Bernard-Henri Lévy

A year later. Now, the heart of the matter. I’m starting, this time, with the documents.
Document 1.
18 March 1999. Letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Dear Friends,
After our meeting a few weeks ago, these lines to let you know about the following thing.
I have been contacted by Msrs Gilles Sandoz and Pierre Chevalier, who are currently producing a series of one-hour films for Arte entitled «Gauche-Droite» [Left-Right], directed by various directors. For my part, I proposed to them a sort of reconstitution of our dinner the other night. The title would be “Pas un dîner de gala” [Not a gala dinner]. It would concern a three-way conversation in a place to be decided, opposing what, to simplify things, I would call partisans of the image and partisans of text. An alternative title would be «Un fameux débat» [A Famous Debate]. The idea came to me as I was re-reading Gérard Wajcman’s piece (“The Godard-Lanzmann Match”) in the review of Woody Allen’s best friend. Cinematographically, this television film would be divided into two parts: the dinner, the actual debate, which would last half an hour, recorded “live”, as they say, by a director chosen by the producers. Then three shorts of ten minutes each, or five minutes if the dinner-debate lasts forty-five minutes, during which each of the dinner guests resumes his position in what he deems to be a favourable manner. The production will grant each one a budget and the desired technical means. I don’t know what you will think of such a proposition and ask you to please let the said producers, whose coordinates you will find below, know. Furthermore, we must be able to do the thing during the month of June, 1999. Amicably yours,

So, there we are.
This marks the genesis of the «Pas un dîner de Gala» [Not A Gala Dinner] project that Richard Brody and Antoine de Baecque both include in their biographies, but with some inaccuracies.
Note that the initiative for this project was Jean-Luc Godard’s; as is often the case with him, everything evolved from a commission (in this case, the «Gauche-Droit» collection Pierre Chevallier had launched on Arte television channel that Gilles Sandoz was to produce for a company that was then named Agat Films. Sandoz had asked Godard to be the central figure of one of the programs, and he in turn suggested sharing the air time he had been granted with two others, Lanzmann and me.)
Note the mention of Gérard Wajcman’s article in Le Monde of December 3rd, 1998, Saint-Paul Godard contre Moïse Lanzmann? [Saint Paul Godard vs Moses Lanzmann?], which was itself a reaction to an interview of Godard the previous October 21st by Serge Kagansky in Les Inrockuptibles, where Godard declared, notably, «I have no proof of what I am venturing to say, but I think that if I put my mind to it, with a good investigative journalist, I could find images of the gas chambers after twenty years; one would see the deportees enter and one would see in what state they left. It’s not a question of pronouncing a ban, as Lanzmann or Adorno, who take things a bit too far, because we always find ourselves discussing ad infinitum different ways of saying «it’s unfilmable», do. People should not be prevented from filming; we mustn’t burn the books, if we do, we can no longer criticize them. »
And note, at last, the mention of «the other night’s dinner», of which this film project was to be, at this stage, the exact reconstitution and that had taken place on February 4th at my home, in the presence of Nathalie Bloch-Lainé, Alain Sarde and Arielle Dombasle, at Godard’s request, because he wished to meet Claude Lanzmann and knew he was a good friend of mine. Godard’s idea was to get to know one another, to understand the point of view of the author of Shoah, and to begin to settle the unspoken quarrel that had gone on between them since the publication of the interview in Les Inrockuptibles, but face to face rather than through third-party hearsay.
What, then, of this dinner?
Since the film was supposed to be the reconstitution, what, exactly, happened?
This is the essence of what I read in the notes I had saved from that time.
Lanzmann told Godard that he had been shocked by the interview in Les Inrocks, that he had never, not ever intended to prohibit anything, and that he in no way considered himself one of the “partisans of text” as opposed to the “partisans of image” for whom Godard would be the standard-bearer. Having watched hundreds of hours of rushes and edited nine and half, to be treated as “the enemy of image” was too much. “You’re beyond brazen, Godard !»
I said, and Nathalie Bloch-Laîné backed me up, that Godard’s argument, on the surface obvious and a polite challenge, actually concealed an additional perversity: imagine that, even with the help of the «good investigatve journalist», «at the end of twenty years” you have found nothing. What should one conclude? That the gas chambers did not exist? That there is at least a doubt as to their existence? What strange reasoning….
Godard repeated to us his eternal credo, his religion of cinema, of the inextricably linked text and image. He opposed us and developed his argument during the meal, his version of the Hegelian theorem we had of course understood but that was the very one that was the cause of confusion, «all that is real can be filmed; only what has been filmed is and remains fully real». And, with a hint, in doing so, of bringing grist to the negationists’ mill, he said no, of course, that has nothing to do with the subject at hand and that to expect cinema to confront the event of the century, command it to tell the story with its own means, insist that it would not live up to itself and its duty if it were unable to accomplish this task and to give the thing form in its language and its syntax is just to pay homage to the cinema and recall how much we all, including film makers, in this case, have an obligation to this unique page in modern history.
The discussion was lively, but frank and amicable.
It was a real debate on the question of the representation, or not, of the Shoah, the powers and responsibilities of art, even on Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, which I was unable to find out if Godard had seen in its entirety, but to which he referred with respect.
There were also amusing moments like the one when Godard, taking his leave and feeling, I sensed, intellectually dominated by Lanzmann, said this curious thing to him, which Lanzmann didn’t know how to take, “It took us the same amount of time, you to shoot Shoah, and I, Histoire(s) du cinema.”
But let us be clear.
That the remark about the «images of gas chambers» found «at the end of twenty years» by «a good investigative journalist” could seem over the top and be taken the wrong way, I am the one who emphasized it that evening, and I am more conscious of the fact than anyone.
That this manner of transforming Lanzmann—and, in passing, Adorno—into abominable censors on the sole pretext that the one spoke of the difficulty to write poetry after Auschwitz and the other considered the fictionalization of horror neither reasonable nor healthy, I also abundantly emphasized it during the same dinner, and there can be no doubt that that should be counted as one of the Godardian “ambiguities”.
But that any of us, in the course of the discussion, were witness to I don’t know what actual act or even Freudian slip expressing antisemitism, that one sensed the shadow or the ulterior motive in the entirety of his remarks, that Godard, in other terms, revealed himself on this occasion and exposed his true face, no, that I cannot say—and I do not believe any of the other guests at this famous dinner could have said so, not then, and not now, today.

Document 2.
18 June 1999. New letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Messieurs Gilles Sandoz, Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Julien Hirsch
Dear Friends,
Following my previous letter, please find below a few specifics and modifications.
(I) The sequance in the dining room could have been filmed as is during our dinner at the hotel of Rossellini, Le Duc Thuo [sic] and Kissinger. I no longer think the idea of a circular travelling shot is required. A single camera, filming the three people in question in a conventional way, simply and fixedly. Julien Hirsch rightfully suggests using a Pro DV camcorder, which provides an hour’s autonomy. If the exploration of a common cause, of shared sentiments, or on the contrary of opposing ideas calls for it, the recording can last an hour longer, with perhaps a camera angle that is either more distant or closer. If we insist on maintaining the idea of a circular travelling shot, it should be done only in the vaguely luxurious setting of the dining room. Hence a very slow movement in one direction and back lasting a half-hour each. A few extras strike me as appropriate, (in addition to the waiters coming and going as they work). Then we could extract from these one or two hours the approximately nine minutes allocated to this sequence. Theoretically, I am for a single extract of approximately nine minutes, and not several extracts, even if they follow one another through simple superimpositions. It is not in fact a debate that is being filmed, just the image of a debate; and it is important to preserve the idea and feeling of blocks (in this case seven.)

(II) The three sequences (blocks) known as “exposés” are introduced simply by the titles of the exposés. Scientists would say communications. In fact, it’s as if in the realistic sequence of the dining room, at a given moment, we were to move from the person speaking outwardly to his inner self, as though passing through a kind of door, then to hear his real “credo”. The shot or shots making up the exposé (he who exposes himself`) must therefore correspond to a situations—reconstituted, certainly, but plausible for this person. In the exercise of his functions as they say. In a reality that is his own and thus cannot be invented. Not a slice of life, as “progressives” used to tactfully say, or else it is up to this exposed subject to choose this moment of life. I would say, if I were not afraid of being about the only one to hear a difference, that the words spoken in the dining room are televised, while those of the exposés are cinematographed. In short, it’s not a question of a work but the delivery of a belief, a conviction or a doubt, hope or despair, etc. It’s not necessarily what the person exposed says that should come across as the truth, but the person himself seeking the truth. Still briefly, it’s no longer a question of a conversation like the one at the hotel, however serious and sincere, but already a music. Otherwise put, before we said what we thought, now we think what we say. The camera and/or the eventual shot(s) must respect that, principally if other people are filmed with the person in the chosen situation.
(III) The last three sequences, known as film1, film2, film3, are introduced by the films’ titles, but this time along with the names of the author and director of the film in question. Thus we are dealing with works, with compositions whose three faces and three bodies, visible during the three exposés, are absent. So first of all, we are dealing with an illustration, a plea, a prayer, a demonstration, a footnote, etc. But it could also be something more vast (even in about seven minutes) or something more ordinary having a less philosophical, more sentimental rapport with the concept of left/right.

(IV) Here, dear friends, are the few thoughts that came to me while contemplating our project. Actually, they, strangely, only define the exact shape of the vase in which we will soon arrange more flowers or less. May that make a prettier “bouquet” than that of TF1, Canal, and company.
Amicably yours,
Jean-Luc Godard

In this new letter (addressed to Claude Lanzmann and me, but also to Gilles Sandoz as well as Julien Hirsch, Godard’s collaborator whose name would come up again several times in the course of these discussions), Godard had modified his project. Or perhaps he had improved it. And we went from the pure reconstitution of the dinner in the Boulevard Saint Germain to an elaborate plan in which the dinner would become simply the hors d’oeuvre (just the «image of a debate»), the essential constituting: first, three declarations of intent (Godard was almost ready to call them «communications»,or, instead of, as in the prologue, “saying what one thinks”, according to him, one should “think what one says”); and, second, three “films” written and filmed by the three authors, but from which they themselves would be physically absent («an illustration, a plea, a prayer».)
How did the project develop, then? Why? Under the effect of what influences or circumstances?
Once again, I come back to my notes, taken, as always, day by day.
First, one must know that, a little less than a month earlier, on Monday, May 24th, the three of us met at Lanzmann’s home, in his impressive study, overflowing with books and photos, where, I think, the editorial committees of Les Temps Modernes have met ever since Sartre’s death. A strange meeting where, contrary to what happened during the dinner in Boulevard Saint-Germain and the mood of unfettered expression that had prevailed then, the subject of our films was never explicitly broached. “The” subject, Godard said, “the thing”, he stressed, leafing through a book, a review, a newspaper, as he had at my place. “The object”, he would repeat, but never saying more, never saying «the Shoah», for example, nor «the Jews». Lanzmann and I—let’s be honest, with hindsight this is not the least extraordinary aspect of the entire matter—said no more in this respect than he. To the extent that, at a given moment, no longer able to contain myself, I risked a brief outburst, intended, no doubt, to ease the atmosphere but which remained just as absurdly cryptic and made the air still thicker instead of clearing it. “Our project is no longer/ Not a gala dinner, but/ How to beat around the bush, and we’ll soon have to call it that”.
And then, one must also know that another dinner Godard mentioned took place on June 9th, eight days before his letter, at the Hotel Raphael (the same one he calls the “Hotel Rossellini”, because Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini had lived there twenty years before). An even stranger dinner. And even, when I re-read my notes, completely astounding. Empty restaurant. Lanzmann grouchier than usual, moreso than he is at home. Godard arriving, unshaven, and keeping his raincoat on all the way through dinner until dessert. Gilles Sandoz seated at a table a little ways away with a few of his associates, peeking at us from afar, very worried, panicked even, easily perceiving that things weren’t going well, no doubt itching to intervene and offer us his insights of a great, experienced producer—looking, as one of the three of us remarked during one of the rare almost spontaneous moments of those two terribly ponderous hours, like one of the courtiers who waited every morning outside the door of Louis XVI’s and Marie-Antoinette’s nuptial chamber for the confirmation of the consummation of the marriage. And, in fact, a sort of conversation, if one could call it that, that occurred in three phases.
1. The same beating about the bush as at Lanzmann’s: Rossellini, who had lived there and that Godard remembered having come to see in room number 7 on the ground floor, one that he occupied for the year; an article by Robert Redeker Lanzmann had found fascinating that had appeared in last Saturday’s Le Monde; a public conversation Lanzmann and I had just had concerning the question of Kosovo, of which Godard thought a trace should remain, in one way or another, in our films (Lanzmann condemning in principle as well as by instinct the American aerial bombings of Belgrade and I, in my last column, supporting my defense of the intervention of NATO forces with the concept of the just war); funny and clever judgments of the comparative merits of mineral waters the maître d”hotel offered us, etc.
2. Godard, for the first time, stopped beating around the proverbial bush, but still just skirted the outside, and reluctantly so. A secret about his father, who was a Red Cross doctor and who may have «known about the camps»; a muttered remark about «this question» (still unnamed—but this time the allusion was clear) which, he tells us, has never ceased to be on his mind («I’m obsessed by it, it’s all I think about, I stop thinking about it and then I start thinking about it again insistently”); a frightened look when Lanzmann, referring to his legendary friendship with Alain Sarde, remarks, “you are completely Jewified”, and Godard replying, with a voice suddenly quite soft and almost plaintive, “Oh no, you cannot say that that way.”
3. A third, downright comic phase, where Godard explodes but on the most absurd of pretexts, «I’ve had it, it’s always the same ones who travel. For the time being, it’s me, I’ve come to Paris five times. I’ve travelled 1200 kilometers five times, that’s 6000 kilometers. And what about you? It’s always the same ones who move, the Parisians look down on us.” I immediately replied, partly out of politeness but in part also because I thought, this will give me the chance to see François Musy, this soundman I did Le Jour et la Nuit with and who works with Godard, in Rolle. “Well, it doesn’t matter, next time we’ll be the ones to make the trip and we’ll come to see you in Rolle.” And Godard then, with the air of a man who is completely panic-stricken because he has started an infernal machine and doesn’t know how to stop it, “No, not Rolle, especially not Rolle,”—but without any further explanation.
That’s where we were when we received this letter of June 18th.
That was the climate in which Godard wrote it—and which makes the extreme, fanatical, impassioned precision of these notes so much more bizarre, but also, kind and friendly.
I have difficulty, gathering up my memories as I do here, imagining that the man who pouted, griped, absent, at the Raphael and at Lanzmann’s home is the same one who dreamed here of his “lovely bouquet”.
The film, in any case, is there.
He has it, at the end of his pen and his viewfinder.
I do not know what he was alluding to in mentioning «five trips» to Paris, because I can only count three, perhaps four if I count our last tête-à-tête in the Boulevard Saint Geremain, where he first expressed to me his desire to meet Lanzmann. But it’s not important. The film, I repeat, is there. All that remains is to shoot it. And to rediscover, even just once more, the tone of friendship and relaxation that prevailed during that first dinner.

Document 3
29 June 1999. New letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Gilles Sandoz, Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Julien Hirsch.
Dear Friends,
It seemed to me rather useless that Le Monde should be informed of our common project, and I share Nora’s opinion at the end of Dashiell Hammett’s L’Introuvable [The Thin Man]:
« Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind our drinking.”
“It’s all right by me. What do you think will happen to Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert now?”
“Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us, the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”
“That may be, “ Nora said, ‘but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”
Amicably, no doubt,
Jean-Luc Godard

This third letter, manifestly exasperated («Amicably, no doubt») was in reaction to a brief article by Jean-Michel Frodon that appeared in Le Monde on June 27th, 1999, entitled, “The Famous Debate”. This article in fact revealed the essence of our project. And the announcement was, indeed, to say the least premature. What was the source? Where did the leak come from? Today it’s still a mystery. I note, nonetheless, that apparently it did not call anything into question.

Document 4.
12 July 1999. Letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Gilles Sandoz, with copies to Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy.
And yet, time was passing.
The project was not in question, but it was making no headway.
The date of «during June» Godard mentioned in his first letter of March 18th as apparently ideal is long since past.
And the dinner the evening before, on Sunday, July 11th, at the Crillon, was just as tense, perhaps even moreso, than the one that preceded it.
This time, Gilles Sandoz preferred not to be there at all since he thought his presence at the table nearby, like that evening at the Raphael, could only add to the pressure, hence the tension that a project we had begun to sense was more fragile and uncertain than it had appeared, frankly, could do without.
But the fact is that his decision, far from improving things, no doubt aggravated them by further annoying Godard who decided, as he wrote in this letter, to see in this absence a mark of lack of interest for the project; or a lack of professionalism; or the sign of a departure from Paris before what he called the «usual vacation», whose dates seemed, in his mind, surprisingly precise. Or who knows, perhaps it was even a sudden reluctance to supply these «contracts» that, in Godard’s universe, were always of extreme importance (and which, besides, would follow very shortly). The fact is that, once more and, in a way more than ever, we spent the entire dinner without saying a word to each other of what might make us agree, disagree, or, at least, occupy us.
I smile when, in this letter written the day after, I come upon the stock phrases «we know very well what we want to talk about» or “three declarations resuming for each one the heart of the debate” which continued the same game of hide and seek with a theme, a subject, a film that was still just as nameless.
Nothing is more amusing, either, than his manner of writing here about the nightmarish «two meals» (at the Raphael and the Crillon) where, I repeat, nothing was said or produced since we spent the entire two hours staring at each other like china dogs. Now he writes that, had they been “filmed”, would have “been suitable today”!
I also find the trace of a lively discussion resulting from a question raised by Lanzmann concerning both the responsibility of each one for editing and the final property of images, including rushes, from the filming of the dinner. Knowing Godard’s theses about property (virtually collective or, in any case, inattributable) of the flow of images produced and flooding the world every day, we had, indeed, some reasons to be worried and to try to “dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s”.
At this date, however, July 12th, the film was late but still a work in progress.
And I even think Godard never seemed in such a rush and, even more, so precise as to the form of this filmed object that had been his idea and the dream of which he, manifestly, continued to pursue.

Dear Friend,
Once again we had dinner last night at the Hotel Crillon. I was surprised at your absence, but the others seemed to find it normal.
I’ll be in Paris again before the usual vaction period, on the evening of Monday, July the 19th, Tuesday the 20th and Wednesday, July the 21st until 4 p.m. and available. I would really like to receive a contract during this time. I think the same is true for the others, J.H. included.
Enclosed is one last dot of the i’s of the situation as I understand and feel it.
Amicably yours,
Jean-Luc Godard
c.c. to the other three

2
Exposés of the three authors, order of exposés chosen by a simple majority (the producer among them) or by drawing lots, maximum running time. 10’, minimum. 08’
Theoretically, a single take, but the author’s exposé being made in a situation of his own choice, he can request another take defining the situation from which the author is speaking,

3
A short made by the author as part of the budget drafted by the producer, max. running time 07’-09’ in which case the opening conversation will last less than 09’,
The author’s image is absent, only his voice can be presented off-screen,
For JL.G, if we really know what we want to talk about, the conversation can merely consist of three declarations summing up the basics of the debate for each.
For C.L., I think he would like a long recording from which will be drawn the approximately 3×33 minutes for each. The advantage of this length would be, according to C.L., to allow us to define the stakes and more developed terms during the exposés and the shorts.
For JLG, this running time has already been used four times (had the two meals been filmed, they would have been suitable today), but he has nothing against taking up the conversation once again.n
(We always forget that Arte’s jurisdiction has fixed at one hour the time devoted to stating the case. The advantage for those charged is that they are paid a salary.)
The recording of the exposés, as well as the use of the authors and their final cut, belong to them within the limits of the budget drafted by the producer. (It is clear that the set-up of the shoot in respect to the exposés is that of a simple television interrogation. If, for example, an author wishes to bare his soul on Tianmen [sic] Square, the travel expenses will be deducted from the budget of his short.)
Each author can see or show the others what he has done or indicate what he plans on doing. He can also do nothing with this, preferring to wait until the final broadcasting print is made.
During last night’s dinner, I tried to explain the importance of the three blocks of images and sound presented to the vision and hearing (understanding, as poor W. Benjamin put it) of eventual audiences. It seems to me especially crucial that the exposé in no way be a first short film. To sum it up roughly, it appears to me that 1) present the society, 2) represent the person, and 3) represent the art (and/or its resistance) and as old Brunschvicq used to say, one is in two, two is in one and these are the three persons.
Amicably yours again,
Jean-Luc Godard

(titles: ordinary white letters against a black backdrop)
Arte Agat Films present
The nth film of the series, Left/Right
In the company of
(debate credits)
Claude Lanzmann
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Jean-Luc Godard
The revolution is not
(Music: `”aux armes etc.” by S. Gainsbourg)

Hotel, dining room, conversation, debate (approx. 9’)

Not a Gala Dinner

(titles: white letters against a black backdrop)
Exposé 1, 2 and 3, approx. 10’ each.

(titles: white letters against a black backdrop)
Film 1, 2 and 3, 7’ each approx.

End credits (Aux armes, etc. by S. Gainsbourg

Document 5.
6 September. Letter from Gilles Sandoz to Bernard-Henri Lévy
This letter, announcing the arrival of the famous “contracts” Godard asked for at the beginning of July, was addressed to me. But the two other co-authors, naturally received one like it. The summer had gone by. The project was running late. But it was, more than ever, still in the works.

Paris, Monday, 6 September 1999
Dear Sir :
Please find enclosed a proposal for an author’s contract as well as
a proposal for an Author/Director’s contract. If the contents of these contracts meet with your approval, they will be sent to you in three copies for signature.
Kindest regards,

Emmanuelle PINET for
Gilles SANDOZ

Document 6.
Letter from me, Bernard-Henri Lévy, to Gilles Sandoz, 13 September, following reception of the contracts.

13 September
Dear Gilles Sandoz,
I have left for Cuba. But I left the signed contracts at your disposition at my secretariat.
However, before returning them to you, I would like to make one remark.
The more I think about it, the more I find it would be regrettable if we should lose sight of the spirit of the endeavour as Jean-Luc Godard defined it during our very first meetings.
By the «spirit of the endeavor», I mean the idea of a film in three types of modules: the debate, or the idea of the debate, of course, but also “the declarations” and the “short subjects”.
In other terms, I would like it to be clear that we are not abandoning what will constitute the originality of “Not A Gala Dinner».
In still other terms, I would like it to be agreed that the part devoted to the debate, even if it should be long, not exceed, for example, about thirty minutes, which is the only solution that would allow the other elements to remain possible.
As for the cutting and editing, I’m worried, as is Claude Lanzmann, about the form that it will take. Imagine that there is no consent among the three protagonists of the discussion as to the intense elements of the debate in question. I propose that it be stipulated as well that it will be up to each one to indicate, to a third party, the fragment or fragments that seem to him the most representative of what was said during the hour or hours of Sunday evening at the Raphael.
Please excuse me for appearing to be excessively «formalist», but I prefer that this sort of thing be expressed before rather than after.
Amicably yours,
Dictated by Bernard-Henri Lévy,
Absent from Paris.

PS: I can be reached at Cienfuegos at the numbers my secretariat will give you [added in blue: 0144392231]

To understand the tone of this letter, one should know that we saw each other once again, all three of us, Lanzmann, Godard and I, on September 5th, for a new dinner at the Raphael. Contrary to the others, I have kept very few traces of this encounter. Just the beginning of a problem—evident in this letter—as to the difference of appreciation that we might have of the images of the dinner itself. And then a series of questions asked by Lanzmann as regards the person who would be in charge of the “final production” and who would thus decide what images would be retained in the first film (of the actual dinner). Then the reiteration, on my part, of our preoccupations as to the fate, the destination, the eventual re-use, and by whom, according to what rules and procedures, of images not retained. And I recall in particular the responses—which we found rather evasive and which, as a result, confirmed our suspicions—of a Godard grumbling that the question of the property of images was an absurd, obsolete question that today’s world had gradually emptied of any sense.
One should know as well that we had another meeting the following day, September 7th, at Lanzmann’s home, in an increasingly deleterious though in many ways hilarious atmosphere. Jean-Luc Godard spent the entire hour addressing us in a monologue, at first interrupted by Lanzmann’s grumbling and my protests and then, rapidly, when we both understood that nothing could stop him and that this was the wave length he had decided to transmit on that afternoon, uninterrupted—Jean-Luc Godard, then, spent the «conversation» time talking about Proust’s chauffeur, Agostinelli, the value of the plane Proust had given him, in which he would kill himself, the value it would have today, the difference between the two sums that seemed to plunge him into unfathomable meditations and about Pietro Citati’s book, La Colombe poignardée [The Dove Stabbed], from which, I suppose, he had gleaned these pieces of information.
And it should be known, finally, that on September 10th, the day before I left for Cuba, we had lunch, Lanzmann and I this time, at the Ritz bar, and that I understood then that Lanzmann was beginning to be fed up with this dialogue of the deaf and the histrionics that went with it. What was the point, when, having made Shoah, one was the author of one of the great films of the 20th century, at once a film and more than that, what was the point, when one had given words and images to that which was supposedly impossible to represent and when one had, what’s more, known how to name the unspeakable, to take the trouble, not to serve as “off the cuff psychoanalysts” to an artist whose “antisemitism” or, at least, whose confusion, embarrassment, or lack of information concerning this affair we would have discovered, as has been written, but to arbitrate coquetteries, questions of precedence and etiquette, and squabbles about technique?
I don’t know if Godard sensed it—but it’s the truth: the film, at this time, was still an ongoing project in principle, but the bond of confidence had been broken, and that, I repeat, for technical reasons or disagreement about the form of the thing or because of our difficulty in talking to each other. But none of those had anything to do with an “antisemitism” of which we would be abruptly informed.
Of course, technique is never just technique. And one can always say, after the fact, that behind these quarrels about the form of the final production, or about the respective length, for each one, of different fragments or sequences, or about the delay in coming up with the contracts lay other, more basic disagreements. But that is not true either. That would be rewriting the story. And in any case, that is not the way Lanzmann and I experienced it.

Document 7.
15 September 1999. Letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Dear BHL,
Thank you for sending me your book. I paid particular attention to the sequence you pointed out as well as the following one. Now that C. Lanzmann has organized Sunday like a beginning of the week rather than an end, as I had hoped, I can only be grateful for your gesture and not go on, amicably and sincerely, about the content of what you have written.
See you Sunday, then, amicably,
JLG

Jean-Luc Godard was referring to the dinner of September 5th which, indeed, happened to be on a Sunday and a date that had been inconvenient for him but which he, sportingly, had accepted.
He also alluded to the copy of Comédie I sent him in which I had called his attention to the «sequence», as he puts it, containing the “poem” he had addressed to me in 1996, the day after the flop of Le Jour et la Nuit.
And as for the other Sunday (mentioned in the «see you Sunday» of his note), it was the following Sunday, September 19th, the day of my return from Cuba, when a last dinner was to take place at the Crillon, a dinner which, my notes indicate, went very badly this time.
Reciprocal exasperation.
Godard once more sitting down to dinner without taking his coat off.
Lanzmann who, once again, literally didn’t say a word from hors d’oeuvre to dessert.
And after that, a long conversation between Lanzmann and me in the cloakroom of the hotel, in which he expressed his wariness and, basically, his growing antipathy towards Godard.
At that time, though, still nothing had been said.
Nothing, as yet, had been definitively decided.
At this point, none of the three of us seemed ready to assume the responsibility for breaking it off.
And the film was still in the works.
One thing, maybe, one little thing I must confess, to be completely honest. It concerns this last letter in which, for the first time, I perhaps sensed a breath of wind from the wing of antisemitic imbecility. I say “perhaps”. That said, I am conscious of tempting the extreme in terms of the situation and the words. All the moreso since I have always made it a rule to be wary, in principle, of the unfair and far-fetched overinterpretation of Freudian slips. And yet…”Now that C. Lanzmann has organized Sunday like a beginning of the week rather than an end, as I had hoped,”…. When you think of it, what a strange phrase! And what strange anger, all of a sudden. Does one have to draw a picture? I didn’t do so for Lanzmann. And for the first time, I preferred to keep the letter to myself.

Document 8.
24 septembre 1999.
FACSIMILE OF A PAGE FROM THE WEEKLY «LE POINT» ANNOTATED BY JEAN-LUC GODARD
This eighth document, this scanned page, is my column from Le Point. But no matter, what counts is the annotation, in Jean-Luc Godard’s hand, in the margin of the last paragraph “which shall not be a gala dinner”.
For, on Wednesday the 22nd, two days earlier, a meeting took place in Jérôme Clément’s office at ARTE. And this meeting was well and truly, this time, the last rendez-vous of the three protagonists of this project that would have been called Not a Gala Dinner—the epitaph of which was written here.
Seated, like Lanzmann and me, facing a Jérôme Clément on a mission of reconciliation, Godard had begun by grumbling, in an antagonizing, almost nasty way, an enigmatic “A Shoah equals 150 theatres.”
Lanzmann, irritated, then furious, and all the more furious because he did not understand, any more than I did, what our partner was trying to say or make us understand, retorted, “Be clear, Godard, be clear.”
Godard, Lanzmann’s furor nourishing his own, got up and turned the light switch on, then off, and, trembling with rage, sat down again, simply saying, “There.”
Lanzmann, beside himself and ratcheting things up a notch, head between his shoulders, with the air his friends are familiar with, indicating he is ready to strike, replied, in an even more disconcerting and absurd manner, “I was sure of it.”
I exclaimed, in turn, that I had just about had it and that, if everyone had decided to take leave of their senses, why shouldn’t I as well, a little bit—and I added, “Have you already dug a grave?”, which, honestly, made no sense either.
And while Jérôme Clément attempted to somehow calm things down, both of them left, one, then the other, Godard first, then Lanzmann, Godard calling out to everyone in general, “All you have to do is get Semprun.”
That 22nd of September, it was all over. And it is thus touching to see this last annotation that would constitute the last time I saw what would have been the title of our film, printed in Jean-Luc Godard’s own hand.
End of match. End of story. And an ending in which one can easily see—excuse me for saying it again—that it hasn’t much to do with the discovery Lanzmann or I, Lanzmann and I, supposedly made concerning our partner as someone one would not associate with.
One could find this story absurd, comical. This incident or that one that I have described may seem puerile. Some may even be surprised that, ultimately, Lanzmann and I could waste so much time running after an idea whose unfeasibility in principle appears, in retrospect, to be obvious. But it would be dishonest on my part, ten years after the fact, to show off and exclaim, «Ah! The sly dog! Oh, the nasty man! We sensed it, we did, that closet antisemitism! We saw, very clearly, the mask come off! And that is why we backpedaled and abandoned the project before it was too late.” It would be dishonest, because it would be contrary to the actual sequence of events.