And was surprised to find I had only seen two other Godard films. (One of which did have the hyphen on my spreadsheet.)
Those two films are Breathless (1960), which I watched during my series Audient Audit in 2019 to see if I had correctly or incorrectly added it to my big list of movies watched (incorrectly, I decided), and Notre Musique (2004), which isn't even Godard in his French New Wave prime.
I have a much more well-established notion of the strengths and weaknesses of Godard than I should for having seen so few of his films. There was a lot of assuming going on here, it appears.
For a long time the impression I thought I had of Godard was of a proto Jim Jarmusch, whose characters all wore wife beaters and smoked cigarettes. That's actually only an element of a few Jarmusch films, and I actually like some of them. Only a few of Jarmusch's films that meet that description actually irk me.
Anyway, this impression was obviously formed by Breathless, some small amount of which I think I saw in a French class (that was my conclusion during Audient Audit anyway). So that impression was with me when I saw Notre Musique, sometime after 2004 but I think fairly close to 2004, which was actually my first Godard.
Notre Musique offended me in a different way to how I thought I had been offended by the little amount of Breathless I actually saw. Although I'd be hard-pressed to call up a lot of details of it, this was a far more experimental film, abstract in different wrong ways than I thought Breathless had been abstract, but still pretentious as hell.
And then I must have thought I'd seen another three to four Godard films that I never saw.
I did have one more way my Godard impression was molded, but that's been more recent, and I'd say it probably confirmed my impression rather than molding it. This was the director's brief appearance -- I say "appearance" because it was notable for being an absence -- in the Agnes Varda film Faces Places, in which the director is sort of taken to task for his lack of warmth or sentimentality or anything remotely resembling genial behavior, in a way Varda portrays generously, leaving most of it up to our interpretation. He's talked about but doesn't appear on screen, apparently because he opted out, coldly.
So on Monday night I finally saw Contempt, having first become aware of it on this awesome tumblr site some 15 years ago.
And look, it did not vastly change my impression of Godard. However, it made me appreciate him a lot more. (Um, that sounds like a vast change in your impression, Vance.)
I still think there's a lot of intimate talking that doesn't really go anywhere, that could be cut in half without seriously damaging the narrative. You get a lot of that in Breathless, in addition to the guys smoking cigarettes in wife beaters.
But there were a couple things about Contempt that really drew me in:
1) It has a fourth-wall breaking aspect that I thought was pretty ahead of its time for 1963. That's not to say no one ever talked to the camera before then; they certainly did. In fact, no one talks to the camera here. But what I mean by breaking the fourth wall is that it steps out of a fictitious world and into our real world by using real people playing themselves. For example, Fritz Lang is in it as ... Fritz Lang. He may be the only real person playing himself, but the film is about a director trying to push through a troubled shoot of The Odyssey, and he's well suited to playing himself in it. (And fortunately it does not require a huge amount of scenes from him.)
2) The incredible last 20 minutes or so in Capri. There are parts of Contempt that spin their wheels before this point, but when the production shifts to this Italian island that's subbing in for ancient Greece, the camera just drinks it in. Raoul Coutard's camerawork is not only beautiful on a sheer travelogue level, but Godard has him set up his equipment in such a way to accentuate strange angles in the architecture that disorient us and deepen the feeling of strangeness that the film has slowly built up. There's one particular staircase shot from above that I can't stop thinking about. Here, I'll show you.
3) Brigitte Bardot. Sure, some of the extended aesthetic about Godard that sort of bothers me is his very French worshipping of female beauty. But she was quite the beauty, and the camera also lovingly caresses her clothed and sometimes tastefully nude body. (Tastefully nude = always seen from behind only.)
4) Jack Palance. He's in this! My knowledge of Palance extends mostly to some older and some newer westerns, so it was interesting to see him show up here as a smarmy movie producer.
Look I don't have to list a lot of things. I wasn't even sure I really liked the movie until its last 30 minutes, and especially its last shot, started to leave me -- um -- breathless. There's still a lot of back and forth between the screenwriter (Michael Piccoli) and his wife (Bardot) about whether she does or doesn't still love him and why. I could have done with 25% less of that.
But it did make me realize that the cinematic world of Jean-Luc Godard probably contains some multitudes I didn't realize it contained. Which I really should have realized before now, considering that the two movies of his I've seen are not very similar at all.
I've got another, let's see, 37 features to get to, if I've parsed his filmography on IMDB correctly, and pulled out all the things that were shorts, segments of omnibus features, uncredited films and other bits cinematic ephemera.
Better get to it, tout de suite.
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