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Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the offices of the banned
newspaper La Cause du peuple, 1970.

Models of the Public Intellectual: Cinema and Engagement in Sartre and

Godard

Daniel Fair f ax September 2017 Sar tr e at the Mov ies Is s ue 84

In the last fifteen years, no less than three biographies have been dedicated to Jean-Luc
Godard. Of the three, Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Work ing Life of Jean-Luc
Godardfrom 2008 is indisputably the most objectionable – not least due to his baseless and
unsubstantiated accusations that the filmmaker harbours latent anti-semitic views and
paedophilic desires. A much more defensible aspect of his study, however, is the light he
shed on the influence exerted on Godard by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre – particularly
during the former’s Parisian youth in the late 1940s and 1950s, when a callow Godard, yet
to launch his filmmaking career, was already dreaming of the intervention he would make
into the post-war French cultural scene.

As Brody chronicles, much of Godard’s conception of the role that could be played by a
public intellectual was inspired directly by the model developed by Sartre, a model with
which Godard has wrestled ever since this time, alternating between exploiting his media
profile to the full and violently rejecting it, or withdrawing into hermitic solitude. Reviewers of
Brody’s work may have found the analogies the writer draws between Sartre and Godard to
be “forced”,1 but in fact it is a relationship that has manifested itself in multiple guises over
the course of Godard’s seven decades (and counting) of activity in the cinema. The
relationship has taken multiple forms: parallels between their respective lives and artistic
careers, biographical intersections, when the two figures came into direct contact with each
other, and influences – although for the most part this last relation was a one-way affair, with
Godard inescapably affected by the actions and stances of his elder. Indeed, given Sartre’s
colossal stature in French intellectual life in the years after the Libération – a clout that was
not limited to the world of Parisian letters which the philosopher had made his home, but
radiated out to take in the nation as a whole – it would be more surprising if Godard
had not been subject to the philosopher’s influence. And yet, Brody’s remarks aside,
seeking to trace out the connections between Sartre’s aesthetic praxis and that of
the nouvelle vague filmmaker is an avenue of research that few “Godardologists” have
pursued.

This is not to say that Godard has adhered slavishly to the Sartrean model of artistic
engagement. In fact, Godard has often been distinct from the figure of the politically
committed intellectual promoted by Sartre, often cultivating a stance of apolitical

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detachment, or, in his more radical phases, devoting himself wholeheartedly to a

revolutionary project that tended to negate the very role of the intellectual in political
struggle. On another level, however, a deeper parallel can be drawn between the form of
engagement practised by each of these cultural icons of post-war France. As he articulated
in the grand polemical texts of What is Literature?, where his notion of the engaged artist
was fully fleshed out, Sartre conceived of the goal of the writer as being, above all, a
commitment to words, to their true meaning, the real effects they can have, and a
resistance against the mystificatory misuse of the written word for the purposes of
manipulative political propaganda and anaesthetising consumerism. The “first duty” of a
writer, Sartre declares, “is thus to re-establish language in its dignity.” If “words are sick”, he
contends, then “it is up to us to cure them”.2 Godard, particularly in the latter part of his
career, has cultivated a similar outlook, while relating it more directly to his chosen medium
of expression. For Godard, it is a defence of the dignity not of words, but of images – in all
their polysemic power – which is fundamentally at stake in his work, and which has been at
the centre of his aesthetic project. It is in this sense that he can truly be considered an
engaged artist.

* * *

Before the onset of World War II, Sartre had already gained a certain renown for his literary
output: most notably from the novel Nausea(published in 1938), a diaristic account of
Antoine Roquentin, a young man living in the fictional harbour town of Bouville who contends
with the absurdity of existence, and The Wall, a collection of short stories published the
following year. His philosophical writings at this time were not as well-known, although the
phenomenological diptych of The Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936) and The
Imaginary (1940) would be of lasting importance to the development of French film theory in
the post-war period, particularly in the work of André Bazin. During the conflict Sartre was
briefly interned as a prisoner-of-war, and was active, to a limited degree, in the Resistance
after his release. But writing still consumed the bulk of his time, and this period also saw
the publication of the work that is now regarded as his philosophical magnum opus, Being
and Nothingness (1943). The 800-page volume is mostly concerned with ontological
questions (Sartre subtitled his tome “A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology”), but
concludes with a discussion on the ethical implications that can be derived from his
understanding of being. Humans, in this conception, are unavoidably thrown into situations
that require fundamental ethical choices to be made. Authentic being thus entails facing up
to these choices, rather than shirking the responsibility for making them or ascribing such
decisions to outside forces, which would constitute a form of existential “bad faith”. The
ability to act on this free choice, doing, thus reveals the nature of being. Moreover, the
underlying basis for judging these actions is whether or not they contribute to the
preservation and extension of human freedom, and whether or not they seek to overcome
the systems of oppression and exploitation that still dominate the world.

After the end of the German occupation in 1944, Sartre’s presence in French culture and
politics could hardly have been more prominent, the product both of the appeal of his
philosophical ideas in the political conjuncture of a nation rebuilding itself after the
humiliation of war, occupation and collaboration, and a canny understanding of self-

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promotion on Sartre’s own part, taking advantage of the media outlets and cultural forums
that proliferated after the end of hostilities, including his own journal Les Temps
modernes (whose moniker derived, as we know, from the French title of Chaplin’s 1935
filmModern Times). As existentialism became a household word, Sartre sought to
popularise the presiding ideas of Being and Nothingness and relate them to the
contemporary political situation in the landmark public lecture “Existentialism is a
Humanism” (later published in book form), and related his broader philosophy to his literary
practice in a series of articles collected in the volume What is Literature?. Rejecting both
the art-for-art’s-sake standpoint of the symbolist and surrealist traditions, as well as
bourgeois utilitarianism and its Stalinist equivalent (the “socialist realist” aesthetic
championed by Zhdanov), Sartre argued that “the writer, a free man addressing free men,
has only one subject – freedom”,3 and that artists were duty-bound to confront the major
social and political problems of their era (“writing for one’s age”). His negative view of
Zhdanovism, as well as other critical positions he articulated concerning the politics of the
Soviet Communist Party and its French counterpart, did not stop Sartre from adopting a firm
stance against the capitalist status quo in the West, and as the 1950s bled into the 1960s,
his political views became increasingly radical, particularly when it came to Third World
resistance to Western imperialism.

The E xploit s of E laine (1914)

Sartre also had an abiding fondness for the cinema. In his article for this dossier, Dudley
Andrew writes of Sartre’s provocative act of defending the culturally disreputable practice of
movie-going in a 1931 commencement address at the lycée where he taught.4 Three
decades later, in the autobiographical musings of Words, he also dedicated a long passage
to the thrill of watching films as a child: lapping up serials such
as Fantômas, Maciste and The Exploits of Elaine in the Boulevard cinemas of Paris, he
recalls his desire “to see the film as close as possible”, and even claimed that he had the
same “mental age” as the cinema: “I was seven and could read; it was twelve and could not
speak.”5 Sartre’s cinephilia also permeated his literary output.Nausea’s protagonist,
Roquentin, is a habitué of Bouville’s movie-theatres, and explicitly mentions watching Henry
Roussel’s 1924 filmViolettes impériales (Imperial Violets).6 Nausea was a cipher, in many
regards, for the experiences of the young Sartre, and the importance of the cinema in his life
is underscored in a later scene where, working out how far he can stretch his modest

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inheritance, Roquentin calculates his monthly living expenses: “A room for three hundred
francs, fifteen francs a day for food: that leaves four hundred and fifty francs for laundry,
incidentals and the cinema.”7

Sartre’s fondness for the cinema did not, however, permeate through to his philosophical
writings. The exhaustive taxonomy of image forms in The Imaginary failed to grant any
specific qualities to the cinematic image (a lacuna that evidently fuelled Bazin’s motivation
to address this question). In What is Literature?Sartre sees the main function of the cinema
as a means for writers to convey their ideas to large audiences, following the pattern of Jean
Delannoy’s Gide-adaptation La Symphonie pastorale (Pastoral Symphony, 1946), or the
BBC’s radio version of Sartre’s own Huis clos.8 Later, in a talk on the relative merits of
theatre and cinema, which has been preserved in the form of Sartre’s lecture notes, the
philosopher distinguishes the cinema on the basis of the perceived proximity of the actor
through the projection of close-ups of faces on the screen, which “crush” the spectator and
result in the cinema being an art of “participation” where “observation and explanation” are
excluded and any equivalent of Brecht’s practice of distancing is voided.9

But Sartre’s most notorious intervention on questions of cinema came in the form of a review
of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) for the communist-aligned film review L’Écran
français in 1946. The German occupation had prevented Welles’ debut film from receiving
French distribution when it was initially made, and it did not gain a theatrical run until well
after war’s end. Sartre, however, had already viewedCitizen Kane during a trip to the US in
1945, and was thus in a privileged position to set the terms of the film’s reception upon its
French release. His attitude to the film was not a favourable one. In an article for Les Temps
modernes, which is nowadays evoked (usually as a straw man) far more often that it is
actually read, he critically lacerated the film. Citizen Kane was not, Sartre affirmed, “an
example to be followed”. The problems he had with the film are worth unpacking. Although
Sartre accepted Citizen Kane on a political level, understanding it as a contribution to the
broader anti-fascist struggle, the stylistic techniques utilised by Welles met with Sartre’s
ire. The film’s formal wizardry amounted to little more than abstract, intellectual pretension
at odds with the qualities he preferred to associate the cinema with: its action, its liveliness,
its immediacy. The innovative flashback structure of the film’s narrative may have been
welcome in literature, but it was out of place in the cinematic medium, which was by its
nature an art of the present tense. Or, as Sartre damningly put it:

Kane might have been

interesting for the Americans,
[but] it is completely passé for
us, because the whole film is
based on a misconception of
what cinema is all about. The
film is in the past tense,
whereas we all know that
cinema has got to be in the
present tense. ‘I am the man
who is kissing, I am the girl

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who is being kissed, I am the

Indian who is being pursued,
I am the man pursuing the
Indian.’ And film in the past
tense is the antithesis of
cinema. Therefore Citizen
Kane is not cinema.10

The objection is a curious one. Despite Sartre’s openness to formal invention in other art
forms, he is essentially, as Sam Rohdie has argued, advocating for a maintenance of
conventional cinema.11 If Sartre’s great contemporary André Malraux, in the 1939 text
“L’Esquisse pour une psychologie du cinéma”, saw the elevation of cinema as an art form in
the rise of montage techniques that were able to give filmmakers artistic agency on a par
with their counterparts in other art forms, Sartre prizes its capacity for recording actions and
conveying them with such intensity that the images on the screen appeared to the viewer as
if they were taking place in the present. Visual trickery and narrative artifice could only serve
to strip the young art form of this quality. Such a viewpoint was mirrored in the scripts Sartre
wrote, for mostly mercenary reasons, for Pathé between 1943 and 1945. Of the eight
screenplays he turned out during this time, only two were produced as films, Les jeux sont
faits (The Chips are Down, Jean Delannoy) in 1943, and Les Orgueilleux (The Proud and the
Beautiful, Yves Allégret) in 1953.12 Although Sartre conceived his scripts in eminently
cinematic terms, incorporating camera angles, movements and editing effects into his
screenwriting, the films were overwhelmingly classical in their broader construction. As art
historians Odette and Alain Virmaux wrote: “one is surprised to discover that there is very
little in it that is revolutionary […] one might have hoped, however, that the author of Le
Mur would, in his scripts overturn more decisively established film conventions.”13

Cit iz en K ane (W elles , 1941)

Sartre’s negative response to Citizen Kane had a decisive effect on the film’s reception in
France. For communist critics, it was a neat fit with their prevailing anti-Americanism, at a
time when the French film industry was sundered by battles over the import quotas for films
set by the Blum-Byrnes accords – although, ironically, Sartre’s opposition to the film was
precisely due to its departure from the norms of conventional Hollywood filmmaking. Another
strand of film criticism, however, leapt to the defence of Welles, and Bazin took up their
cause. Writing inLes Temps modernes, Sartre’s own journal, the then 28-year-old critic

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effectively rebutted the philosopher’s takedown. Welles’ use of deep-focus photography,

allowing multiple planes of action to take place simultaneously on the screen, was not an
ornamental embellishment at odds with the innate promise of the cinema. Rather, Bazin
contended that the “spiritual key” of the film was “built into the very design of the
image.”14 Indeed, throughout Bazin’s writings on cinema, Welles was, along with Jean
Renoir and Roberto Rossellini, one of the foremost filmmakers championed by the critic.

* * *

Godard arrived in Paris from Switzerland in 1946, at the same time as this critical dispute
was in full force. Falling in with the crowd of young post-war cinephiles, who numbered
François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer among them, he could not help but lean
more towards Bazin’s conception of the cinema, with the primacy it gave to form in
determining the merits of a film. Politically, he flitted between apolitical detachment and the
dandyish right-wing anarchism of his cinephilic confrères, and was thus poles apart from the
political commitment demanded by Sartre. But the philosopher’s prestige nonetheless
exerted a strong pull on the young Godard. In his twenties, he haunted the Café de Flore in
the Saint-Germain-des-Près, one of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s regular hang-outs. When
Godard turned to film criticism in the 1950s, Sartre is one of a vast constellation of writers,
philosophers and artists frequently evoked in his playfully allusive prose. The existentialist
was not always mentioned in a favourable light. In an early review of Roger Livet’s Histoire
d’Agnès (1950), written under the pseudonym Hans Lucas for the short-lived
magazine Gazette du cinéma, Godard writes provocatively, and perhaps disingenuously,
that the film’s “pure artifice” bears “the taint of third-rate literature (that of Sartre).”15 Later,
Godard retrospectively recognised his youthful infatuation with Sartre’s writing: “I wanted to
read everything. I wanted to know everything. Existentialism was at its peak at that time.
Through Sartre I discovered literature, and he led me to everything else.” In a discussion
with Marguérite Duras in the 1980s, he even came to Sartre’s defence against her strident
attacks, insisting, “You go too far when you say he’s not a writer, in the way that we can
say that Delannoy and Spielberg are not filmmakers…”16

Indeed, much of Godard’s critical writing was imbued with the outlook and vocabulary of the
existentialists. In the piece that comes closest to a manifesto in the young Godard’s
writing, “Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction”, he declaims that the “nature of
dialectic in the cinema” is that “one must live rather than than last. It is pointless to kill
one’s feelings in order to live longer.”17 Polemicising, here, against Bazin’s views on the
deep-focus, long-take aesthetic, and defending the rapid, action-oriented editing of Hawks
and Preminger, Godard even directly invokes Sartrean principles: “One remembers,” he
opens his text, “the vehemence with which Jean-Paul Sartre once attacked François
Mauriac: the author of Anges Noirs, he said, was incapable of endowing his heroes with the
liberty with which our lives are adorned, the sudden desire to alter a given course, and in a
monstrous parody made them hesitate only in order to ape the magnificence of God.” A
similar vanity, Godard contends, underpins the idea that language itself could be vested with
a metaphysical quality, and critics such as Bazin, easily swayed by the influence of
contemporary philosophy, err in “elevating certain figures of style into a vision of the
world.”18

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For the most part, the Sartre summoned in these texts was more the figurehead of pop
existentialism than the Husserlian phenomenologist of Being and Nothingness, and when
Godard burst onto the filmmaking scene with the release of À bout de souffle (Breathless)
in 1960, the film exhibited the influence of the equally conspicuous, but philosophically
shallower, Albert Camus. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard, with his louche
individualism and fatalistic insouciance, is closer to Meursault than Roquentin.19 And yet
Sartre’s debut novel had left an undeniable imprint on the young filmmaker. With his bower-
bird approach to literary citation, it is always dangerous to assume that Godard has read a
book from cover to cover, even when he quotes from it copiously. But it is certain that he
was familiar with Nausea: in a rapturous review of Sommaren med Monik a(Summer with
Monik a, 1953), he likened Bergman’s film to the “sordid pessimism” of Sartre’s novel.20 No
film has captured the café-dwelling intellectual scene of 1950s Paris in quite the same way
as Breathless – the Café de Flore is even singled out by name in an early treatment for the
film.21 The film is peppered with nods to Faulkner, Picasso, Renoir, Malraux, Klee, Louis
Aragon and Dylan Thomas – a virtual inventory of cultural reference points among Left Bank
circles at the time – while Jean-Pierre Melville turns in a cameo parodying the kind of
bombastic, attention-grabbing, bon mot-ready public intellectual with which France had
become all too identified in the global consciousness.

B reat hles s (Godard, 1960)

But the parallels between Breathless and Nauseaare more pointed, and suggest a direct
influence of the book on Godard’s film. Above all, they can be seen in the grand centrepiece
of Breathless, the long scene in Patricia’s hotel room, where she and Michel talk, flirt and
bicker in a dialogue-heavy pas à deux forming a long interregnum to the narrative flow of the
film as a whole. If the overarching tone and structure of this scene has any narrative
antecedent, then it is the parallel passage in Nausea, where the laconic, ruminative
Roquentin visits his old paramour, the histrionic, flamboyant actress Anny, in her Spartan,
pokey Parisian hotel room. For 25 pages, the two characters, reuniting after several years
apart, parry with each other, vacillating from despondency to excitation, from annoyance at
each other to a rekindling of the affection they once had. Their discussion, with introspective
pronouncements issued on both sides, is punctuated by movement and action: Anny ruffles
Antoine’s hair, moves about the room, and twice disappears into the bathroom. Likewise,

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Michel and Patricia tumble about in her hotel room, listen to the radio, pin art reproductions
on the wall and eventually fall into bed together, all the while proffering their scattered views
on life, art and love.

Like Nausea, Breathless was the work of a young artist, desperate to “put everything” into
his work, as Godard would phrase it,22 and both the novel and the film achieved widespread
critical and popular success, giving instant fame to their makers. With their follow-up works,
Sartre and Godard were both keen to move onto more serious, “engaged” work. Roquentin
was a largely apolitical character, too absorbed in his personal existential crisis to concern
himself with world affairs, and when political events were noted in the novel – bread-lines in
depression era New York, street-fighting between Nazis and Communists in the Berlin of the
Weimar republic – they were precisely included as a counterpoint to Roquentin’s self-
examination, highlighting his implacable isolation from the political unrest happening
elsewhere in the world. Michel Poiccard, of course, was even more focused on his
individuality to the exclusion of broader social issues, and his character contributed to the
widespread idea that the nouvelle vaguefilmmakers, were politically shallow and traded
chiefly on the salacity of their films. Sartre’s collection of short stories, The Wall, more
directly confronted the political situation of the 1930s: although mostly given abstract,
fictionalised settings, the stories concerned themselves with the climate of ascendant
fascism and impending war permeating the late 1930s. The same subject matter pervaded
Godard’s sophomore feature,Le Petit Soldat (1960). The filmmaker was blunt about the
motivations for this thematic shift: “My way of engaging myself was to say: thenouvelle
vague is accused of showing nothing but people in bed; my characters will be active in
politics and have no time for bed.”23

It was natural, then, that the conflict in Algeria, and the reverberations it had for politics in
Europe, should be a focus for Godard. Indeed, Le Petit Soldat tackles one of the most
controversial elements of the conflict in Algeria: the use of torture by the combatting sides.
Sartre’s story “The Wall”, about a republican fighter in the Spanish Civil War who is tortured
by his captors, thus had clear resonances for Godard, while his later play Les Mains
sales (Dirty Hands, 1948), with its depiction of a communist militant caught between his
moral code and the exigencies placed upon him by the movement he belongs to, may also
have been an influence. But whereas Sartre took a firm stance on the Algerian conflict,
siding with the pro-independence Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and steadfastly
opposing both French colonial rule and the right-wing militias seeking to keep it in place (the
notorious Organisation armée secrète), Godard offered a far more ambiguous outlook on the
issue. While insisting that the film dealt with “the necessity of engagement”, he explicitly
accepted that the protagonist of the film, Bruno Forestier (played by Michel Subor, whose
acting Godard had scouted during a performance of Sartre’s playLes Séquestrés
d’Altona24 ), had an autobiographical veneer: “Throughout the film, he does not quite know
what he wants, except that he refuses to be obliged to want something. Caught between
two factions, between two parties, which have a lot in common, he does not choose a group
of men, but man himself. I see some of myself in this character.”25 Bruno is, in fact, a
Geneva-based operative for the Algérie française movement, hired to assassinate their
political opponents. Dithering over whether to fulfill the mission assigned to him, he is
caught by FLN forces and subject to prolonged bouts of torture, shown openly by
26

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Godard.26 At the same time, Bruno is the Godard character closest to the existential
heroes to be found in the mid-century writings of Sartre, Camus and Malraux. An individual
caught between two equally unpalatable alternatives, his freedom crushed by the dispiriting
political realities of his time, Bruno sullenly declares in the opening of the film “For me, the
time of action is over. I have got older. The time for reflection is beginning.”

Le P et it S oldat (Godard, 1960)

The film itself met an unfortunate fate. In one of many censorship battles Godard has faced
throughout his career, Le Petit Soldat was initially banned by the French censorship board,
not for the stance it took on Algeria, but for the mere fact of addressing the conflict so
directly. It was not released until 1963, after the Evian accords had guaranteed Algerian
independence, at which point the ambiguous position Godard seemed to be offering was
assailed by the vast majority of left-wing critics in France. Indeed, Godard would later
accept the charge that the film reflected his own political “confusion” at the time, but
insisted that this was precisely what the film was interrogating: “Since it is a film on
confusion. I had to show it. It appears throughout, and it is experienced by the hero. […] I
spoke of what concerned me, a Parisian in 1960, belonging to no party. And what
concerned me was the problem of war and its moral repercussions for a Frenchman in the
year 1960 who does not belong to a party.”27 In an echo of the Citizen Kane debate, he also
claimed that the film’s form was on the left: “There were two films about the Algerian war, Le
Petit Soldatand L’Insoumis by Cavalier: one was said to be on the left and the other on the
right – mine, of course. But I would say that, cinematically, my film was on the left and the
other one on the right.”28 Indeed, if the scenes of torture being inflicted by FLN
sympathisers scandalised the French cultural left, the small cell of anti-colonial militants
tasked with interrogating Bruno, who quote from Lenin and Mao while unflappably fulfilling
their political duty, uncannily presages the revolutionary groups Godard would associate
with, and depict from a much more sympathetic viewpoint, in the years following the May
’68 uprising.

Throughout the 1960s, then, Godard moved increasingly to the left, to the point of openly
breaking with both capitalist society and the commercial cinema it underpinned by the time
of the May protests. Although the media strategy he practised at the time, combining
profundity and provocation in equal measure, seems almost directly drawn from Sartre’s

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self-promotional toolkit, the growing political proximity did not seem to draw Godard and
Sartre personally closer to each other, even though his films often featured cameos from
intellectuals in Sartre’s orbit, such as Brice Parain in Vivre sa vie (1962), and Francis
Jeanson in La Chinoise (1967). Notoriously, a scene in the latter film shows Jean-Pierre
Léaud, as the Parisian Maoist Guillaume, erase the names of canonical artists from a
blackboard, until only Bertolt Brecht is left – the first name wiped off the slate is none other
than Sartre’s.

La Chinois e (Godard, 1967)

Curiously, however, it was during Godard’s period of Maoist engagement succeeding La

Chinoise that he and Sartre’s biographies intersected in the most direct way. Unlike
Godard, Sartre never fully identified as a “pro-Chinese” Marxist-Leninist, but his growing
distance from the PCF, especially after the crushing of the Prague Spring, led him to
increasingly gravitate around the charismatic young militants aligned with French Maoist
organisations such as Vive la révolution and La Gauche prolétarienne. Sartre admired them
for their revolutionary verve and tactical inventiveness, while the leaders of the Maoist
movement viewed him, in a rather utilitarian fashion, as a “democrat” whose clout in the
public arena could be profitably made use of – this was the man, after all, about whom
Charles de Gaulle reportedly declared, when hearing that he had been detained by the
police during a protest: “One doesn’t arrest Voltaire.”29 When, as part of a government
crackdown on the far-left, the GP’s newspaper La Cause du peuple was banned in 1970,
Sartre accepted the role of honorary director of the newspaper, as a means of putting
pressure on the Gaullist state, and both he and Godard (as well as other prominent cultural
figures, including François Truffaut) participated in public sales of the newspaper in June of
that year, daring the police to apprehend them. In February 1971, Sartre and Godard shared
the microphone at a press conference given to denounce the six-month prison sentence
given to a school-aged Maoist activist after a protest action at the Basilique du Sacre-
Cœur.30 Both figures also played an active role in the founding of the leftist press agency
Agence-Presse Libération – Godard, according to Brody, even suggested the name31 –
which would later, with Sartre’s encouragement, morph into the daily newspaper Libération.

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Godard and S art re at a pres s c onferenc e in 1971.

The shared activity in support of French Maoist groups did not, however, prevent Godard
from issuing strident criticism of Sartre’s self-positioning as a revolutionary intellectual. In
remarks published by Arts, Lettres, Spectacles in 1971, he declared: “By becoming a
professional, you cease being a revolutionary. Sartre may well have spoken about
renouncing writing in order to pass over to direct action. But he took up his pen again –
differently, it’s true. He is too myopic to use a bazooka. It would be a mess.”32 Recalling,
upon the release of Tout va bien in 1972, his and Sartre’s solidarity with La Cause du
peuple, Godard was even more pointed:

You can see it with Sartre, for

example. I participated in
some actions with him for La
Cause du peuple. And then
when I tried to talk about it
with him, it wasn’t possible. I
tried to know the relation that
existed between his closing
speech at the Russell
Tribunal, as well as his
speech against the French
coal mine owners, which were
remarkable texts, and his old
– and new – studies on
Flaubert and Mallarmé. He’ll
reply that there are two
people inside him. The one
who continues to write on
Flaubert because he can’t
see what else he could do,
and the one who throws
himself headlong into the

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struggle, making speeches

atop a barrel to the Renault
factory workers. […]

In my opinion, forgetting
about the social conditions of
his existence, Sartre is not
doing the work of an
intellectual revolutionary in a
revolutionary manner. The
proles don’t only need Sartre
to come with all his
persuasive intelligence and
attack the French coal mine
owners, they’d also like to
know why he writes those
things on Flaubert. Why does
a bloke spend ten hours a
day writing on Flaubert, and
three hours a day attacking
the coal mine owners, when
the worker spends the same
time on the factory line? He’s
not necessarily against this
fact, but he’d like to know why.
Sartre has the Flaubert
drawer, and the class struggle
drawer, but he’s forgotten
about the table. At the
moment, leftism continues to
demand of intellectuals that
they form a backup force.33

Ironically, Godard’s long rumination on the contradictions of Sartre’s intellectual activity

critiques the philosopher from an eminently Sartrean standpoint: splitting one’s time
between the class struggle and a literary project (the 3000-page biography of
Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille) that had little to no application for revolutionary politics would
precisely violate the ethical standards of Sartre’s own notion of “authentic” being, which
implies an unequivocal dedication to a course of action judged to be just. For the Godard of
1972, there could be no division of his work into separate “drawers” – commitment to the
overthrow of capitalism had to be absolute, and entailed a totalising upheaval in all spheres
of one’s artistic practice and public activity.

* * *

As we now know, of course, Godard did not maintain such an unbridled devotion to the

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cause of Marxism-Leninism for much longer after the release of Tout va bien. In the
filmmaker’s work since the end of his Maoist period, a commitment to revolutionary politics
has been supplanted by another form of engagement: the patient, decades-long project of
defending the dignity of the cinematic image from the multiple misuses to which it has been
put over the course of the 120-year history of the cinema, and more particularly, salvaging
the image from an undue semantic subordination to the text. This undertaking reached its
apotheosis with the four-and-a-half-hour video essayHistoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). It is
thus appropriate that, near the conclusion of this work, Godard should return, more than fifty
years after the fact, to the polemic between Sartre and Bazin over Citizen Kane that
animated French critical circles in 1946. In a dense sequence 20 minutes into Episode 4B,
Godard cuts from a shot from Citizen Kane where Susan Alexander is receiving singing
lessons, to an iconic photograph of Sartre smoking a pipe, accompanied by the on-screen
text “Citizen Kane n’est pas pour nous un exemple à suivre” (“For us, Citizen Kane is not an
example to be followed”) and then “Orson Welles se moque de l’histoire” (“Orson Welles is
heedless of history”). The image cuts to a still of Welles in his 1948 adaptation of Macbeth,
superimposed over the Sartre photo. On the soundtrack, a recording can be heard of an
aging Sartre discoursing on the Vietnam War: “…because they don’t like the communist
system which, by the way, has established itself slowly and with great difficulty, given the
ravages that the Vietnamese land has suffered…”, while the exasperated singing teacher
from Kane laments “Some people can sing, some can’t. Impossible! Impossible!” Given the
importance of Welles in the schema of film history Godard offers in Histoire(s), one of the
rare figures to resist the travesties suffered by the cinematic image in the 20th century, this
sequence can only be read as a long-overdue riposte by the filmmaker to Sartre’s original
review.

His t oire(s ) du c inéma E pis ode 4B (Godard, 1988-1998)

To argue that Godard’s primary commitment in his “late” period has been to the image itself
is not to contend, however, that he has abandoned all political preoccupations.
Contemporary global flashpoints – whether Yugoslavia or Palestine, the Ukraine or Egypt –
have surged throughout his most recent films, from Notre musique (2004) to Adieu au
langage(2014). In Film socialisme (2010), a jeremiad for Europe, with the continent
symbolised by a cruise ship (which would ominously sink off the coast of Italy after filming
was completed), a particularly piquant nod to Sartre surfaces. InNausea, Roquentin
regularly, but ineffectually, assails the salauds (bastards), those around him who are self-

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contented, provincial, vacuous and irredeemably bourgeois. In Film socialisme, Godard

provides an updated vision. As a character states in the film: “What doesn’t change is that
there will always be bastards. But what does change is that, today, the bastards are
sincere.” Asked by a journalist about the line, Godard admits openly to its provenance: “It’s
a phrase that came to me when reading some passages from Nausea. At that time, the
bastard was not sincere. A torturer knew he wasn’t honest. Today, the bastard is honest.”34

Endnotes

1. See Adrian Martin, “Contempt”, The Monthly (October

2008),https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2008/october/1222748994/adrian-
martin/contempt
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London:
Methuen, 1967), pp. 210-211.
3. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 46.
4. See Dudley Andrew, “Holidays and the Movies in Sartre’s Imagination”, included in
this dossier
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 77.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1965), p.

201. Roussel remade the film with sound in 1932, but the chronology of Sartre’s
novel means that he must be referring to the silent-era original.
7. Ibid., p. 245.
8. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 180.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Theatre and Cinema”, in Modern Times: Selected Non-Fiction,
trans. Robin Bass (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 199-204.
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Quand Hollywood veut faire penser… Citizen Kane d’Orson
Welles”, L’Écran français no. 5, August 1, 1945. Sartre later re-read the article
and admitted that he “hardly recognised his style and expressed some doubt
about the authenticity of his signature.” After re-watching the film, he “had a
slightly more favourable opinion of it” but rejected the idea that it was a
“masterpiece”. See The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre vol. I: A Bibliographical
Life(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 125.
11. See Sam Rohdie, “Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle
Vague”, Screening the Past no. 38 (December
2013),http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/jean-paul-sartre-hollywood-
citizen-kane-and-the-french-nouvelle-vague/
12. For more on the film scripts Sartre wrote, see J.D. Connor, “Sartre and Cinema:
The Grammar of Commitment”,Modern Language Notes 116:5 (December 2001),
pp. 1045-1068.
13. Cited in Rohdie, “Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle
Vague”, op. cit.
14. See André Bazin, “La technique de Citizen Kane”, Les Temps modernes no. 17
(February 1, 1947). Cited in Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), p. 126.
15. Hans Lucas (Jean-Luc Godard), “Œuvres de Calder et Histoire d’Agnès”, Gazette

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