Tag Archives: Jean-Luc Godard

Bang Go the Caresses

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Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Contempt inventively deviates from cinematic convention and probes gender relations while it explores miscommunication between people. The storyline is loosely adapted from a 1954 novel by Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo [A Ghost at Noon) and depicts the production of a film-within-a film, a cinematic version of Homer’s classic Odyssey. Multileveled ambiguities complicate the narrative of the movie enough that many writers have misinterpreted Godard’s premise. They fail to understand why the female protagonist becomes disillusioned with her husband. I will interrogate those critical misapprehensions to suggest another reading of her response. I will further attend to a sequence that is rarely mentioned in the copious literature about Contempt. The scene in question is a mise en abyme staged in a movie theatre auditorium, which displays in microcosmic form the primary deconstructive and reflexive techniques of visuals and sound that Godard uses throughout the film. In that scene, through a critique of the dominant ideologies of Hollywood and by exploring male and female relations, Godard reveals how women are diminished.

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In an interview done while he was working on the film, Godard reduced the plot down to one simple sentence: “It’s the story of a girl who is married to a man and for rather subtle reasons begins to despise him” (Feinstein, 9). This quote indicates that the director considers the primary theme of the film to be the disaffection of the couple, with a particular focus on the feminine rationale; however, the way in which Godard reveals the response of a woman to her husband’s behavior is far more complex.

The narrative can be more properly synopsized as follows: a young writer, Paul Javal (played by Michel Piccoli), is commissioned to write a screenplay for a filmed version of Homer’s Odyssey, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang, who plays a version of himself. The film is financed and produced by an extremely arrogant American, Jerry Prokosch (played by Jack Palance), who cannot speak the languages of those involved in the film production, but relies on his assistant/interpreter Francesca (played by Giorgia Moll). Prokosch’s demands strain not only the progress of the film, but also Paul’s marriage. The writer takes out the brunt of his frustrations on his wife Camille (played by Brigitte Bardot) and he uses her to curry favor with the producer, which eventually leads to the separation of the couple and her death.

When Contempt was first released in 1963, it was the most widely promoted and renowned of Godard’s films and indeed, of any film connected with the French New Wave. A huge literature has built up around the film in the time since its release and a newer burst of analysis occurred after the release of the Criterion Collection DVD in 2002. However, many of the critics that have been written about it, both at the time of its release and more recently, seem to have misread the reasons why Camille leaves the callow, compromised writer Paul, to go with the crude and bullying American producer Prokosch. This confusion is in spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that so many writers have dismissed the importance of Godard’s story content. They echo the commentary in David A. Cook’s textbook, A History of Narrative Film: “The narrative portion of Le Mépris, which concerns the dissolution of the scriptwriter’s marriage, is less important than Godard’s use of the self-reflexive conceit” (542). Cook’s claim results in a distorted view of the film because he privileges Godard’s reflexive techniques over the content of his narrative. In fact, the nature of Godard’s practice is such that the representations and socio-political content in his narratives are every bit as important as the cinematic forms of depiction that he uses. They are intricately and essentially bound together. Godard is always self-reflexively pointing to the way the film industry and his personal life are tied together and how representations inform the relationships between men and women.

Alternatively, the cinematographer of Contempt, Raoul Coutard, remarked that the director made the film to be a “million-dollar (love) letter” to his soon-to-be-ex-wife Anna Karina (Horton, 210). Seen in this light, Contempt is Godard’s self-analysis of certain of his own negative behaviors, which by explicating them in the course of the story, he acknowledges to have contributed to the eventual dissolution of his marriage. Therefore, the film is rather a confession or apologia, than a love letter as such. There is a high degree of personal investment in the narrative, which shows that that narrative should be accorded the same level of critical attention as the technical aspects of the film.

Many have said that the success of the film is largely due to the conspicuous presence of the famous beauty Brigitte Bardot in the cast. Her erotic presence and star power inform public reception. Likewise, veteran American tough-guy character actor Palance is used effectively as the American producer Prokosch. His casting incorporates the audience’s expectations, as noted by critic Robert Stam:

In the cinema the performer…brings along a kind of baggage, a thespian intertext formed by the totality of antecedent roles.(…) By casting Jack Palance as the hated film producer Prokosch in Contempt, the auteurist Godard brilliantly exploited the sinister memory of Palance’s previous roles as a barbarian (in The Barbarians, 1959) and as Attila the Hun (in Sign of the Pagans, 1959). This producer, the casting seems to be telling us, is both a gangster and a barbarian, a suggestion confirmed by the brutish behavior of the character (548).

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Palance is so famed as a portrayer of gangsters, even to the French, that his presence in the film telegraphs “villain” to the audience fully as much as Fritz Lang indicates “venerated director” or Bardot indicates “sex kitten.” Palance and Bardot are both used reflexively within Contempt, as their extra-screen images carry meaning in very different ways into the narrative of the film. They each indicate stereotyping, or rather they reflect the traditional male and female characters that are produced for Hollywood narratives, but in Contempt they demonstrate how those stereotypes complicate real-world expectations.

In fact, male/female relations are a central concern of Contempt. At a screening that Lang has arranged to show Paul and Prokosch rushes of the film in progress, the producer arrogantly makes claims to understand how “the Gods” feel, but then leers and sniggers in a degraded way at shots of a nude woman swimming onscreen. He forces his assistant and interpreter Francesca to bend over, while he uses her back as a desk to write a check buying Paul’s rewriting services.

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Disturbingly, Francesca serves his efforts to control the film, since she is not only selective in how she chooses to translate Prokosch’s English words for the film team, but also, she edits what she relays of what they say back to him.

Stam also points out how Francesca chooses to perform her functions as translator: “(she)….mediates between the monolingual American producer Prokosch and his more polyglot European interlocutors.(…) Francesca’s hurried…translations invariably miss a nuance, smooth over an aggression, or exclude an ambiguity” (549). As will be seen to also apply to the other female characters, Francesca primarily is ventriloquized by the male characters; the words of Prokosch and the other male character are filtered through Francesca. She does not speak her own thoughts or opinions, but can only edit, at best. Francesca sometimes subverts her employer’s interests — when Lang frequently makes disparaging remarks about the producer in languages that Prokosch doesn’t understand, she often either mitigates them by altering their meaning, or doesn’t bother to translate them at all. However, her discretions regarding Prokosch’s proclamations and the responses they elicit are wasted on the multilingual Lang, at least, because he is aware of exactly what Prokosch is saying.

Many critics have wondered why Camille falls out of love with Paul in the course of the story For instance Colin McCabe says that he cannot see how Paul’s behavior can “explain [Camille’s] contempt for her husband, nor her decision to have an affair with Prokosch.” (155). McCabe misconstrues the reasons for the couple’s disaffection and blames it, as if by default, on the woman involved. This is a misreading apparently based on the spurious, sexist views of “liberated” female sexuality that were prevalent at the time the film was first released, rather than anything seen in the film. Significantly, Camille is traded like a commodity between Paul and Prokosch. Neither man cares about her opinion. Paul silences her and betrays her trust. He and Prokosch both attempt to remove her agency. This represents the way in which the dominant ideologies of Hollywood deprives women of their voices and uses them only for their physical beauty in films.

Despite any protestations Paul makes to Camille and to Lang in his consultations with the director, whose advice he seems to ignore, the writer goes along with Prokosch’s desires regarding the script he is supposed to be working on. In his behavior, Paul shows himself to be no better in his way than Prokosch is in his. It is notable that to curry favor with Prokosch, Paul repeatedly pushes Camille at the American. First, Paul arranges for Camille to ride with Prokosch in his sports car. It is the first major blow to the marriage. Camille is disgusted that Paul entrusts her to the care of such a man. Paul is then late himself in getting to where Prokosch drives her and he makes an unconvincing explanation for his tardiness. Francesca arrives at the destination on her bicycle belatedly and just after Paul, which gives them the appearance of collusion and we, the viewers, cannot say whether or not there is justification for such an implication.

Subsequently, Camille’s worst suspicions are apparently borne out when later, she enters the interior of the Capri residence to see her husband casually fondling the interpreter. Camille observes that Lang is also forced to work with Prokosch, but shows obvious contempt for the producer.

Throughout the film, Paul displays no ethical backbone at all. He whines to Camille and vacillates about whether or not to compromise his talents, as he is unquestionably in the process of doing just that. He has taken Prokosch’s check after the producer made a fool of himself in an absurd tantrum. Yet, Paul blames Camille for his compromises. He says he must do so in order to make more money to pay for the apartment that she likes. In his escalating argument with her, Paul condescendingly describes Camille as a “typist” who he has somehow elevated in status by his attentions, even though typing is the only activity we see him do.

Additionally, Paul has been hiding things from his wife that she subsequently discovers: that he is a member of the Communist Party and that he has a gun. In the extended apartment scene, the entire relationship slips over the edge when he unexpectedly, shockingly slaps her. She then says that she fears him and that “it wasn’t the first time either,” implying that he has physically abused her previously. Later, Paul pushes Camille on Prokosch again and insists that she leave with him on his boat while Paul remains behind on set. Paul later spies Camille and Prokosch kissing, and blames Camille.

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Paul brings a gun onto the set for the purposes of threatening Prokosch, but he does not follow through, apparently because it would endanger his employment.

The auditorium scene (the chapter titled “7. An Audition” on the DVD) is rarely noted in articles and papers about Contempt, but it forms a microcosmic view of many of the most important themes of Godard’s innovative mise-en-scène. It can be usefully examined by splitting its elements into two parts: one that focuses on the visual aspects of the scene and one that concerns itself with Godard’s use of sound. The scene is staged in a movie theatre and/or auditorium that is being used for a casting call that is set up in the form of a dance performance.
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Visuals

The scene in question is prefaced by another, much shorter scene that takes place in a cab. This short interlude links the very famous long take within Paul and Camille’s apartment to the scene under particular examination here, the casting call that takes place in an auditorium. After the emotional sequence in the apartment, Camille escapes in a cab, trying to leave Paul behind, but he runs to catch up to the vehicle and hops in. There is a brief interchange between the couple and then Camille apparently surrenders, to be taken to the casting call. Her anger and disgust at Paul is emphasized by the abrupt imposition of a dark filter over her image. This is one of several occlusions of Camille, which foreshadow what becomes of her at the end of the film and also echo the use of colored filters in the nude scene at the beginning of the film.

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In the present scene, the dark filter leaves only the silhouette of Camille’s head and the whites of her eyes visible, whites which glitter strangely. The filter simulates a temporal passage from daylight to early evening, but it also represents an occlusion of the character of Camille. The darkening, taken with the swelling at that moment of the non-diegetic score, symbolically predicts her fate at the end of the film.

Inside the theatre, the girl onstage mimes a pop song as she dances in an eroticized manner, wiggling her hips and shimmying from left to right and vice versa. The other performers behind her onstage simply walk in male/female pairs from one side of the stage to the other, only to turn and walk back again, repeatedly. One of the couples separates as a woman goes offstage; her male partner then wanders back and forth among the other couples as if confused. They are all shot with sweeping back-and-forth horizontal movements of the camera. This is similar the other slowly swiveling horizontal pan shots in this film, but in this case the actors have their lower legs and feet cropped out.

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Their movements become groundless and their shifting figures seem to be sliding in different directions, which creates a dizzying, unmoored sensation in the viewer. Simultaneously, the shadows of the performers project via multiple light sources onto the movie screen behind them and above the stage, replicating their images in ghostly overlays and reflexively emphasizing the nature of film itself, as 2-dimensional images representing 3-dimensional reality, created by projected light. The lead dancer lip-synchs the song while she dances with occasional odd high-stepping leg movements, as if pulling to extricate her legs from a mire.

When the view reverses to show the audience and the production team in the auditorium, again with slow, to-and-fro horizontal pans, Lang and Camille are on the left side of the aisle. Camille speaks to Lang and they exchange private gestures of disgust about those on the other side of the aisle, but we cannot hear what she says. Francesca is behind them, reading a newspaper and translating for Prokosch, so she is heard, but she is often blocked from view. On the right side of the aisle, Paul sits with Prokosch, who eventually rests his arm on Paul’s shoulder in an overbearing manner that implies Paul is simply furniture. A photographer repeatedly emerges from behind Paul and Prokosch to crouch in the center of the aisle and shoot pictures with a flashbulb of what is transpiring onstage (aiming towards the fourth wall that separates viewer and film).

As they are leaving, Prokosch crows that he has convinced the singer to appear nude at a later shoot. This resonates with the major demand made on Godard by one of the real producers involved with Contempt, the American Joseph Levine, that a nude scene of Bardot be added to the beginning of the film. Godard managed to turn this compromise to his advantage by making that scene work beautifully and support his narrative. However, that was not Levine’s desire. He just wanted Brigitte Bardot naked in the film for commercial reasons. In Hollywood, even such a star as Bardot is only there to stimulate the erotic desires of a male audience. Sex sells; it is the basis of the economy of cinema. At the end of the scene, the film team goes up through the aisles of seats while discussing the actors’ roles within the adaptation of Odyssey. Camille rejects Paul’s conciliatory efforts, but reserves a smile for Lang when he cites her (Bardot’s real) famous initials, “B.B.” Camille then removes herself from the group to pass through an upper row of seats, separated from the others. Prokosch moves ahead and reaches the exit first; he then turns, dramatically placing one leg up on the seats at the end of the row Camille is navigating. When Prokosch asks Camille why she doesn’t speak, the theatre lights are cut and she is again plunged into darkness, one not quite so deep as that which enveloped her in the preceding scene in the cab, but echoing its affect. The shadow around Camille obscures her and reduces her to just a shadow, as she reiterates her muteness.
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Sound

The sound of the scene is also key to deciphering its reflexive narrative qualities. Camille and the “singer” onstage are depicted as voiceless, sexualized bodies. Francesca is also voiceless, but in a somewhat different way; she functions as a mediator and such limited agency as she has is limited to withholding small bits of information. These characters symbolize the roles forced on women by Hollywood that relegate them to a lower class. Women may perform, but words are put into their mouths by men and their acting roles are most often passive and subservient—they may be mothers, homemakers, servants, secretaries or sex toys. They may mediate between men or be traded as commodities among men, but whenever possible, their proactive participation in the power structure is avoided by the male-dominated film industry, then and often still.

As previously noted, in the taxicab sequence that links the famous apartment scene to the auditorium scene, as Paul forces Camille to accompany him to the audition, a filter darkens the image of Camille as the non-diegetic Moravia score swells up portentously. In this way, visual and auditory cues influence the viewers to ascribe great significance to the obscured image and dramatic music–which with hindsight, appear to foreshadow what will become of Camille as the movie’s events unfold. Then, the scene cuts to the approach to the auditorium.

The team working on the film of Odyssey is at the theatre to watch a casting call occurring on a stage in front of a large movie screen. A “singer” who is not actually singing dances onstage in front of a “dancing” troupe made up of couples who hardly dance. Because there is no alteration in the volume of the lead vocal of the song as she shimmies and slides far past the microphone in either direction, it becomes clear that the woman is lip-synching to a recording. One wonders what role she could be cast for then, since she is just a body, an apparent “speaker” for the music with no voice of her own. The diegetic music is murky, brassy and too loud for the auditorium’s audience to have a conversation over.

However, when the view reverses to show the audience, the diegetic music cuts abruptly so that the conversation of the main characters, seated in the front rows of the audience, can be clearly heard. Harun Farocki explains the significance of this device within the greater arc of the director’s filmed corpus: “…it is Godard’s way of comically obeying a rule of sound mixing which he almost always breaks: the rule that ‘background’ noises should be lowered during conversations” (Farocki & Silverman, 49). Farocki understands how Godard alerts the viewer to the ways in which sound is typically presented, in order to demonstrate its artificiality.

In the commentary track included on the DVD, Robert Stam also finds the reflexive manipulation of the sound of this scene comical. However, what is revealed of the characters in the conversations that become audible because of the dropout of the diegetic music is anything but amusing. Both Lang and Camille display revulsion primarily through miming, each for their own very good reasons. Francesca must mediate between the male parties and Paul sulks, but continues to acquiesce to the crass Prokosch’s ongoing bullying.

Two online commentators who reviewed the more recent DVD release of Contempt have opposing views of the sound in this scene. Glenn Erickson takes the scene to represent a theatrical presentation; he misunderstands the purpose, which is actually that the characters are attending a casting call, but he points to the deliberation of the sound techniques that Godard used:

When the leads attend a typically artificial and unconvincing theater performance, Godard takes the opportunity to deconstruct the movie making process. A ‘slotted’ playback tape is used, to which the supposedly live singer on stage lip-synchs. The audio crew has spliced specific holes of blank tape into the playback reel. The appropriately timed gaps of silence allow the spoken dialogue to be recorded in the clear. It’s a standard musical technique, I saw it used on the big dance number in 1941. But here in Contempt, instead of remixing the scene with clean, uncut music, Godard leaves it raw. The jarring holes in the playback punch in and out, making the scene purposely artificial, unfinished…anti-slick (Erickson).

Even as Erickson misses the narrative point of the scene, he apprehends the technical innovations involved. Godard even has the sound cut-off occur within a single shot. For instance, as the film team is shown, the music is heard, then drops out so we hear the conversation. Then the music resumes before the camera shows the stage. In this way, the director draws the viewer’s attention to the various multi-levels of narrative taking place and the fact that the conversation could not be heard unless the music was muted.

Joshua Zyber understands what transpires in the scene, but he treats the director’s handling as negative and possibly accidental:

Like most of the director’s films, Contempt is filled with pretentious attempts to play with or deconstruct the language of cinema. (…) An overbearing score often drowns out the dialogue. During a scene in which Jerry auditions singers, the music and singing abruptly cut out on the soundtrack whenever the main characters speak (Zyber).

Whether or not Godard’s work is “pretentious” is debatable, but his effects are entirely deliberate. As Zyber notes, the music does “drown out” the dialogue in other scenes, but in this scene, the music drops out whenever Prokosch, Francesca, Lang, or Paul speak.

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They sit in the front row, first Lang beside Camille, with Francesca seated in the row behind them, and then across the aisle, Paul besides Prokosch, who pontificates while Francesca translates. Francesca has no authority or agency; her words are never truly her own, although she occasionally edits her translations in the interests of diplomacy. Rather, she is a conduit between men, she is a body used for transmission. Often Francesca can’t even be seen; her positioning makes her invisible, a disembodied voice that has no apparent source. Her skills as a linguist or mediator are never acknowledged and she is never thanked by those that she serves.

Camille seems to be primarily there as an erotic presence. She is not actually part of the production and she hardly speaks while they are seated. When she does, it is overridden by the diegetic music. Paul speaks to her, but she doesn’t answer him back. Several times, she gestures as if she is exchanging words with Lang, but she cannot be heard. As they leave the auditorium, the party continues to discuss the movie project. Paul attempts to speak to Camille, only to be angrily but silently rebuffed. Lang is reflexively faux-ventriloquized by Bardot, as he ascribes a Berthold Brecht quote to her nickname “B.B.” This reference seems to prompt Camille to soften for a moment and silently smile. Lang then specifies those initials as signifying Berthold Brecht, another reflexive touch.

Prokosch makes an announcement regarding the arrangement he has made with the singer: “She agrees to take off her clothes, Tuesday morning, 8 o’clock on the beach” (ironically reflecting the demands made on Godard and Bardot by the real American producer of Contempt). Again, the singer’s voice isn’t heard, her words are only mediated through Prokosch. As the group traverses the aisle on the way out, Prokosch says in English to Camille, “Why don’t you say something?” As Paul and Lang both turn to look at her, a loud click is heard and the lights of the auditorium come down. Camille is eclipsed in shadow as she looks up at the stage and answers (according to the subtitles), “Because I’ve got nothing to say.” This indicates that as with Lang, Camille also understands English and so is more aware of the significance of the various conversations and manipulations occurring around her than she lets on.

According to Kaji Silverman and Farocki Harun, Camille’s silence reflects her symbolic role within the Homeric allegory that the film represents:

HF: …Camille is the only one of the four major characters who never offers a verbal interpretation of Odyssey—the only one who makes no claim to stand outside it, to relate to it from a distance.
KS: Instead, she accepts her preassigned role from the start, and simply persists in it (50).

This interpretation implies that Camille-as-Penelope is locked into a voiceless role, a view echoed by the singer onstage, who is also voiceless in her lip-synching, who pulls yet cannot extricate herself from the cropped-off, boundless space of the stage and who will also soon enough be stripped bare by Prokosch for his pleasure. Similarly, Francesca has no real voice of her own; she merely parrots for the men more palatable versions of their words to each other.
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Throughout the film, Paul emotionally and physically abuses Camille whenever he has a chance to address her without anyone else seeing. It is his violence, his shallowness and his lack of integrity that drive her away. And the result of all of Paul’s betrayals, compromises and rejections is the worst possible one for Camille: Prokosch is eventually the death of her. In the end, after Camille leaves Paul, she and Prokosch are killed in an automobile accident.

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Camille’s death at the end of the film is also misconstrued by some Godard scholars, such as Douglas Morrey, who says it “appear(s) as distinctly arbitrary and as such, it is difficult not to conclude that Camille is being punished for her actions, and punished indeed for her gender which appears solely responsible for those actions. The sudden death at the end of Le Mépris has no generic or narrative motivation….but nor is it realistically motivated…” (20). But a conclusion such as this seems again to reflect preconceptions on the part of the critic, rather than observation of the events depicted in the film. Camille makes no actions that are not precipitated by Paul’s inexplicably cold, contrary and even abusive behavior.

Few Godard scholars misread Contempt as offensively as does Jeremy Mark Robinson. At the outset of his examination, Robinson writes:

Contempt is a film about Brigitte Bardot’s ass (and a very nice, smooth rounded ass it is too). Bardot’s butt is the super special effect, the mega-buck production value item at the heart of the film. The writer Paul quips in the film that if you show a woman a movie camera, they’re happy to show off their behinds. Contempt demonstrates that, time after time. It’s a film of what Godard called the “civilization of the ass” (161).

Here Robinson attempts to ascribe his own sexism to Godard. But in his quoted comment as well as in his self-reflexive movie, Godard alerts the viewer to the absurdity of the patriarchal film industry, to the idea that the producers are self-important, tasteless “asses” who, ironically, are apt to align themselves with Robinson’s literal interpretation. Robinson says of the initial nude scene with a similarly derogatory tone:

The lengthy shot…frames Bardot’s back and buttocks and legs, cutting out the heads of the couple, and the film will do this a number of times, as if telling the viewer, no, you’re not really interested in faces or what the people are saying, you want to see Brigitte Bardot’s naked body. The instinct of the (sic) Contempt’s producers was spot on, of course. And Godard was happy to do what was asked (167).

Again, Robinson assumes wrongly that he comprehends Godard’s motivations and is qualified to judge his integrity. These quotes instead indicate the depths of the critic’s misogyny and his condescension to the audience.

More reasoned is the description by Colin MacCabe:

…there can be little doubt that Contempt would be a much less beautiful and moving film without the long opening scene of Bardot naked on a bed. This highly stylized scene, both in the repetitive naming of the parts of the body and in the use of very strong primary colour filters, delivers neither the pornographic charge nor the psychological explanation which Levin wanted. It does, however, provide perhaps the most beautiful portrait of Europe’s most photographed woman and a hint of the married bliss which will turn to catastrophe in the course of the film (154).

McCabe appreciates how Godard satisfied the producer’s demands while simultaneously subverting them, no mean trick. As a result, the film can sustain a feminist reading of its depiction of an abusive relationship even as it plays on its status as a star vehicle for one of the most objectified of actresses, Brigitte Bardot. Even by the values of 1963, it should be seen that it is Paul who is as Camille says, “an ass.”

A large part of the shock value of the film is watching a man callously maltreat his wife, as Paul does; the abuse is emphasized in seeing it happen to a character played by the famously desirable Bardot. Her various close-ups, even when subversive in content, still achieve exalted heights of glamour and help to propel the film to legendary classic status. In one profile shot that echoes the painted statue sequences that are interspersed through the film, Camille speaks a transgressive list of obscene curses, then turns and her face crumples in pain. In another close-up, she nurses her burning, slapped cheek.

Despite the actress’s engagement in her role, the character of Camille is as much the intoxicating Bardot as “Lang” is Lang. Godard’s ability to play on this adds to the reflexivity of the film in many overt and subtle ways. In her bathtub scene, Camille reads a biography about Lang, and quotes his words. Lang in his role as himself speaks lines that express Godard’s own theories. And, as noted earlier, in the auditorium scene, Lang quotes Bardot’s ubiquitous nickname “B.B.”

Even as Godard embeds in his film specific depictions of how creative people are used and abused by the money interests of Hollywood and other players in the commercial movie world, he shows how women are specifically maltreated and exploited within that system. Godard pulls aside the curtain on the private emotional interactions between men and women, to expose and comment on the shallowness of male sexism and weakness of character. He shows how relationships can be dismantled through one partner’s realization that their love has been taken for granted, or that their sexuality has been exploited for the purposes of career advancement, or by a victim’s rejection of escalating mental and physical abuse. In this way, Godard makes a classic film, yet one that destroys the artifice of film. Contempt raises questions about female agency and the female voice. It points to problems which it does not answer, but at least Godard notices that the problems exist. He made Contempt to be derisive in tone, towards a society that rewards sexism and cruelty and towards the processes of filmmaking that demand so much compromise from artists.

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Bibliography

Contempt (Le Mépris). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance. Criterion Collection, 2002. DVD.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. State University of New York Press, 1997. Print.

Farocki, Harun and Kaja Silverman. Speaking About Godard. NYU Press, 1998. Print.

Erickson, Glenn. “DVD Savant review: Contempt”. 5 Dec. 2002. Coolector Movie Database. 15 March 2013.

Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. 8th Edition. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Interviews. Ed. David Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Print.

MacCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. UK: London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.

Morrey, Douglas. French Film Directors: Jean-Luc Godard. UK: Manchester University Press, 2005. Print.

Robinson, Jeremy Mark. Jean-Luc Godard: The Passion of Cinema. UK: Kent: Crescent Moon, 2009. Print.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Print.

Temple, Michael, James S Williams and Michael Witt. Forever Godard. UK: London: Black Dog, 2004. Print.

Zyber, Joshua. “Contempt (Le Mépris) (Blu-ray)”. 22 Feb. 2010. Hi-Def Digest. 15 March 2013.

“Band” “of” “Outsiders”

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Band of Outsiders is generally considered one of Godard’s most accessible and warmest films. In a review here a while back, Robert Stanley Martin, called it “an ode to the joie de vivre of adolescence,” filled with charm, and humor.

Robert’s review was a big part of why I rented the film. And I can see, at least in part, what appealed to him. “Band of Outsiders” is filled with the joy of moviemaking; the rush of turning on a camera and almost magically creating art. You can see this in the bravura sequences that Robert points to — the scene when the three main characters declare a minute of silence, and the soundtrack cuts off for 30 seconds, or the famous dance number, or the giddy race through the Louvre. But it’s there even in less flamboyant moments. For example, there’s one scene, shot from a distance, in which the protagonists have to step around two men carrying a rug. It’s nothing special, and barely visible, but the very gratuitousness of it is a kind of high spirits — a gleeful insistence on imitating the stochastic bumps of reality, and a kind of celebratory whoop that film makes that imitation possible.

But while, as I said, I can at least partially key into why Robert enjoys the film, I can’t say that I actually liked it myself. Part of the problem, perhaps, was that, where Robert appreciated the movie as an enjoyment of youth and adolescence, I had a lot of trouble doing that for the banal reason that the actors just didn’t seem young. Indeed, Claude Brasseur, who played Arthur, was 28 at the time of the filming, and looked older; Sami Frey, who played Franz, was 27; Anna Karina (Odile) was 24. As a result, much of their childish tomfoolery — passing notes in English class, for example — comes across less as cheerful high spirits, and more as a kind of decadent desperation. Karina’s blushing bashfulness and flirtatious eye-batting, which Robert (and I think many other critics) found winning, seemed to me like almost queasily self-parodic camp. The scene where, after Arthur’s suggestion, Odile mincingly changes her hair-style, suggests both drag and Pygmalion; a fantasy in which a woman becomes, or is possessed by, a suggestible girl.

Godard is a filmmaker obsessed with the filmness of film; as such, I’m sure that the discrepancy between the actor’s ages and the character’s ages was not an accident. Rather, I think Godard is celebrating not so much the dance of youth as the filmic potential of a dance of youth. The film isn’t about “real” adolescence, but about faux adolescence — especially about the power of film to provide a playground for adults. Thus, for example, early in the film Arthur and Franz engage in a mock gun battle; when Arthur is “shot” he performs an elaborate thrashing “death scene”. Towards the end of the film, Arthur is really (or should that be “really”?) shot, over and over again, by his uncle — and his death scene is even more ridiculous and extended than the fake scene from the beginning of the movie. That’s possible because, of course, the real scene isn’t any more real than the fake one. The kids playing around in the first are just like the adults playing around in the second, a truth only emphasized by the fact that the kids playing around in the first are actually adults playing kids playing around.

I’ve no objection to self-referentiality in itself — but the way Godard does it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps it’s the smirking deliberateness of his playfulness. Having the teacher read Romeo and Juliet while Arthur courts Odile couldn’t be much less subtle. And as for that oh-so-cheeky run through the Louvre, turning art into play into (by means of the cinema) art — you just wonder how he manages to even see the footage what with all that winking. The heist tropes, the romantic triangle tropes; their tropeness never functions as critique or even really as comment. They’re just “fun” because they’re “cinema”; nifty elements to manipulate, like the soundtrack. For me, “Band of Outsiders” felt less like an exhilarating romp, and more like an hour and a half of being lectured on what an exhilarating romp I was experiencing. Godard the self-referential lecherous control freak doesn’t entirely thrill me…but it seems at least less oppressively self-congratulatory than Godard the insistently whimsical maestro.

Contempt: A Visual Reading and Other Loose Ends

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Lucien Goldmann, a Marxist critic, said that Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard (1963): “is about the impossibility of loving in a world where The Odyssey can’t be filmed.” (In a world without gods.)  It’s an imaginative interpretation, and a surprisingly reactionary one coming from a Marxist critic commenting on the work of a Marxist director, but it links two of the picture’s themes: 1) the end of the couple Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli); 2) the difficult relation between art and commerce; i. e.: the creative differences between director Fritz Lang (himself) and producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance).  The problem with Goldmann’s thesis is that he reached a totalizing conclusion starting with a particular example, but, mixing gods to the equation, the film invites such an universal statement.   

Apparently the reason why Camille starts to despise Paul is more down to earth than hinted above: she feels used by her husband. When Jeremy Prokosch hits on her Paul does nothing until it is too late (he even encourages his advances ignoring her supplicating eyes). Godard himself said that Camille is like a vegetable

“acting  […] by instinct, so to speak, a kind of vital instinct like a plant that needs water to continue living.”

Contempt is a tragedy (George Delerue’s score never let’s us forget it; Paul to Camille:

“I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”)

and that’s why Lucien Goldmann isn’t that wrong. The events are linked together in a fabric weaved by the fates. Paul Javal was a hack who sold his wife the moment he sold himself. Camille doesn’t rationalize her reactions, but she’s a victim of the commodification of human relations.

The gods no longer exist, so, they can’t influence the lives of humans, but, in a capitalist world, money took their place reigning supreme over everything. That’s why Jeremy Prokosch says:

“Oh! Gods! I like gods! I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.”

To which Fritz Lang replies:

“Jerry, don’t forget: the gods have not created men; men have created gods.”

If men created gods and destroyed them, they can also destroy capitalism.

It wasn’t the first time that Paul was an hack either. He previously wrote Totò Against Hercules. We can only imagine a comedic peplum (Totò, Antonio Gagliardi, was an Italian comedy actor). Contempt’s producer Joseph E. Levine did produce Hercules in 1958 though. He may very well be the target of Godard’s satire. Prokosch is a caricature, obviously: showing him lusting after a nude female swimmer in Fritz Lang’s The Odyssey is a comment on his producer’s insistence to show Brigitte Bardot’s body in the film (Paul:

“cinema is great: we look at women and they wear dresses, they participate in a film, crack, we see their asses.”)

Contempt is full of self-referential and autobiographical details like the one above. Another is Brigitte Bardot wearing a black wig to look like Anna Karina, Godard’s wife. Paul is clearly Godard’s alter ego: wearing a similar hat (as shown in his cameos) and a similar admiration for American films (Camille:

“I prefer you without hat and without cigar.”;

Paul:

“It’s to imitate Dean Martin in Some Came Running.”)

While being on the terrace of villa Malaparte Camille waves at some point. At whom? The paparazzi who infested the surrounding bushes?…

At the beginning of the film, at Cinecittà Studios in Rome (sold by Prokosch to a chain of malls), we can see film posters of Godard’s own Vivre sa Vie (To Live Her Life) and his favorite films also produced in 1962: Hatari by Howard Hawks, Vanina Vanini by Roberto Rossellini; and 1960: Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock. We may draw two conclusions from this list: 1) not everything that money touches is crap; 2) the Italian film industry wasn’t as dead as it seemed because masterpieces continued to be created.  This means that the reading of the images gives some nuance to an otherwise seemingly boneheaded message.  

Camille being trapped between the posters of a film in which men hunt and a film about a sex worker. It’s no wonder that she wears a dark color. More about that, later…

In the above image, taken from Godard’s La Chinoise (1968)  we are invited to confront vague ideas with clear images. The image is clear enough to me: it shows a bourgeois interior with red furniture. Red being the symbolic color of communism the contradiction is self-evident, but how many viewers do the reading? In a logocentric culture, what’s shown to us is automatically hidden.

Being a commercial product directed by an avant-garde director means that Contempt self destructs. Godard even mocks the choice of CinemaScope, a format that, in the words of Fritz Lang:

“Is not suitable for Men. It’s suitable for serpents and funerals.”

And yet… it allows the most interesting formal device of the film. CinemaScope is the format of epic action movies so something unusual was bound to happen when put in the service of domestic drama. In the central act of this three part play (some may argue that it is the most interesting) Camille and Paul are shown in a maze of walls and doors. (The door without glass that Paul opens to enter a room while returning through the wide opened hole is a Keatonian gag. Ditto Camille absent mindedly passing under a ladder to avoid doing the same on her return when she realized what she had just done.) The couple is shown like mice in a lab experiment, the architectural obstacles between them being symbols of their gradual estrangement. Godard even shows a book about opera and an image of the interior of an opera house to further hint at how ridiculous his producers’ ideas of grandeur are (or as an omen of tragedy). In the duly famous conversation between Camille and Paul with the white lamp between them Godard forces the wide format to behave like a more intimate close up framing refusing to do what would be obvious: to show both actors at the same time.

Another great device used by Godard is color. He uses it (especially the clothes’ colors) as symbols. We know Godard’s attraction for primary colors. In Contempt they’re codified as indifference (yellow, but also green), antagonism, communism (red, but also orange), fate, fight, Neptune (blue). All those colors are shown at the beginning of the film (as filters) to contradict the love scene. Or, in a Deleuzian image-time manner to flash-forward what’s already written in the fates’ tapestry script. The living room in Camille and Paul’s house has blue chairs, a white lamp and an orange couch (it’s almost bleu, blanc, rouge, the French flag; France is viewed as a nation divided). The examples of the use of colors as symbols are too many to cite here: it’s in the orange couch that Camille discovers that Paul is a member of the Italian Communist Party. This turns his selling out to capitalism even more unforgivable of course (being Paul Godard’s alter ego it’s obvious how self-loathing this scene is; ditto Paul using a bath towel to look like a toga in Levine’s peplum). On the other hand the Italian Communist Party was an important member of what was called back then eurocommunism, that is, a revisionist mild version of hardcore communism. We may thus read Paul’s betrayal as a more profoundly political one. Ditto the singer in orange and red at the theater singing a pop song to the masses around her (24000 baci – 24000 Kisses – by Adriano Celentano with the lyrics detourned to include the word “politics”) . In the same sequence Fritz Lang quotes “poor” BB – a pun between Bertolt Brecht’s initials and Brigitte Bardot’s nickname:

“Every day, to earn my daily bread/ I go to the market where lies are bought/ Hopefully/ I take up my place among the sellers.  […] Hollywood.”)

At the end of the film Prokosch’s red Alfa Romeo (Camille:

“get in your Alfa, romeo.”)

has an accident against a blue oil (!) truck. Prokosch, Neptune’s tool, is dressed in red while Camille, a willing sacrificial victim on the altar of capitalism is dressed in blue. (Fritz Lang:

“Death is not the end.”

It isn’t because the film has an epilogue.)

This use of color influenced John Cassavetes in Opening Night (1977). A film about theater as Contempt is about filming. In it actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) fights with a red dress (life and youth) against the forces of aging and decay (black).  

Godard, like Johannes Vermeer frames domestic drama to give us the feeling of peeking some secret that we’re not supposed to witness.

 

Like Rembrandt Godard uses shadow to a dramatic effect: showing melancholia and distress…

The opening shot ends with Raoul Coutartd’s camera pointed at us, the viewers, while a voice over quotes Michel Mourlet (not André Bazin as stated):

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in accordance with our desires. Contempt is a story of that world.”

What are these desires, then? The camera asks… Do we want tragedy and catharsis like the old Greeks did in their theater? Or do we want unresolved disturbing truths? Godard’s film ends with the death of Camille and Prokosch, victim and tool of an inhuman system. The last sequence being shot in Contempt of the diegetic The Odyssey ends with a victorious Ulysses, as he arrives at his homeland, Ithaca. He is facing the sea (Neptune), to tell him that, against all odds, he fought and beat him. In this story outside a story the

“truth 24 frames per second”

could never do that. (Another cinephile reference in Contempt is Viaggio in Italia – Journey to Italy – 1954 – by Roberto Rossellini, in which a troubled couple finds redemption. The same thing doesn’t happen in Contempt, of course.) The last words belong to Jeremy Prokosch and Francesca Vanini, yes, Vanini (Georgia Moll): after being reminded by Paul that Fritz Lang fled Germany because he didn’t want to have anything to do with the Nazis, the former simply put it:

“This is not 33, it’s 63.”

(There’s no escape.) Plus: Francesca to Paul:

“You aspire to a world like Homer’s, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t exist.” 

Betatown

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Some shapeless face speaking about robots,
And boredom quivering in the jowls of art
Flop like salmon in the brain cells of the heart.
Oh tragic face of fish, who knows not which was what’s.
 
In memory a flickering, a future passed like prunes
As detectives loomed and knitted new trench coats.
Grad school will keep you ever young, the careful notes
Ring like leaky bivalves in the analog spittoons.
 
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The Godard Roundtable index is here.

Images of Asses

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Contempt opens with a naked Brigitte Bardot asking her beaux Paul (diagetically) and you (extra-narratively) whether you like her butt. Specifically, she asks Paul ((Michel Piccoli) whether he can see various body parts in the (off-screen) mirror, and what he thinks of them. He is (as who wouldn’t be?) appreciative.

The scene is charmingly sexy. It’s also a tease, in more ways than one. Camille (that is, Bardot’s character) doesn’t ask what Paul thinks of her; she asks what he thinks of her image. Of course, we’re looking at the real Camille, not the image — except, of course, of course, we aren’t looking at the real Camille, because there is no real Camille — just an onscreen image of Bardot. The flirtation here, then, is not just Paul playing with Camille, but Godard playing with both of them, and with the idea of image and reality. The scene is less a love letter from a man to a woman than a love letter to the beautiful image of an ass.

The rest of Contempt is almost as self-reflexive as that opening scene. Paul, a theater-writer, is given the opportunity by the crass American producer Jerry (Jack Palance) to rewrite a script about the Odyssey by Fritz Lang (playing himself.) Paul is deeply ambivalent about working on the screenplay; Jerry is a bore, and Lang, who Paul deeply respects, doesn’t want the script changed. In the course of Paul’s vacillations, Jerry casually hits on Camille and Paul himself makes a half-hearted pass at Jerry’s translator/assistant. Somewhere in there, Camille decides she no longer loves Paul. In fact, she despises him.

In a review of the film a few weeks back, Robert Stanley Martin argued that Contempt is about the collapse of communication in a marriage. As Robert says:

Paul is essentially declaring himself a whore, and it’s clear that his seeing it as being for Camille’s benefit leads him to blame her for his situation. He doesn’t stand in the way of the producer’s efforts to come on to her, and he humiliates her further by letting his attention (and hands) wander to the producer’s pretty assistant in her presence. She drops every hint she can that she doesn’t want him to do this job. She even tells him how much happier she was when they didn’t have money and he was hacking out crime novels for a living. But she’s relying on rapport to tell him how she feels; telling him outright means their love isn’t strong enough to do the job. His resentments stand in the way.

That’s a basically naturalistic reading of the film — for it to work, you have to be willing to believe, at least provisionally, that Camille and Paul’s relationship is real. And, at least for me, that wasn’t really possible. A love that could vanish as suddenly and hopelessly as Camille’s love vamished — over the course of a few hours, as both Paul and Camille say — wasn’t really a love to begin with. It was just an image, or a trope.

In fact, Camille’s contempt for Paul seems to be almost entirely a convenient reflection of his contempt for himself. No sooner does Paul accept a check from Jerry than he’s thrusting Camille into a sports car with the oleaginous producer. She’s less a wife than a masochistic fantasy; a dream of defilement. The delirious, endless scene in their apartment — in which the camera shoots the pair passing through doors and hallways or exchanging places in the bath, setting the table and clearing it without eating — has the too-vivid timelessness of a dream. Nothing gets said or understood not because communication between two people has failed, but because that apartment is a skull and there’s only one person in there. Perhaps that one person is Paul; perhaps (as is suggested when Bardot dons a black wig making her resemble the filmmaker’s wife Anna Karina) it’s Godard. But it’s not Camille.

Godard certainly thinks about the way that Camille is a thought. Throughout the film, both Jerry and Paul reimagine the story of the Odyssey in an effort to justify their own view of their relationship with Camille. Jerry speculates early on that Penelope was actually unfaithful to Odysseus; a not-very-subtle wish that Camille will be unfaithful to Paul. Later, Paul imagines that Odysseus stayed away from Ithaca for so long not because he couldn’t get back, but because he had marital troubles and didn’t want to come home. He also grabs a gun and talks briefly about Odysseus murdering Penelope’s suitors, clearly flirting with the idea of killing Jerry.

You could argue that the film is critiquing Jerry and Paul; that it’s undermining or ridiculing their efforts to make Camille their own narrative Pygmalion. Certainly there’s some of that going on; Paul, for example, actually drops that gun without realizing it and someone has to give it back to him — his gangsta dreams are profoundly ridiculous. But, at the same time…Jerry’s dreams do come true; Camille is unfaithful with him. And while Paul doesn’t kill his rival, the film — which is at least somewhat linked to Paul’s consciousness — is happy to do it for him. Jerry and Camille are killed in a gratuitously melodramatic, feebly ironic car crash after they tootle off together, finishing off Paul’s job and his relationship in a single bitterly masochistic ecstasy of revenge.

I was talking about this essay with Caro by email a little bit, and she argued that the unreality of Godard’s characters was not a weakness, but a meta-commentary. “The film is not…about lived reality, but filmed reality,” she said. “So the depiction is of the meaning of the depiction of woman on camera, of man on camera, not about men and women.” Clearly, there’s a lot of truth to that. We’re not supposed to look at Paul, or even at Godard, but at the film of Paul or of Godard. They aren’t asses, but images of asses. You are not meant to identify with them so much as you are meant to contemplate their assness.

But a contemplation of assness is not necessarily, or not only, the same as a critique of assness. Indeed, often, as with Bardot in the opening scene, the contemplation is a pleasure. From its opening shot of a camera on a dolly filming through its sudden interpolations of dramatic shots of statuary to the on-again, off-again dramatically swelling soundtrack to the avuncular presence of Fritz Lang, to that virtuoso dialogue in the apartment, Contempt is boisterously, seductively enamored with its own image. Godard certainly is aware that the woman-as-image, as projection of male sado-masochistic desires and fears, is itself an image. But that image-of-an-image is still irresistibly alluring. Bardot in a wig is a joke about the filmmaker turning Bardot into his wife — but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s turning Bardot into his wife. Camille dead in a convenient car crash is an ironic comment about male ego and filmic wish fulfillment — but the self-referential knowingness just fetishizes the self-reference on top of the wish fulfillment, savoring not the beauty of the dead woman, but the beauty of the reflection of the dead woman. However many lenses you look through, Camille is still a thing in his dream, and contempt is still a pleasure.
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The index to the Godard roundtable is here.

Brecht vs. Godard

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We’ve had an interesting discussion of Godard’s relationship to Brecht in comments, and I thought I’d highlight it here.

Charles Reece started it off by comparing Brecht to Godard in his post on One Plus One.

As our reality was becoming increasingly mediated by images, where the representation of life was replacing life and human relations were displaced through commodities (compare Pierrot le fou’s famous dinner party scene in which the guests communicate through ad-speak to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle), Godard radicalized his films in Brechtian fashion by subverting cinema’s conventions, calling attention to their mediating effects (albeit Debord and the Situationists weren’t fans): music pops up arbitrarily, dialogue doesn’t sync with the images, quotes (both visual and textual) are used in abundance but frequently have no logical connection to what little plot is involved, etc.

This prompted a series of interesting responses in comments, first by Craig Fischer:

I think you’re the first person to invoke the “B” word in your post–labeling Godard’s films “Brechtian”–and I’d agree that SYMPATHY’s separation of elements, etc. follow the techniques of Epic Theater. Personally, though, I’ve always had trouble with Brechtianism, because (a.) it presumes that the author (or auteur) can create a text that can effectively govern reader/audience reactions, and (b.) it assumes that escapism is a bad thing. What about the counter-argument, made by the great Hollywood director John Sullivan, that escapism is “all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan…”?

Then Andrei Molotiu responded:

You’re making Brecht’s point for him. Of course, escapism is never “all some people have.” A choice to educate oneself (for example in critical theory, which is only as far as the nearest public library), or to be a creator rather than just a passive consumer, is always possible. But the entertainment industry would like people to believe that is all they have, so as to keep them coming back as obedient consumers. There is a clear connection between corporate interests, the promotion of escapism, and the definition of film as exclusively narrative, fictional and diegetic (therefore providing a story and a place to escape to). From this point of view, “Brechtianism” is exactly the corrective that is needed. Furthermore, if I’m not mistaken, Godard is influenced by Brecht from the very beginning; the jump-cuts in “A Bout de souffle” are already such a verfremdungseffekt, though later they get absorbed fully into narrative filmmaking, forcing Godard to push alienation further and further (especially in “Weekend” and “La Chinoise”–I haven’t gone back to read your review of the latter since reading this comment, but I’m not sure how one can enjoy it without being aware of exactly that intent–I mean, it’s pervasive!)

(I’d also like to point something out here–about how your comment seems to posit “escapism” and “Brechtianism” as the only two choices… But discussing that would take forever. Let’s just say I see it at least as a sliding scale, with many hybrid possibilities in the center, and also other approaches–Brakhage, say–that do not fit on the scale at all, though a Brechtian approach certainly could prime viewers for them.)

Your other “trouble with Brechtianism” is that “it presumes that the author (or auteur) can create a text that can effectively govern reader/audience reactions.” But isn’t that exactly what Hollywood does–indeed, isn’t that Godard’s main problem with the Hollywood institutional style? It’s just that Hollywood does this through emotional manipulation, counting on an (ideal) ideologically-blinded viewer, while Brecht (and again, I haven’t read him in decades, so I’m working from memory now) undertakes to educate the audience as to its own risk of being manipulated, and then refuses to manipulate it emotionally (for example, through catharsis, which, IIRC, was one of Brecht’s bugaboos), rather trying to educate it and therefore (hopefully) to help it judge rationally the presented ideas and narrative?

Well, that’s the theory, at least. In practice, as shown by Godard, verfremdungseffekts can clearly be used without a single-minded didactical purpose, can be used more “modernistically,” I guess you could put it, but, nevertheless, the Godard/Brecht notion involves a more aware cultural consumer, one who is conscious of the possibility of his or her own ideological manipulation–a much more positive scenario, I’d say, than the ideal consumer of Hollywood spectacle that Sullivan’s comment implies.

And then Craig again:

My mistrust of Brechtianism stems from Brecht’s assumption that much of the misery in life is a product of capitalist ideology. Brecht, like Marx, is at heart a utopian; if we offer the masses an alternative to mindless escapism, Brecht says, they can take steps towards liberation. The problem with this, however, is that sometimes life can be brutal in ways that have little to do with ideology. People die and shit happens regardless of the nature of the social order, and during those times escapism can be a balm. The examples that come to me are personal ones—how after my mother’s death I re-read old comics to escape into a nostalgic haze for a while—but I do think that SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS is a credible rebuttal to Brecht. Sometimes life sucks, and escapism helps.

In some ways, we’re on the same wavelength here: we both lament the overwhelming dominance of Hollywood escapism, and you’re right when you say that Brechtian aesthetics are a corrective. Given that Hollywood operates within a pathetically narrow narrative field, other types of films—Brakhage’s closed-eye abstractions, Bergman’s psychodramas, Antonioni’s languorous ennui, etc.—function as radical alternatives. I’d also agree that it’s a sliding scale between the extremes of Hollywood storytelling and Brechtianism, a point that Brecht himself acknowledges when he categorized his own plays into “culinary” Epic Theater (with enough old dramatic tropes to give pleasure to a mainstream audience) and Lehrstucke (much more experimental, and designed for already enlightened participants).

I’d disagree, though, that the Godard of BREATHLESS was Brechtian. The jump cuts and formal play in his earliest movies jolt the audience, but many of the pre-1965 Godard films don’t follow that jolt with any political content or point-of-view. There are plenty of exceptions—the Algerian War in LE PETIT SOLDAT, or the critique of consumer culture in A MARRIED WOMAN—but movies like BREATHLESS, A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and BANDE A PART give us Brechtian form but virtually no radical content. In his book A CERTAIN TENDENCY OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA, Robert Ray points out that plenty of late 1960s-early 1970s Hollywood films (BONNIE AND CLYDE, FIVE EASY PIECES) borrow flourishes of Godard’s style, but since the content (and the emphasis on narrative) doesn’t change very much, the result is a jazzier version of Hollywood business-as-usual. I’m reluctant to call a text “Brechtian” unless it has both radical form and content.

Also, I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer about my “trouble with Brechtianism.” I’m perfectly happy to extend my skepticism about texts controlling audience/spectator/reader response to ALL texts, Brechtian, Hollywood, and otherwise. I stick close to the Cultural Studies belief that a text generates a multiplicity of responses, only some of which were anticipated by the creator(s) of said text. That doesn’t mean that Brechtian movies can’t have a radical effect—just that I think our assumptions about their radicalism should be humble and skeptical until proven otherwise.

In her book INTERPRETING FILMS, Janet Staiger argues that films (and the historical moments in which films are watched and discussed) generate a plethora of reading strategies, though some of these are much more dominant than others. I relied on Staiger’s work in my dissertation, where I argued that US critics read Godard’s late 1960s and Dziga Vertov films in many different ways, though by far the dominant reading was to co-opt them into a conservative “Godard as auteur” paradigm. That’s happened here at HU too: the thread following John and Sandra’s post is a list of favorite directors formidable enough to make Andrew Sarris blush. But is there tension in claiming that Lynch, Bresson or Godard are “radical” while admitting them to the canon and labeling them “great artists”?

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Images of Godard and Brecht with 3-D glasses from BRRRPTZZAP! the Subject.
 
The index to the Godard roundtable is here.