waiting-rooms), the deserted places (movie
theatres, streets), the antechambers of anguish (doctors’ offices) and the
temporary shelters (hotel rooms, unfurnished apartments) of these settings that
emerge in a lacerating fashion. (12)
It is effectively the first film in which Godard
ditches, once and for all, the conventional conception of fictional characters. You could “care” –
discontinuously, on and off – for the lonely Nana in Vivre sa vie (1962) or the increasingly tormented/alienated lovers in Contempt (1963), Bande à part (1964), Pierrot le fou (1965) or Masculin féminin (1966); you could even (if this is your,
like rum biographer Brody’s,
bag) find poignant autobiographical echoes of the filmmaker’s ongoing sentimental
education (or misery) there – just as you can again, later, in the great decade-long
cycle initiated by Sauve qui peut (1980).
But everybody in Made in USA is a
cartoon figure (and Laszlo Szabo
literally provides the appropriate cartoon faces and voices). Or as Cameron put
it in ’67: “The actors are, even by Godard’s standards, very little concerned
with the traditional business of creating characters”. (13) These figures are
ciphers, emblems, flags of this or that film-type or ideological position;
whatever emotion is evoked in and by the film (and that can vary, as well as
displace itself, from one viewing to the next), it floats frees of them.
Another intriguing rift.
Alain Bergala, while fatally faulting Made in USA in retrospect for “not
having a real subject” (and Godard agreed with that in ‘78), nonetheless
salvages it as a kind of inventory à la Jacques Prévert or lightly fictionalised catalogue of signs à la Georges Perec: in this sense, a
valuable chronicle of (the surfaces of) the 1960s. (14) That archival utility
(and fascination) of Godard cannot be downplayed, especially as time goes by:
his films give you the Arcade of Walter Benjamin’s writerly-dream in all its
gaudy splendour, equally in sound as in image. Jacob, in 1967, took an approach
similar to Bergala’s.
And if, in 50 or 100 years, Godard comes to be considered, as a few of
us predict, as one of the most important creators of our era, it is precisely because
he will have given us the least superficial chronicle of it by using the most
superficial of its elements – pictures, posters, comic strips, newspaper
clippings, book titles, graffiti … everything which, for a sociologist storing
up the present for the future, constitutes the word filled with its true
meaning before misunderstanding has transformed it into a lie. (15)
But for Godard in ’66, “the word” – language – is not
yet “filled with its true meaning”; maybe it never has been, and he is very anguished
about it. In the same bistro sequence as Faithfull’s cameo, there is a
stretched-out verbal play (Bergala describes it as “an Oulipist delirium à la Raymond Queneau”) (16) that
expresses a familiar, post-existentialist problematic of troubling indifference,
words meaning nothing or everything, depending on the sequence and context in
which they are placed (and the same goes, naturally, for shots in cinema);
there’s the giddiness of free poetry at one end and the solidity of fascist
propaganda at the other end of the continuum, but the uncontrollable
vacillation between these options creates only an abyssal vertigo. For Ropars, Made in USA therefore demonstrates
Godard’s “inability to organise a political language” – it’s the Big Problem of
Content in his work – but nonetheless she counted it in ‘67 among his “best
films”, of a “tremendous beauty”: “Made
in USA is a poetic film because in it Godard settles his accounts with
poetry, because in it poetry never stops dying beneath the blows of history”. (17) It’s a fragile tension to maintain.
Two or Three Things will prolong
and deepen the anguished but equally semi-Utopian reflection on lost language
(of every kind). But, once that anguish has been finally uncoupled from the
vicissitudes of lyrical love (as tears go by … ) and hitched to the swiftly
vaulting extremism of ultra-Left commitment, Godard will embrace a new form of
discursive certainty (the “master discourses” of Althusser, Mao, etc.) – and it
will take him quite a while to recover from the fanaticism of that
self-inflicted blow. Godard, thrown against a wall and pinned there, along with
freedom …
MORE Godard: Aria, Hélas pour moi, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1A & 1B, For Ever Mozart, Soigne ta droite, Éloge de l’amour, La Chinoise, Film Socialism, Tout va bien, Ici et ailleurs 1. Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre & Jacques Rivette, "Montage". back
2. See Jean-Luc Godard, “One or Two Things”, in Toby
Mussman (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard (New
York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), pp. 274-275; and Alain Bergala, “Made in USA”, Spécial Godard: trente ans depuis, Cahiers du cinéma hors-série (1990), p. 117.
3. Ian Cameron, “Made
in USA”, in Cameron (ed.), The Films
of Jean-Luc Godard (London: Studio Vista, 1969), pp. 132, 135.
4. Marie-Claire Ropars, “Form and Substance, or the
Avatars of the Narrative”, in Royal S. Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), p. 95.
5. See, for instance, Michel Cournot’s interview with
Schiffman, “A Leap Into Emptiness”, in Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard, pp. 46-49.
6. Godard, “One or Two Things”, p. 275.
7. Ropars, “Form and Substance”, pp. 91-92.
8. Godard, “One or Two Things”, p. 275.
9. Cameron, “Made
in USA”, p. 139.
10. Ibid., p. 132.
11. Ropars, “Form and Substance”, p. 94.
12. Gilles Jacob, “Atonal Cinema for Zombies”, in
Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard, pp.
150-151.
13. Cameron, “Made
in USA”, p. 132.
14. Bergala, “Made
in USA”, p. 117.
15. Jacob, “Atonal Cinema”, p. 149.
16. Bergala, “Made
in USA”, p. 117.
17. Ropars, “Form and Substance”, pp. 106-108.
© Adrian Martin 13 April 2022 |
