Salute Your Shorts: Godard, Truffaut and A Story of Water

[Above, L-R: Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut; photo courtesy Traverso]

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

The French New Wave more or less began with Claude Chabrol’s first films, but by the end of 1960 it was clear who the movement’s superstars were.  Sure, there were a lot of great films made during that period, many of which hold up beautifully, but it was obvious early on who its Lennon and McCartney were. On the one hand, there was François Truffaut, who bled urgency into his movies with inventive, playful framing and camera use.  He put out impossibly polished films on a budget, and with the success of his first feature, took France’s previously ubiquitous “cinema of quality” out back and killed it, with a look towards characters and topics previously untouched by the country's output.

The other great enfant terrible of the time was Truffaut’s friend, the revolutionary-minded trickster Jean-Luc Godard. If Truffaut killed off what was traditional French cinema at the time, Godard took the corpse and buried it so deep no one could find the body. While Truffaut was telling stories uncharacteristic in their narrative structure, Godard was throwing structure out altogether, barely telling a story at all. Breathless’ jump cuts were just the beginning, and each film he put out was stranger than the last one, with little regard for pedestrian concepts such as plot, character or even a modicum of coherency.

Together the two seemed to stand for the extremes of the movement, with Truffaut as the conservative looking backwards for inspiration and Godard the radical looking forward (or possibly sideways). It’s a little too simplistic a way of looking at things, but a generality that still holds up pretty well. By the end of the '60s, when Godard gave a metaphorical goodbye/fuck you to film in general with Weekend, Truffaut was returning to the semi-autobiographical character Antoine Doinel in Stolen Kisses, showing that he was finished moving forward stylistically. What Truffaut wanted were deeper stories and characters. Later asked in an interview what he thought of his old friend, Godard confessed only confusion as to how Truffaut could’ve developed that way, when at one time they both seemed heading in the same direction. Meanwhile, Truffaut understood why Godard’s movies sold less and less tickets, as they didn’t have anything resembling entertainment within them. It was an ugly breakup, culminating in a series of angry letters and mutually hurt feelings that never resolved before Truffaut’s death in the early '80s. 

By that time there was a feeling that if Truffaut had worn a red tie to an event, Godard would have condemned it as pandering to the public before making a statement on how blue was the only true tie color of the revolutionary. But for all their differences, and the only thing they seemed to agree on was that there were differences aplenty, the two men began in the same place. Godard was an early writer for Cahiers du cinéma, the influential French film magazine founded by Andre Bazin, while Truffaut was Bazin’s protégé. In a nutshell, they were both film critics, and though Truffaut is the one who first proposed the auteur theory, there’s no doubt that it came out of conversations with, amongst others, Godard. At the time of their near-simultaneous breakthroughs, they’d been friends for nearly a decade. The original odd couple, Truffaut grew up as a penniless orphan while Godard was born into money, albeit rejecting it to live on the streets and hang out in the wild Bohemian dens of anarchy that were, well, dimly-lit theaters. Both directors even cited the same movie as a primary inspiration for their careers after seeing Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil at Expo 58 and awarding it top prize at the fair. 

It was no surprise that the two cinephiles considered working together. They had virtually the same taste, same politics and seemingly the same ambitions. In 1952, Truffaut asked Godard to help him adapt the story of Michel Portail, a petty criminal, and though their work hadn’t gotten much further than outlining when funding fell through, it still set the ground for their later collaboration. Eventually this little idea transformed into Breathless, but while Truffaut’s involvement in that film was little more than telling Godard he could use his name to find backers (likewise, Chabrol acts as the film’s “technical adviser,” despite having nothing to do with the movie), Truffaut still had his friend in mind when he went out to make another short film.

In early 1958, Truffaut shot an improvised comedy in Paris during the aftermath of a flood.  This seems a bit off for Truffaut, whose works are always highly scripted, but at the time he’d only directed two short films and was still finding his voice. After the shoot, Truffaut realized that he might just be making fun of the locals’ plight dealing with the flood. His friend Godard, though, figured he could do something with the footage, completing the film and crediting it to both himself and Truffaut. This short was the only thing the two auteurs would claim dual directing credits on. It’s here below, though unfortunately the only versions available streaming online have not been subtitled in English.

The piece itself is a little bit insubstantial. It’s not particularly funny, nor at all moving. Its historical value, though, is huge. Not to mention its metaphorical value for people (and articles like this) looking to make sense of what happened between the two directors, what rift set them in such opposite directions. The answer Un histoire d’eau (A Story of Water) offers is that even from the beginning, when they theoretically co-directed a film, they were never really on the same project, but they were still in some senses working in the same realm. 

Truffaut’s original vision for the film is a bit cutting-edge in its improvisatory nature and on-location shooting. It’s bold, and the imaginative angles and beautiful shots are quintessential Truffaut. This, however, is not at all what Godard had any interest in turning out. Instead, his version edits away whatever plot Truffaut had, and in its place puts in an arch-voice-over that often times has little to do with what’s onscreen. The narration is digressive, with jokes and references to seemingly whatever Godard was thinking about while it was being recorded. It’s no stretch to call this an early modernist film, as the voice-over is stream-of-consciousness to the extreme. Even the film’s title is a playful reference to the erotic novel Histoire d’O. That the film entirely disregards diegetic sound creates an oddly unsettling feeling that seems like a precursor to the jump cuts that would make Godard so famous just a few years later.

The editing itself is just as odd. Taking out the narrative structure of the film isn’t such a big deal, considering that the story had already been stripped away. Sure, eyelines don’t match up (which oddly contradicts the French New Wave’s love for realism), but more interesting are the repeating sequences and quick editing towards the end of the feature. For a few moments, Histoire borders on Kuleshov-level montage, except most of the shots were already shown earlier. Crosscutting is taken to its extreme, and if it doesn’t make sense given what else is going on, what else is going on doesn’t really make any sense anyhow. When the short’s narrator speaks the credits rather than showing them onscreen, the film barely even breaks through the fourth wall due to how disjointed everything else is.

Critical commentary on short films is always hard to come by, but in April 2008 Richard Brody briefly addressed the film in The New Yorker, saying that amongst other things it showed the early separation between Godard and Truffaut. “Truffaut told a story, while Godard used a story as a pretext for flights of manic invention.” This is obviously there, since their two visions for the same film ended up being very different. But Truffaut’s vision for the film was improvisatory, slapstick and by all accounts much goofier than any of his features ended up being. In this way it’s much like Breathless, which Godard would write the morning before every shoot. Godard here also conformed more to conventional structure than he did in pretty much any of his own films. The plot is almost non-existent, but what is there follows the typical boy-and-girl-have-a-romance storyline that seems antithetical to Godard’s feature work. And despite its use of montage, the editing is actually pretty tame by Godardian standards. 

Or you can judge for yourself. Histoire was just released in semi-restored fashion (not everything is cleaned up, but it’s certainly the most beautiful home release of the film ever made) on the DVD set for Truffaut’s The Last Metro. Which is kind of ironic, considering that by the time Truffaut made The Last Metro, the two directors weren’t even on speaking terms.  Too bad the set doesn’t feature a director’s commentary on the short, since it would have potential to be the greatest directorial argument in the history of film.