For Nick, Sam, Nixon and Karina: Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In U.S.A
By 1966 Jean-Luc Godard was nearing the end of what is considered in many quarters to be the most creatively prolific decade of any filmmaker in the sound age. Between Breathless in 1960, and 1967’s Weekend, the Swiss-Franco filmmaker would produce no less than 15-feature length films of great interest, a task unparalleled even when one looks to the infinitely more productive silent period. Made In U.S.A, a film made outside of the U.S.A but one very much informed by that country’s culture, particularly the film noir, the cinema of Wilder and Hawks, and the novels of Hammett and Chandler, was one of a number of films directed by Godard in 1966, and was shot essentially as a favour for long-term producer Georges de Beauregard. While a number of Godard’s projects came by this way of chance and circumstance, Made In U.S.A is perhaps more notable than others for being a film which very much fitted in naturally with the direction the filmmaker was heading in in the wake of Pierrot Le Fou, the work which marked not only the breakdown of his marriage to Anna Karina (who, in Made In U.S.A, appears in a Godard feature for the final time (I)) but the breakdown of the filmmakers relationship with the silver screen.
While Pierrot Le Fou was considered by Godard himself to be the first time the cinema itself didn’t hold the answers to his creative woes, one can chart a period from that picture through to Weekend as the decline of his interest in the standard form feature. Whilst working on Pierrot Le Fou, as highly personal an experience as any production has ever likely to be, with Godard later admitting that the cinema had all but abandoned him: “In my other films, when I had a problem, I asked myself what Hitchcock would have done in my place. While making Pierrot Le Fou, I had the impression that he wouldnt have known how to answer, other than, “Work it out for yourself!””(II). As he became increasingly politicised his gaze shifted from the worlds created by Welles and Ford to those inhabited by the politically engaged youth of Paris in the late-1960’s. His own move towards a reawakening of the real aligns neatly with the road to May ’68, the events of by which time he had fully turned a corner away from narrative cinema and was firmly placed within the experiemental.
But alas, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In many ways Made In U.S.A was the last of Godard’s films to be produced in a manner one might deem to be traditional, at least according to his own approach. While the 1980’s brought with it a period heralded by many as a second golden age for the filmmaker, one cannot deny the seachange that occured in the years following 1967. The roots of Godard’s preoccupation with politics can be seen in Made In U.S.A. Inspired by the tale of Ben Barka, a left-wing Moroccan politician whose disappearance in Paris in October 1965 exposed a seedy conspiracy involving the French police force, who were said to have employed the talents of their own national underworld to take down Barka, allegedly on behalf of Mossad. In Made In U.S.A Godard adapts the story of Georges Figon, a French career criminal who claims to have arranged the meeting with Barka that would lead to the latter’s disappearance (III). Here renamed Richard Politzer (for Georges Politzer, the Marxist theorist), Godard employs his own voice to project the doomed man’s preachings, as heard in telephone calls by Paula, Politzer’s girlfriend and the protagonist of the feature. Paula, portrayed by Anna Karina, is searching for Politzer, unaware that his fate has already been determined. Her odyssey takes in hotel rooms, garages and the open road, as the conspiracy unravels and she investigates her beau’s death.
By filtering the distinctly French tale of Barka and Figon through the aforementioned influences of Hammett and the US hardboiled writer, the two sides of Godard face off against one another. Achingly contemporary in it’s relevancy (the film was shot just months after the Barka plot unravelled) Made In U.S.A marks distinctly Godard’s turn of attention from the silver screen to the underground pamphlet. While one might presume to expect that the title of the film comes in reference to the establishing ground of the great aesthetic influences (see, Karina in a trench-coat, Bogart androgynous), but, as Richard Brody explains in his tome on Godard, ‘Everything Is Cinema’, it is in fact the American tradition for subterfuge and governmental deception to which the title refers. This is further encouraged by the naming of a couple of secondary characters after two of the key US political figures of the age, Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara. This particular detail, perhaps more than any other, has gained a formidable temporal traction, with the post-Vietnam relationship between the two and the World political landscape leading to an even richer subtext.
Elsewhere, and in an occurrence which would eventually come to stand as quite the opposite to how the future Godard would adopt technology, the director explicitly disallows Paula from the use of modern technology to aid her journey. Godard, as Politzer encourages Paula to reject contemporary technology in her search for him, and instead insists that the answers to her problems can be found in the works of Melville, Dickens and Hammett. While rendered even further paradoxical thanks to his (Politzer’s) use of a modern technology with which to relay this advice, it was in Godard’s own seeking of solace in the cutting edge of technology later in his career that renders this section of the film most notable in retrospect, not to mention the manner in which cinema, at least in relation to the other mediums cited in Made In U.S.A,had always stood to represent technological development in the face of tradition.
From an aesthetic perspective Made In U.S.A stands as one of Godard’s lushest and reverential (to convention) pictures. Shot in ‘Scope, albeit Techniscope as opposed to CinemaScope, the visual pattern is defined in an assertion made by one of the characters on-screen. The claim by one to another that “We’re in a political movie: Walt Disney with blood” fits the tone to a T, with the barrage of information; the edit rendered hyper-real, coupled with the extravagant colours of the Techniscope format (itself an extension of Technicolor) coming together to recall the classic Hollywood via the more politically astute mediums of elsewhere. The rare (for Godard) adoption of the dutch angle repurposes a cab grounding to a halt in to a missile striking, the ever-present sound of traffic and jetplanes never more effective than when accompanying this rather simple, yet wholly inspired shot. Made In U.S.A sees Godard reunited with Raoul Coutard, his regular lensman, following a liason with cinematographer Willy Kurant on the film that directly preceded Made In U.S.A, Masculin Féminin, in another example of the fractured state in which Pierrot Le Fou had left it’s director in (Coutard and Godard rowed furiously on the set of Pierrot Le Fou, the director’s personal breakdown directly affecting everyone on set — following Weekend it would be a whole 15 years and 1982’s Passion before the two would work together again). In keeping with the stylistic representation of mood that their previous collaboration is, Godard’s camera only rarely strays away from the figure of Karina in Made In U.S.A; The actress very much the object of the lens’ affections.
The film closes with a scene which inverts the typical noir climax completely, as Paula driving off in to a hopeful future, complete with swelling crescendo and saving grace. But alas, before the scene can fade to black Godard holds the fix of the camera for almost three whole minutes before allowing his protagonist to leave, and even then she does so on a question mark. Uncertainty returns, hope is torn, Godard was past the point of no return. While Made In U.S.A may open with a dedication plate in honour of Nick and Sam (Ray and Fuller), it closes with a rejection of those career defining influences, the path ahead as certain in it’s physical direction as it is uncertain it is cinematic direction.
(I) The two would work together for a final time on the short, Anticipation (1967)(II) See. Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema (2008)(III) Figon’s story was told in a more literal manner in 2005’s I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed
