While the critics are still wrestling with the political and aesthetic implications of his La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard has already been treating himself to a new film; it will contain one of the biggest traffic jams in cinema history. Nothing could be better calculated to put on display the inherently loutish nature of the Parisian than to observe him on the now obligatory, purgatorial weekend trip through suburban traffic in search of “calm.” And no one is better equipped to get it on film than the sulky pope of the nouvelle vague.
The plot of Week-end, in so far as Godard will reveal it, concerns a young couple, Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne, who decide to kill each other on one of these trips out of the metropolis. This traffic sequence is a technical landmark in Godard’s career since it will run for a period of between six-and-a-half and eight minutes – depending on whether the director uses the sequence where his crew pushed the dolly 300 yards fretfully on an empty stomach, or vigorously after a feast of cold meat and mayonnaise.
At eight in the morning Godard appeared in a field a few miles outside Versailles and with a springing nervous step and dark resentful eye began to poke and push and rearrange the material laid out for his pleasure. It included a llama; a man preparing to tow a yacht in full sail; an oil tanker; a man bringing a brace of lions out for an afternoon jaunt and another who favoured monkeys; a child screaming to pee on the road… In fact, an assortment of all that is humanly and mechanically troublesome.
The idea that no one knows what will happen from moment to moment in making a Godard film is true only in so far as Godard never tells anyone. In this case he took four and a half hours to lay out the material to a pattern which clearly corresponded to some very precise notions of colour, movement, and noise.
Photograph: Everett Collection, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
When it was all just about ready he rode up and down the lines with a loud hailer briefing his troops on every frantic gesture and every excruciating expletive. He had jeeps stick long sharp steel fingers into the eyes of wrecked cars and toss them on their backs. He smeared blood on a scatter of citizens at a cross-roads and went around the rest of the day half happy with his blood-stained hands. One felt that all he needed fully to relieve himself was a press conference. Then a motor horn gave the signal to set everything in motion. Possibly to irritate his new Communist supporters of La Chinoise the starting signal was Algérie Française.
At each take the movement of the camera was precisely the same. Starting with a high, stretched neck to catch the couple roaring into the blocked traffic, it then sank down to drift parallel with their erratic passage through the honking drivers and then rose again to get a bird’s eye view of the holocaust at the cross-roads as the couple swung clear out into deserted grim countryside.
The first time it went all wrong. With his stubborn determination to dictate every frame of a sequence, Godard could not make allowances for slippery human beings coming at him on a kind of conveyer belt. They kept pulling out of the frame while the cameraman was condemned to follow an imaginary line. After haggling they compromised; the camera would still follow the line but with freedom to swing about to catch what was happening.
Now riding atop the camera Godard conducted the operation; he punched with a bloody left fist to stoke up the chorus; pushed at air urgently with flattened hands to slow the progress of the couple; rounded his lips silently and bared his teeth like a lunatic to remind people to come across with their lines – he drifted along creating a screaming, honking cacophony in the quiet of a Versailles backwater. He went through this seven times before lunch and four after.
A few more things went wrong. A giraffe did not turn up. “Caught in a traffic jam?” someone suggested. A monkey escaped and ran up a tree. A hairy assistant cameraman, chosen no doubt because of his resemblance to a monkey, was sent scrambling up the tree after him. They came down embracing lovingly.
And there was a more irksome problem: people wanted to eat. Everyone was presented with his cardboard box of cold grub while Godard paced about, resentfully digging his teeth into an apple, clearly disapproving of the sad orgy of eating in the damp fields. Then he climbed back on to his cinematographic tank and grimacing and punching led his troops along another firing line of aggression, spleen and frustration. A very Parisian day all round.
Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
