Film Chronicle

Previously in these pages I have discussed Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, but without touching on a remarkable sequence from its start. There we behold Godard’s regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard perched behind a dolly-mounted camera being pushed by grips along a set of tracks exactly in time with the camera’s moving target, an actress proceeding down a sun-bleached pavement outside a Cinecittà sound-stage in Rome. Later we will learn she’s the script girl for a film production of the Odyssey. A soundman walks along the pavement too, holding a microphone over the actress, though on Godard’s soundtrack we hear no footsteps. Instead, a French voice intones the credits over a highly wrought orchestral score, music seemingly at odds with the workaday movie-making scene on the screen.

The sequence isn’t a tracking shot itself, rather a very static long take, but it obligingly depicts a tracking shot in the process of being photographed, as part of Contempt’s scrutiny of movie-making, its techniques and moral compromises, its only partly successful creation of “a world more in harmony with our desires,” as the critic André Bazin comments in a quotation eventually projected on the screen. Here at the start of his film Godard insists on keeping a certain distance from the story, never allowing us to forget that films, Contempt included, are constructed things, rather than windows into reality. Actually he keeps us at a certain distance throughout. A writer has been brought in to doctor the Homeric screenplay, and after the opening sequence we see him walking through the lot with the script girl to meet the overbearing American producer, Jerry, who is in charge of the production. Here Godard employs a conventional sideways tracking shot, exactly the sort of thing we have just watched Coutard filming, in exactly the same location. Initially, the camera keeps company with the writer and the girl, making them the center of attention, but notice what happens when the producer (played by Jack Palance) enters the scene—indeed, when he “makes an entrance” under giant letters spelling out “Teatro”: everything Jerry does is stagey and larger than life. As if compelled by the sheer force of his personality, right and left tracking movements follow his strutting back and forth. The producer’s ego seems to drag the camera along with him. “A tracking shot is a moral act,” Godard once said. Whatever else this gnomic pronouncement means, it means at least that a film’s technique is intimately related to its themes, and thus to the moral stance it takes toward the world. One cannot—or anyway, Godard could not—divorce the means of filmmaking from the ends of filmmaking. If one of the ends in Contempt is to portray philistine Hollywood in full bullying mode, then Godard has found the right visual means, a fluently moving camera, to put that quality on the screen.

The discovery, early on in the history of the cinema, that the camera could move—be pushed forwards or backwards or sideways along tracks, be panned in a turn around its vertical axis, be tilted up or down, be attached to a dolly or other moving vehicle—was a crucial advance for the young art, setting a scene, providing visual excitement, helping viewers identify with a character, or hinting at personality traits, as with Jerry in Contempt. Some film historians have thought this advance was taken furthest in, became characteristic of, French filmmaking. It is certainly...