Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma, 1985
Durée : 91', couleur, son
Grandeur and decadence revealed in a search for actors in a film for public television, based on an old novel by J.H. Chase
by Jean-Luc Godard
France, 1986, 91', video and 35 mm, sound, colour
with Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marie Valéra, Jean-Luc Godard, unemployed people from the ANPE (French Employment Agency)
The 1980s marked a return to cinema in Godard's work after his 1970s political and social essays on video and television. This return to film and to fiction was dictated by a feeling of necessity and was also and above all a return to the entire history of cinema, its creation, origins and forms, in an attempt to save what Godard felt was disappearing. Considering himself to be one of the last filmmakers to take his place in the annals of history of his art – following the disappearance of François Truffaut, Serge Daney or Jean-Pierre Rassam, who “died in battle”, and at a time when television imposed its norms, prefiguring the multimedia era – Godard wished to preserve its memory. Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma draws a bitter and nostalgic conclusion with respect to this disappearance, while simultaneously attempting to counter it, by staging the birth of a film, a story and images.
Nothing could be more appropriate for announcing the death of cinema than a commission for television based on a detective novel. Grandeur et décadence, produced by TF1 and Hamster Productions as part of a “Série noire”, follows a director and a producer in their attempt to continue to make films in spite of (or against) everything and everyone. The roles are played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, star of the Nouvelle Vague, and Jean-Pierre Mocky, anarchistic herald of low budget, French-style independent cinema – two “Mohicans” whose names in the film (Gaspard Bazin and Jean Almereyda) evoke major figures of an even more distant past, those of critic André Bazin and filmmaker Jean Almereyda, better known as Jean Vigo.
While we hear at the start, during a casting, several phrases from Soft Centre by J. H. Chase, which this film is supposedly based on, and while we find certain ingredients of the detective novel in the affair of the deutschmarks and the assassination of the producer, the only liquidation concerned here is that of cinema in modern times. As survivors, Bazin and Almereyda defend the condemned, and, with it, “the dead against the living, protecting instead empty and pulverised bones, inoffensive dust that is defenceless against the anguish and pain and inhumanity of the human race.” This text, from Faulkner, rehearsed by a circle of extras who each say a few words, is a key asset to Grandeur et décadence. Eurydice (who is also living on borrowed time), played by Marie Valéra, is its heart. Her old-fashioned face, gaze, personality and grace give rise to images and emotions whose beauty and aptness sketch the outlines of a film. With her, cinema is reborn. Her image invokes other images, namely that of Dita Parlo in Grande Illusion and this reference prefigures the task of resurrection in Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma. Through the two castings / parades of would-be actors, sketches of stories also emerge, along with tonalities, colours, a rhythm of speech and bodies that reconstitute something akin to cinematographic projection.
Even though in the end, the spirit of the era, its futility and mercantilism get the better of this “petit commerce de cinéma”, so quickly replaced by a television company, a film will have had its hour and true cinema will have been briefly revived with it, initiating a dialogue that has remained uninterrupted ever since, between Jean-Luc Godard and the works and men of the cinema of the past.
Judith Revault d'Allonnes
Translated by Anna Knight
