La Chienne
Dir. Jean Renoir, 1931, 93 min, DCP.
The principle of ‘remaking’ was central to Godard’s practice. As he put it in relation to Breathless: ‘What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done.’ It is a concept he revisited at length almost six decades later in The Image Book, the opening section of which is titled simply ‘Remakes’.
In the early 2000s, Godard expressed a desire to make a contemporary version of Jean Renoir’s pioneering early sound film, La Chienne (1931), which was based on Georges de La Fouchardière’s best-selling eponymous novel about a love triangle between a shop clerk, a prostitute and her pimp. Fritz Lang later drew his very different Scarlet Street (1945) from the same book. For his remake, Godard planned to cast Maurice Pialat in the Maurice Legrand role played by Michel Simon in Renoir’s version. This was one of several projects he attempted to make with Pialat over the years, none of which came to fruition.
In the mid-1970s, Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville embarked on a remake of Breathless, to be produced by Georges de Beauregard, who had also been responsible for the earlier film. Initially titled À bout de souffle, numéro 2 (Breathless, Number 2), then Numéro deux (À bout de souffle), the aim of the project was not only to reflect on Breathless, but also on the concept of remaking generally, and on how production processes had changed between 1960 and 1975.
Godard considered remaking numerous films he admired by other directors. Thus Passion (1982) started out as a remake of Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935), which he envisaged transposing from southern France to the Spanish quarter in Geneva. For the most part, however, his remake projects remained unrealized. Besides La Chienne, these included Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du péché (Angels of Sin, 1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, 1945), Marcel Pagnol’s Angèle (1934), and a venture he said he had taken quite a long way at one point in the 1990s, Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), which of course was one of the many films he had ‘remade differently’ in Breathless. —Michael Witt, Series CuratorÂ
