So Hollywood movie producer Jack Palance hires the extremely talented director Fritz Lang to direct a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. A cartoon stereotype of the overwhelmingly arrogant American, Palance is repulsed by and opposed to Lang's treatment of the material as an art film (having seen many films by Lang, I personally don't think he would've ever made the film Godard depicts him to have made) and hires a writer played by Michel Piccoli to revise the script. The conflict between creative expression and advantageous commercial prospect corresponds with Piccoli's estrangement from his wife Brigitte Bardot, who becomes detached from Piccoli, in another one of Godard's pretentious scenes of internal indecision and external inertia between two lovers, after he leaves her alone with Palance, who is of course a hot shot convertible-driving playboy.
Piccoli and Bardot's estrangement is obvious to us long before Godard is finished demonstrating it to us, continuing throughout his career to insult the intelligence of his audience by indulging in his own conscious effort to be different.
Piccoli, Bardot, and Palance correspond to Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon, respectively. Oooooh!
I just watched a French interview from 1964 of idolized New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on YouTube. I've liked Breathless and Tout Va Bien, but I'm embittered towards him because his very snobbish and uninformed bite at Steven Spielberg, saying that Schindler's List was nothing more than an attempt to cash in on the Holocaust, which couldn't possibly be true because Spielberg famously was not paid for directing the movie. I watched the interview on YouTube because I was interested to see if my picture of Godard as an intellectual snob was founded, and it was, because anyone who watches this interview with the knowledge of his high-horsey criticism of very influential people like Spielberg and Jane Fonda can plainly see that he himself is guilty of selling out. The interview was for Contempt, which was made very popular at the time of its release because of the showcase of Brigitte Bardot's nude body. Godard answers the very admittedly prudish French interviewer's question about the scene by saying that he originally did not film those scenes with Bardot but that the American distributors said that in order to make the movie commercial, he would have to include a sex scene with her at the beginning, middle and end. Although he told the Americans that according to the story, it was impossible for her to have sex scenes with her at the middle and end, he submitted to annexing a sex scene at the beginning and nude scenes as substitutes for sex at the middle and end.
Aside from my image of him as an intellectual snob being correct, as he seemingly needlessly references Cellini's Venus sculpture, for example, so that he can elusively flaunt his knowledge and intellect, we see that one of Godard's most famous, most talked-about, and most iconic sequences on film proves him a grandiose hypocrite.
Godard also throws in a discussion of Dante's Inferno and Friedrich Hölderlin's poem, "The Poet's Vocation." Normally, if there are elements of a film that I don't quite catch on to at first, I am patient for them to dawn on me. With films like Contempt, I feel contempt. There is a standard that the audience must reach. It looks down upon you. Whether it is fully comprehensible beyond its surface or not is irrelevant, because one no longer cares after the film tunes out from its audience and panders coldly to its own flight of fancy. Have many great films done that? Yes, but they are at least connected to the audience's reaction, whether bewildered, aghast, enlightened, intrigued, whatever. Contempt couldn't care less about your reaction. Its title is perfect. It's like a brand name. You pick it up at the video store and that's what you get. Contempt.
Piccoli and Bardot's estrangement is obvious to us long before Godard is finished demonstrating it to us, continuing throughout his career to insult the intelligence of his audience by indulging in his own conscious effort to be different.
Piccoli, Bardot, and Palance correspond to Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon, respectively. Oooooh!
I just watched a French interview from 1964 of idolized New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on YouTube. I've liked Breathless and Tout Va Bien, but I'm embittered towards him because his very snobbish and uninformed bite at Steven Spielberg, saying that Schindler's List was nothing more than an attempt to cash in on the Holocaust, which couldn't possibly be true because Spielberg famously was not paid for directing the movie. I watched the interview on YouTube because I was interested to see if my picture of Godard as an intellectual snob was founded, and it was, because anyone who watches this interview with the knowledge of his high-horsey criticism of very influential people like Spielberg and Jane Fonda can plainly see that he himself is guilty of selling out. The interview was for Contempt, which was made very popular at the time of its release because of the showcase of Brigitte Bardot's nude body. Godard answers the very admittedly prudish French interviewer's question about the scene by saying that he originally did not film those scenes with Bardot but that the American distributors said that in order to make the movie commercial, he would have to include a sex scene with her at the beginning, middle and end. Although he told the Americans that according to the story, it was impossible for her to have sex scenes with her at the middle and end, he submitted to annexing a sex scene at the beginning and nude scenes as substitutes for sex at the middle and end.
Aside from my image of him as an intellectual snob being correct, as he seemingly needlessly references Cellini's Venus sculpture, for example, so that he can elusively flaunt his knowledge and intellect, we see that one of Godard's most famous, most talked-about, and most iconic sequences on film proves him a grandiose hypocrite.
Godard also throws in a discussion of Dante's Inferno and Friedrich Hölderlin's poem, "The Poet's Vocation." Normally, if there are elements of a film that I don't quite catch on to at first, I am patient for them to dawn on me. With films like Contempt, I feel contempt. There is a standard that the audience must reach. It looks down upon you. Whether it is fully comprehensible beyond its surface or not is irrelevant, because one no longer cares after the film tunes out from its audience and panders coldly to its own flight of fancy. Have many great films done that? Yes, but they are at least connected to the audience's reaction, whether bewildered, aghast, enlightened, intrigued, whatever. Contempt couldn't care less about your reaction. Its title is perfect. It's like a brand name. You pick it up at the video store and that's what you get. Contempt.