Larcenous Talent

Jean-Luc Godard once stole his grandfather's collection of first editions of French Poet Paul Valery, and, by way of an educated fence, converted them into movie tickets. When he was ostensibly studying ethnology at the Sorbonne, he used his tuition money to preserve his status as one of Paris' foremost moviegoers, and never went to class at all. At this point, hearing the story, moralists feel that Godard should have come to a bad end--and in a sense he has. He grew up to be a motion picture director.

But he grew into a brilliantly successful one. His first full-length film, Breathless (TIME, Feb. 17), is already established beside Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Man Amour as one of the two best accomplishments of the French New Wave, and Godard has two other films ready for release. One, called Le Petit Soldat, may not see a theater for some time, since it is about the Algerian situation and, according to the government censors, takes the rebels' point of view. The other, called Une Femme Est Une Femme, and described by Godard as a "musical comedy without music," deals with a stripper who decides that she would like to have a child and earnestly wants to begin the project at once. When her lover demurs--he is a cyclist and wants to stay in shape for a big race--she decides to get the help of some deserving stranger. Using the technique of U.S. television's Candid Camera, Godard and his cameraman hid with their equipment while Actress Anna Karina and Actor Jean-Claude Brialy stood on the Boulevard de Strasbourg and accosted strangers. "Pardon me, monsieur," said Brialy time after time, "would you like to make a child with mademoiselle?" Some jumped for joy; others said they had more pressing engagements.

Shimmering Quotes. Godard himself long ago jumped for Actress Karina. For a year they have lived in a lowbudget, black-gated house in Paris with his phonograph, his balalaika and his Teddy bear. He had always introduced her as his wife, and everyone thought she was until early this month, when he took her off to Switzerland and married her.

Born in Paris and raised in Switzerland, Godard has seen little of his family since his French-Protestant physician father, horrified by his son's larcenous ways, sent 19-year-old Jean-Luc off for five months to visit relatives in South America. The treatment did not succeed. Returning to Europe, young Godard first signed on as a laborer on a dam project and made a documentary film about the work. On his way back to Paris he took a halfhearted pass at safecracking, and eventually found a job making up shimmering quotes and phony gossip items for the daily Le Temps de Paris.

Soon he was writing reviews for the Paris monthly, Cahiers du Cinema, the Parisian equivalent of Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood, a place where young hopefuls loiter. In the late '50s, every young French director who had directed nothing wrote for Cahiers. One by one, they emerged -- Claude Chabrol with The Cousins, Franc,ois Truffaut with The 400 Blows. Only Jean-Luc Godard seemed to stay behind, and one day he disappeared with the Cahiers' petty cash. Chabrol and Truffaut wondered if Godard was trying to finance a film. They came to his aid, the money was amicably restored, and more was honorably found. Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) went before the camera.

Earthbound Themes. Godard went about making the picture almost flippantly, sitting in a cafe each morning and writing dialogue for the afternoon's shooting, bending the story line and tossing in new ideas whenever they occurred to him.

The city provided the sets, from Orly airport to the Champs-Elysees, and, since life itself is full of jerky movements, Godard ordered his cameraman to shoot from the shoulder and forget the tripod.

He also shoved the cameraman around in a wheelchair and packed him into a post man's mail cart (with peepholes drilled in the sides) to follow the actors as they wandered the streets.

Godard is Gallically capable of spectacular flights of chop logic ("Marxism and Catholicism are the same"), but in his work he is earthbound with his themes. Molelike behind dark glasses, his hair thinning and his bank account growing, he avoids people and parties, often passes hour after hour with friends while saying almost nothing. His main worry is that the New Wave may be hurt by its worst potential enemy: pretension. "The public," he says, "is happily insensitive to the verbiage of the esthetes. The essential thing is for us to remain lucid, and not take ourselves for the navel of the universe."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.