Contempt (Le Mepris) (1963)

I admittedly haven't seen all that much Godard. I saw Masculin Feminin, which is barely comprehensible. I watched ten minutes of Adieu au Langage on Netflix and it was unwatchable. Maybe I'm just not a Godard fan. But Le Mepris is gorgeous. To begin with, there is a plot! The music is super emotional. The characters are complex. And the cinematography is visually stunning. The whole movie was kind of mesmerizing.

It is supremely European. Giorgia Moll plays interpreter for the group of English, French, German and Italian speaking characters. The characters speak in their own languages without regard for the others and the very impressive interpreter must act as the go-between. Kind of interesting that only the French was subtitled, and only if it wasn't also translated orally in English. So you really have to pay attention to who is saying what.

Godard's editing style is rather unique. I wonder if he thinks in the same way he cuts together his movies because some of the montages are otherwise inexplicable. The introductory credits is like a unique behind-the-scenes take with narration. There is some voice-over in the middle too when Camille and Paul discuss the dissolution of their marriage. That whole long apartment scene is masterful. It feels natural. There is one unnatural part at the end of the movie. That is the car accident. The car accident is inexcusably dumb. There is no way he didn't see a giant truck, especially to ram into the section of the truck that drags the huge semitrailer. Also, even though there is plot, the gun never pays off; you don't introduce a gun in act two if it never gets used...

Masculin Feminin (1966)

We sat next to Professor Mason, who actually teaches this movie so she was able to explain a little bit to us. This is a new restoration. It is a very difficult movie. It allegedly takes several viewings. My takeaway is that Godard tells his story (it arguably doesn't have much of a plot) in a non-linear fashion. There's a bit of story here, a parallel story there, and a whole mess of a love quadrangle. He really likes to linger on the misogyny and he makes no effort to hide it. It is quite overt. And Professor Mason said this is somehow a movie about birth control, which was illegal in France at the time and this was supposed to educate young people. And yeah, it was in the movie a bit, but was that the whole point of it? Cause there was a lot of seemingly unrelated points.

I did appreciate the acting. They all do facial expressions very well. And the viewer often reads the characters' reactions in dialogue. By that I mean that in dialogue, the camera often focuses on just one participant. We hear the other speaker off camera, but we watch the one person react, and it really emphasizes physical acting. And the retro music plays a big part too. There is apparently a big emphasis on sound in this restoration. And the score comes in and out at awkward moments and in snippets. I'm not sure if this is intentional or part of the restoration. It sometimes even overpowers the dialogue in a weird imbalance. And at times, it seems out of sync with the picture but again, that may be intentional.

There are intertitles that have some great one liners accompanied by gunshots that sort of cue the viewer in to what the scene is supposed to evoke. But you really have to think hard about it. And to be quite honest, I didn't get enough sleep to think that hard at that time of day (12:30). I dozed off a bit and I was sitting right next to the professor. She may or may not have noticed, but if she reads this by any chance, then I guess she'll know. When I came to, I surprisingly saw Brigitte Bardot make a brief cameo, but I'm not really sure what that was about. I think somewhere there was a political message about Communism, which would make sense because Godard was really into Marxism. I kind of had some traumatic flashbacks to Kuhle Wampe. Brecht's distancing effect is definitely present. Godard was trying to get me to think about my condition, but I was not having it.

I'm trying to appreciate Godard, but at the end of the day, I just didn't really follow. Maybe it takes another viewing, but there's so much out there to see I don't know if I'm going to get to another viewing.