Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Critical Distance: Godard’s Contempt

179 Critical Distance Godard’s Contempt Almost exactly thirty-three years ago, in October 1964, the critical reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s widest American release of his career and his most expensive picture to date was overwhelmingly negative. But now that Contempt is being rereleased as an art film—in a brand-new print that’s three minutes longer—the critical responses have been almost as overwhelmingly positive. It’s tempting to say in explanation that we’re more sophisticated in 1997 than we were in 1964— that we’ve absorbed or at least caught up with some of Godard’s innovations—but I don’t think this adequately or even correctly accounts for the difference in critical response. Despite all the current reviews that treat Le mépris as if it were some form of serene classical art, it’s every bit as transgressive now as it was when it first appeared, and maybe more so. But because it’s being packaged as an art movie rather than a mainstream release—and because Godard is a venerable master of sixty-six rather than an unruly upstart of thirty-three—we have different expectations. I can remember how puzzled I was by this gorgeous film as an undergraduate. Though it was Godard’s sixth feature, it was only the third to be released in the United States, preceded by Breathless in 1961 and by Vivre sa vie in 1963. The first of these was a cheap American-style thriller in black and white, the second a cheap French-style art film in black and white; Contempt, in glorious Technicolor and ’Scope, clearly didn’t belong to either category. A big international coproduction (starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance) that even played in my hometown in Alabama, it virtually began with a scene in which Bardot was stretched out nude on a bed beside a fully clothed, then-unknown Michel Piccoli while they engaged in a curious romantic dialogue about how much he loved her various body parts; a seemingly unmotivated use of red and blue filters punctuated the full-color shots. Coproduced by the vulgar American showman Joseph E. Levine—best known at the time for his distribution of Italian-made Hercules movies with Steve Reeves and his subsequent involvement with Federico Fellini—Contempt could only seem the grotesque marriage of crass exploitation and high art. (In fact, all the nude shots of Bardot were ordered by Levine after Godard considered the film done; acceding to the producer’s request as 180 ESSENTIAL CINEMA literally as possible, he even clarified the commodification process in the opening evaluation of Bardot’s body.) Stanley Kauffmann’s review in the New Republic was characteristic of the scorn heaped on the film. It began: ‘‘Those interested in Brigitte Bardot’s behind —in CinemaScope and color—will find ample rewards in Contempt.’’ He went on to argue that the film’s longest single sequence, transpiring between Piccoli ’s and Bardot’s characters in their flat in Rome, ‘‘can serve in all film schools as an archetype of arrant egotism and bankrupt imagination in a director. . . . Underneath the arty prattle [of what Kauffmann termed Godard’s ‘‘clique’’] about his supposed style, one can hear their unconscious gasps: ‘That film must cost soand -so many thousands of dollars a minute! Any commercial hack would be concerned to make each minute count for something. But Jean-Luc doesn’t care!’ The hidden referent here is not aesthetic but budgetary bravado.’’ A short while after the film’s release I invited Susan Sontag, who was at the time a literary and theater critic with some interest in film, to give a talk at my college. She had recently published an article about camp in Partisan Review that had created a flurry in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and an article about Vivre sa vie had appeared in an ambitious new film magazine called Moviegoer. The night she came she read a still-unpublished essay called ‘‘On Style’’ that would be appearing in her forthcoming collection, Against Interpretation . After her talk, in a bar down the road from campus, I was shocked to hear her say that she’d been to see Contempt four or five times already. It was the first time I’d heard someone refer to the film as anything but a mess and an embarrassment, and I decided that maybe it deserved another look. Even so, it was years before Contempt started...