#52: Contempt

Contempt (Godard, 1963)

I think I'm just about done with Godard. I've seen three of his films. At first I thought, "Okay, I just don't get his cinematic style". So I've listened to what other people have to say about him. I've seen three of his films, one of them twice. I get his cinematic style now. His films suck.

It's not that what he has to say in his films isn't interesting. He has lots of interesting things to say, and cool ideas about what a film should be. But his characters say those ideas directly to the camera. He has no characters. His characters are empty symbols, incapable of self awareness or even the slightest hint of human thought or behavior. Never have I seen such interesting ideas implemented so badly. Godard clearly thinks he's earned such theatrical license he doesn't even need to justify his intellectual masturbation with a plot.

In Contempt, the main character is a playwrite who is asked to write a script for a movie of the Odyssey. He and his wife despise each other but stay together, holding on to the ideal of being in love. He wants to make Ulysses' motives into that he stayed away from home for ten years because he hates Penelope so much. The director fights him, and he complains that audiences don't like intelligent cinema. (That's not the character complaining, it's Godard. The character is just the one talking.) He fights with the producer and director who are strawmen for soulless mechanical filmmaking over the direction of the script, and then quits. Idiots. They don't understand his artistic genius! They want a return on their stupid financial investment.

As his fans will tell you, Godard challenges the notion of filmmaking, and all the cliches about what a film has to be. Some examples. He challenges whether meaningless abstractions built upon meaningless abstractions have to have any connection at all with the human experience. He even goes so far as to challenge whether intellectuallism has to be intelligent! The result is a movie often discussed intensely by film theory students, but rarely enjoyed.

Rating: * 1/2 / 5

58/101