Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Meant to be based on the novel The Soft Centre by James Hadley Chase

Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Gaspard Bazin; Jean-Pierre Mocky as Jean Almereyda; Marie Valera as Eurydice

An Abstract Candidate Re-Review

 

ALBATROSS

FILMS

 

For Jean-Luc Godard, the state of cinema is assessed by way of an adaptation of a James Hadley Chase crime novel, or what should have been one, originally produced for the crime story series Série noire (1984–1991) in France. In this episode of the series, we are introduced to producer Jean Almereyda (Jean-Pierre Mocky), once a matinee idol and major producer explicitly referenced later on in this world to having funded Georges Franju's Head Against the Wall (1959), and lost his career from the failure of Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), now reduced to TV movies. He is also now dogged by a case of stolen money, all whilst his main director Gaspard Bazin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), once an acclaimed figure, spends his time in an obsessive ritual for casting extras that eats up the funds they do have. Almereyda's wife Eurydice (Marie Valera), feeling herself a caged bird, crosses paths with Bazin, becoming a potential creative source when she desires to be an actress.

This, in that premise, befits the time period of theatrical films Godard made, but as mentioned, this was for television, clearly shot with video. It is strange we can uncover lost films by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the biggest names in all cinema, but we can forget that even after ten years, obscurer films in a director's filmography can be neglected absentmindedly, especially when Godard's career for many was the sixties French New Wave era, or his Film Socialisme (2010) period onwards, not even considering his work in television or short film creations. That even a great American director can have material not available means that the Swiss director, even if he is a legend in cinema, can have probably more unavailable, as both being a director who worked in a foreign language to English, and has experiments in television and short work more rife than many in his career. Rise and Fall..., taking place when he returned with his second "debut" Every Man For Himself (1980) after his experimental and Dziga-Vertov Group era, comes a year before his infamous Cannon Films production King Lear (1987), but even here, as a big name to bring in to his assignment with Série noire, he did not do as likely intended.

At one point, Godard does buries the book through Jean-Pierre Léaud's Bazin, and Rise and Fall..., rather than the adaptation of a crime novel as like intended, is a meeting place between his return to narrative cinema in the eighties, and the video experiments that would lead him to his career in the current day, the video and use of clips here a prototype for Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998). The noticeable limitations - the TV screen ration, the limited aesthetic, the video sheen and digital text captions - are things that would undermine another director, but are like providing Godard with new tools to work with here. He is someone, known to use VHS rips of old films on purpose still to this day, completely polymorphous when it comes to technology, already working on television productions in the seventies and, in the 2010s in his older statesman position, having his own 3D camera built by scratch and making a 3D feature in Goodbye to Language (2014). Still working with a plot, he uses this context around one which contrary to his famous quote does have a beginning, middle and end in that order, the struggles of a TV movie company mid adaptation of James Hadley Chase's The Soft Centre, the novel Godard is meant to adapt, in which he weaves his state of unrest, looking at cultural critiques in the midst of the tired producer Jean Almereyda, and the deranged genius Gaspard Bazin.

Léaud, meeting back with Godard and thus evoking his many moments in the latter's work, could if you cheated a little be the exact character he would later play in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996). The same director hired to remake Les Vampires (1915-16) in that film, he here as Bazin rather than that film's character is stuck in a wilderness era in the late eighties, his obsessive ritual with the extras of having them move through rooms in a conveyor belt his fixation. Having them quoting at one point the same passage contracted together between them, the ritual is much him attempting to find his creative sanity as madness. He is less irritated by being stuck making television work, but more that, (with the film biting the hand financing this feature), he wished he was adapting Dashiell Hammett instead, alongside the sense of the world being entirely alien to him, someone in his back story having been as broken mentally as his producer Almereyda in status by the industry.

In a world where he and his producer sit in front of a television showing a fire, rather than a real one, to stay warm, the world has become stranger than the sixties they made their fames in, that strange and very funny moment pretty much the best statement from Godard of what he is aiming at, in the all pervasive air of a television, all within telling a really good narrative in his unconventional way. The film making world is so different from France's before, where Bazin's arcane ritual with the casting chews up money for a company who cannot even get a TV movie off the ground and shown. That Jean Almereyda has stolen German marks, an act that will doom him, to run the company, is as much caused by the struggle of his own career as it is because Bazin is not helping.

Admittedly, Godard's criticisms of the state of cinema and life, as he has been doing them since the sixties, could dangerously fall into shouting into the wind, worse a man trying to joust windmills thinking they are dragons. I view the Film Socialisme Godard, onwards to this day, as cinema's Prospero now, in his magical tower in Switzerland creating his cinematic incantations, or like his character Professor Pluggy in King Lear with patch-cord dreadlocks in his hair, isolated from the world entirely but still incanting on the state of it with a world weariness to his voice. Bazin's test to people, which Eurydice actually succeeds in, of being able to see the true number of characters within classic art, not the exact number but those who are the most important, feels like Godard himself. We must realise in hindsight, for the innovations he brought to cinema with his peers with Breathless (1960) onwards, his career has morphed from the innovator to the figure looking even beyond art to culture in general. Going into literature, classical art, older films, and with this having a crow's murder of soundtrack choices - Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin's Mercedes Benz perfectly used for an intertitle - Godard became someone who is not just the cineaste but the curator of art, a man who can appreciate Jerry Lewis in his youth, but by this point in his career brought in classical music and even Scott Walker into his scores.

His philosophical concerns here are not only enlightening but constantly evolving over time, the ones of yore still relevant to the current day or time capsules to new problems per era, especially as like many of the films from this eighties period, he returned to narrative, and the narratives are interesting even if unconventional. Here, ironically when he was asked to make this TV film, he is practically spiting at the producers by having the pair of Bazin and Almereyda as doomed figures of the past, floundering even in commercial television, but that is still a compelling little noir tale in itself. Calling the female lead Eurydice is a loaded choice too, but like the women and femme fatales of noir, she is also the focal point here for the drama, as the female heroine also dragged down in tropes of those films of corrupt and the underbelly of life, here the figure kept in an unhappy marriage as a trophy wife to an older husband. She is ultimately not the person that leads someone to doom unlike other noirs, instead the one who, from an unhappy marriage, actually finds happiness in the end here.

Their lives are small scale, the television budget and style of Rise and Fall... helping this. It is too rye to be an out-and-out comedy, but humour is to be found especially in side characters like the accountant, who in deadpan handing out paltry earnings to the extras discounting their social security. Or Léaud playing up his character's out-of-control behaviour, be it interrupting a phone call between a potential actress with acute abruptness, brought to she suspiciously suspected to be erotic shot, when asked to bring a bikini alongside her, or breaking into a Woody Woodpecker impression. Godard's also one of the few directors able to get away with casting himself as the wise sage as well. Much of it, by this time, is because Godard was such an iconic name it was impossible to get around this, common in narrating his own films since the sixties and having a reputation as a figure outside of cinema, making his work (usually dialectic anyway) completely attached to him. Rise and Fall... offers him playing himself, amusingly (as I want to picture it) visiting Reykjavik in Iceland because he had to witness the greatest chess game being played there, but here appearing to find a deal back in France, his scene turns into something else with his talk about Romy Schneider.

Schneider's reference is also one of the most important, and bitterly sweetest, of this film, as thus his scene turns to an appropriate melancholic air about the period, of Schneider, in real life, passing in 1982 in only her early forties. An actress of considerable talent, starting in the fifties and connected to the multi-continental era of European cinema, from France to Italy, the scene in general as well as the clear empathy for her in the dialogue becomes one of the film's most meaningful scene, with Godard with his fictional creation Jean Almereyda, of two old professionals lamenting their careers in cinema being affected by the change in tide, left adrift within it, with Schneider's death for Godard marking a symbolic change in the industry. Even if Godard would become more and more a legendary filmmaker who made films to the current day, he eventually drifted far from narrative cinema again into the nineties, into experimental features entirely, all bolstered by the reputation he developed allowing him to leave mainstream cinema behind whilst French cinema would evolve again into the Millennium into its own form.

His critiques are matched by a willingness to play with the form of film a way few would. The limitations, the flaws, of this television work are devices for him to exploit, superimposition to the hair-raising use of slow motion on a female extra's emotions mid-performance all his hand with collaborators constructing the images and audio. He even deliberately has the sound abruptly halted as if the film has failed, followed by a technical difficulties screen, for a joke about how that would have likely happened in television in that era. The marriage between the two sides is like a much underrated theatrical feature Godard made within this era, Detective (1985) with Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye, a small scale crime narrative confined to one hotel, perfect for Godard's experimentation as well as providing an actual story. Rise and Fall... still tells an interesting tale - for Jean-Pierre Léaud's Bazin, a spark of life is found in Eurydice, who he compares to actress Dita Parlo known for films like Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937); for Almereyda, an embarrassing conclusion to his life, made more embarrassing trying to flee in the silliest costume possible for an escape. Bazin's connection to Eurydice is also not a romantic or sexual relationship either, instead Bazin finding artistic clarity, Eurydice her independence and freedom, finding business in the end to work as head of. Even when the tables turn, and Bazin is now an extra by the ending, he finds happiness nonetheless.

Restored and premiering at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, sadly the reappearance of Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company is not as readily available as one would hope. However if Godard's Dziga Vertov years can be accessed, insanely difficult to appreciate (and even defend) films, and high definition versions no less, than one day one hopes Rise and Fall... would join those available. It is a title absolutely worthy of availability, like many of Jean-Luc Godard's eighties and early nineties work a hidden part of his career which is compelling and virtuous.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Diegetic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low