And/Or

And/Or

Coutard of Godard Fame


Surendar Chawdhary, Direction 1971

Raaool Kootaa is how the Institute director Mohan Agashe kept refering to him throughout his welcome address. But then, none of us needed an introduction to the name of the silver-haired, portly “old monkey” in the chair, nor were we in any doubt how to pronounce it, crisply as spelt, Raoul Coutard.

We have been brought up on that mother of all waves, the nouvelle vague. 400 Blows, Les Mistons, Breathless, Le Petit Soldat, Jules Et Jim; not Bresson, not quite Resnais, certainly not Louis Malle, but Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut. Surprising, though, that all along nobody knew what Coutard looked like. Here he was, suddenly in person, the first ever actual participant from the great wave to visit FTII, to conduct a week-long workshop. The excitement in the Classroom Theatre was palpable, that winter of 1997.

Coutard doesn’t speak English; nor did he have a very structured approach to the workshop. All he had brought were VHS copies of his more recent films (but no subtitles), and was game for anything the students might want him to do. Standing heavily by the rostrum next to a local girl who was his interpreter, he announced as much and fell silent, making faces, waiting. Suddenly realizing that it was their time ticking away, the students began to search for questions while their think tank got busy trying to figure out plans for the rest of his stay. And before long the workshop had found its working rhythm: of longish questions asked, interpreted into a brief french mumble, responded to by a torrent of outpourings in loud french (laced with equally lively shrugs, rolling of eyes, pauses and occasional laughter, then turning for translation) and everybody finally lapping up in hushed silence everything that the interpreter had to say.

Predictably, most discussion tended to slip to his New Wave days, to his long association with Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut and particularly to Breathless and Soft Skin which we were most familiar with. By comparison, his newer films appeared to be well mounted, spic and span and in beautiful colour, but more like assembly line products. Fortunately, Coutard didn’t seem to mind going back to the past and staying there awhile for us.

“Soft Skin had to have a subtle erotic charge,” Coutard told us by way of an opening statement on the film, “and one of the devices used to bring that out was weaving in a profusion of big close-ups, sensuously shot, of details like lovers’ hands, locks and keys, stockings and shoes. The intertwining lovers’ hands in the title sequence were additionally shot in reverse order to add an extra dimension of mystery.” Economy of resources being a hallmark of the New Wave, it squared well when he told us that the professor’s split-level house in the film had been Truffaut’s own apartment. But how were the airplane shots, including those taken from another plane in the air managed, we asked. “It was a low budget film but not that low budget,” Coutard laughed. “Moreover, we were advertising the airline too, so the planes may have come for free.”

The Breathless story, too, revealed many a surprise. For one, he hadn’t been Godard’s original choice on the project, but the producer’s, for whom he had shot three films earlier. Godard discussed his cinematographic approach with him, which to Coutard simply meant he wanted the film shot newsreel style. That, apparently, settled the terms of the celebrated collaboration between the two. Similarly, contrary to a prominent mention naming Truffaut in the credits, there had in fact been no script written for the film. Having established himself with a hit in 400 Blows, this was Truffaut’s gesture of lending prestige to help a friend find financial backing. “Every morning Godard would come with notes for the day’s shooting. When he brought blank pages, that meant no shooting that day,” Coutard chuckled. “Anyway, he always shot in sequence and controlled that film – and many others afterwards – on a one-line formula: Take a situation of impossible love and resolve it with death. That’s what gives those otherwise cold films their emotional core.”

The emotional core of a Godard film was one thing, but any effort on the part of actors to play out that emotion was quite another. Coutard recalled the conflict Godard had with his actress, the close-cropped Jean Seberg. Having been told all along not to project, not to emote, do nothing, she revolted when it came to the scene where she has to report her lover to the police. She being a star, the scene was eventually done her way. “Those veins showing on Seberg’s pretty face were an impurity for Godard which he never again allowed in any of his films.”

On the other hand, Godard had been very flexible on camera placement, easily changing when told the camera could not face a particular direction because of a window. He was delighted when Coutard, using his experience as a war reporter, suggested that small rolls of faster 35mm film used by still photographers could be adapted for their use. Nobody until then had asked for this more sensitive stock for film shooting. The grainy, chalky look of many interiors in Breathless comes from the extensive use of this stock, which was perhaps the first conscious step in the cinema towards liberating action from the tyranny of heavy lighting.

The shooting demonstration on the fourth day was a specialization activity, confined to the cinematography students. For this, they decided to work around a script outline involving a woman receiving a couple of friends in her newly acquired large flat. The situation was chosen partly to fit available neighbourhood premises, and partly to provide typical cinematographic challenges: The three characters, for example, had skin tones ranging from fair to dark; the action involved, at one point, a cramped shooting space and at another, 2-3 lights switched off during the shot; and the hall, having a large number of glass panels, threatened to give away the lights as well as the shooting crew during a 360 degree shot following the woman as she shows her flat to the guests. All this, Coutard was asked to light, operate and shoot on different black-and-white and colour stocks while the students assisted and watched.

“Perfect negative,” the students exclaimed as they came out of the laboratory the next day. And “Perfect operation,” as they saw the black-and-white rushes – colour had to be sent to Mumbai for processing – on the last day of the workshop.

I should like to conclude this memoir with a mention of what might be one of the more lasting gains of Raoul Coutard’s visit to the Institute.

What is the famed ‘Coutard style’ of lighting? Of camerawork? And how might he have come to develop and perfect it? This was the question he was confronted with almost right away on arrival.

“Others say I have a style, but I don’t have one,” he answered, characteristically in detail. “The style is evolved differently from film to film, script to script, director to director. When faced with the challenge of shooting outdoors in available light for Breathless, the shadowless lighting system had to be developed, which some people mistook to be my style. My style is not the same working with Godard and, say, Francois!”

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy the students; some thought that he was being modest and carried on a dogged campaign all through the workshop to prove that maybe, unknown even to himself, he had gathered something of a style – “via the Dutch and Italian paintings, perhaps,” which he had said he admires? But the veteran cinematographer of more than 50 features would have none of that. In another meeting, some of us pointed out that another system of shadowless lighting – fixing a bank of 200 watt tungsten bulbs in a box and stretching a sheet of butter paper over it – had been developed by Subroto Mitra prior to Breathless, for the Apu trilogy. Coutard hadn’t been aware of that but shot back, “So that should be his style too!”

Perhaps it will take some time – and footage – for the youngsters to fully appreciate the import of what Coutard had been trying to tell them. And it’s not going to be easy because of the alarming implications of that answer. Does this mean that Gregg Toland has no style without Citizen Kane, Sven Nykvist none without Ingmar Bergman? And what about Eisenstein’s Edvard Tisse, and our own Subrata Mitra? Are these legends all without a cinematographic style of their own?

Hearts can go breaking but the nature of the medium of cinema would seem to say, yes.

This article has been taken from Under the Wisdom Tree, the commemorative book of the Wisdom Tree Film Festival held at Pune, 2003.