Jean-Luc Godard was, and still remains, a giant — present as a critic and filmmaker from the halfway point of the last century all the way to our current year, even two years after his passing. The question of form in his cinema becomes all-consuming, as a man constantly reaching: toward new technologies, modes, and audiences. From its origins at the genesis of the Vouvelle Vague, Godard’s relationship to cinema was in its “second wave” in the 1980s. This period began with the release of Every Man for Himself (1980). For the American release of the picture, Godard participated in an interview on the Dick Cavett show. The two bantered over Godard’s seemingly obtuse personality, his obsession with Jerry Lewis’ geometries, and his ever-wandering camera. Godard was asked how he would navigate the cinematic space of the film studio, and the director answered this way: “Space is the time you need to go to someone else.”
Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company: As Revealed by the Casting of a TV Movie was, like the majority of Godard’s 100+ films, doomed to the annals of his devotees’ histories of the director: A television movie based on the James Hadley Chase detective novel The Soft Centre, which adapted Godard’s own process of adaptation rather than the actual text. Jean-Pierre Léaud is cast as director Gaspard Bazin (a stand-in for Godard), working for television producer Jean (Vigo) Almereyda played by Jean-Pierre Mocky. A movie about making movies was not foreign to Godard — in some respects, every film he had ever made was as much about its creation as it was about anything else. Films like Contempt and Passion literalized this struggle, of course, but take a film like Tout Va Bien — which is ostensibly about striking sausage factory workers but opens with the declaration “I want to make a film” and the response “You need money for that.” The opening credits are a series of checks to various film departments, the work is self-reflexive and almost entirely interior — taking place in a factory in the mode of Jerry Lewis’ dollhouse in The Ladies’ Man. Godard’s concern for workers was as important as his with the making of a film, and in Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company, the two fronts would come to a head.
The film opens on a line of actors waiting to read for Bazin’s film, soundtracked by Leonard Cohen’s “The Guests.” The producer, Almereyda, is about to be audited. He puffs away at a cigarette while he negotiates his expenses with a secretary and an accountant, desperate to ensure that his company survives their apparent financial doom. In another room, the actors enter for their screen tests. They rehearse a monologue, one actor speaking one line at a time, in a manner not dissimilar to the way Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet staged Toute Révolution est un Coup de Dés based on a Mallarmé poem just nine years earlier. In a stunning moment near the end of the sequence, the video feed suddenly stutters, and the audience realizes that their perspective has changed, and they have been watching the camera test through the cameras in the room. Caroline Champetier’s video cinematography is just as stunning as anything else in Godard’s catalogue (the ’80s had already seen her shooting for Chantal Akerman, Straub-Huillet, and Jacques Rivette), Godard taking advantage of the medium’s channeled textures and flexibility, weaving the nature of the material into the story and form of the film.
Rise and Fall‘s narrative is as elusive as anything Godard made in this period, though its basic components are held together by the relationships between Bazin, Almereyda, and Almereyda’s wife Eurydice, played by Marie Valera. Eurydice wants a role from Bazin, a constant thorn in Almereyda’s side for fear of whether his director will or will not cast her. Almereyda discusses this trouble with none other than Jean-Luc Godard himself, as the two grumble over the state of the industry. “We are not pirates,” Godard insists, after Almereyda complains about the larger budgets of Hollywood. The conversation between the two of them ends with Godard declaring that casting Eurydice is “not a matter of time or era, it’s a matter of tempo.” Indeed, Eurydice does capture Bazin’s attention — a portrait Bazin shoots of her, hands pressed against the iron bars of a window cage, feels like a dress rehearsal for one of the most impressive shots of Godard’s career in Goodbye to Language. The film’s coda sees Almereyda killed in his company’s backlot for no apparent reason — Bazin pouring over tapes of the man’s voice. “The cinema is a dream factory… You keep the dreams and leave me with the factory.”
This work of Godard’s was one preeminently concerned with cinema workers as workers, Godard on the Cavett show saying “I’m both the whore [worker] and the boss of the studio.” The actors in Rise and Fall of a Film Company are kept in a revolving cycle, as if on an assembly line — much is made of their paychecks after the screen tests, which are accounted for in their exact dollar amount by the account, one by one. The actors are mannequins for the grander ideals of the filmmaker, no one prop more important than another. In this way, Godard reveals cinema as a parade of strangers, entering in a single-file line and each leaving with a selection of the material. Divided among them, a hundred different films which add up to one movement. Though, where Godard’s factory workers in Tout Va Bien were on strike, these workers operate like drones, taking all matters of misery from Bazin in stride. At one point, Bazin mixes up his queue cards and hands them to a secretary to organize. Bazin acts not unlike Godard, giving the puzzle pieces of his films to the audience to sort for themselves. “These are the waves. Recreate the ocean.”
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