The Beat Patrol

August 2009 review by Paul Brenner from the AMC Filmcritic website. This recently re-released film (aka 2 Ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais D’Elle) by Godard was one of the last “conventional” (for Godard) movies he made before going off in a more political direction in the late 60s-early 7os…

Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her features one of the seminal shots in ’60s cinema — a widescreen close-up shooting down into a coffee cup, the coffee swirling around slowly as if the camera has captured the creation of the universe. It is a simple and contemplative shot, made all the more so by Godard’s whispering voice, quoting Baudelaire, intoning, “More than ever I have to look around me to my fellow creatures, my brother.” Here Godard is calling a halt to his Anna Karina era of referential film homages blanketed in the conversations of the young, sipping their coffees in Parisian cafes and arguing philosophy down the heady streets of the city. Godard is looking into that coffee, sipped by Karina and finding that the world of the image is much stronger and more visceral and shouldn’t be wasted, rather it should be shifted to malicious late-stage capitalism and rampant consumerism. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her marks this shift. From now on, Godard’s films will become film essays and then cine-tracts. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is the dividing line.

The inspiration behind Godard’s film was an article about housewives living in newly constructed apartment houses in the suburbs of Paris, who, to make ends meet, prostitute themselves during the day to pay for their apartment and filled with consumer objects of desire. Marina Vlady is Juliette Janson, one of those housewives, and the film details a day in her life as she cleans dishes, shops for dresses, gets her shiny red car washed, and picks up johns on the street. Godard introduces Vlady as Vlady, the actress, and then Vlady as the character of Juliette. This permits Vlady, in a brilliant high-wire performance, to play the character, play herself commenting on the character, and to engage in Brechtian monologues by addressing the camera.

These are the 2 or 3 things were know about Vlady/Juliette. But “Her” is also Godard’s Paris (now being ripped apart by construction crews) and also the killing capitalist system and, perhaps, the planet earth in the cosmos (of the coffee cup). And through it all is Godard’s metaphor of prostitution. Not only is Juliette prostituting herself but we all are, through our jobs, through the barage of images slapped into our brains, through the world’s psychic rape of our souls. We are all Godard’s “Her.”

Godard remarks at one point in 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her that “living in modern society is like living in a comic strip” and, with the aid of cinematographer Roaul Coutard, he proves it. Shot with a Technicolor palette of primary colors, the images melt our eyes with gleaming red, whites, and blues, the three colors of the French flag but also of the American flag, the country that is the root of all this evil.

Shot at the height of the Vietnam War, Godard abandons his love of American cinema and replaces it with a contempt and disdain for the violence of America’s War, which is the slow-murmured background of the film. Juliette’s husband Robert (Roger Montsoret) listens to short wave radio broadcasts of Lyndon Johnson pronouncements. Juliette’s little boy has a dream about the reunification of North and South Vietnam. Juliette herself rejects a twosome with an American journalist (he wears a t-shirt with an American flag and the phrase “America Über Alles”) because the bedroom is littered with photos of the war maimed.

Godard closes the film with shots of consumer products mounted on a lawn like the Paris high-rises being constructed. Godard states, “I have to start over from here.” And he does. Next stop Weekend and the Dziga Vertov Film Collective.

Extras on the Criterion DVD include a commentary by film critic Adrian martin, archival television footage, an interview with theater director and ex-Godard friend Antoine Bourseiller, a visual essay on the literary references in the film, and the theatrical trailer.

Paul Brenner

Taken from Phillip Lopate’s 1998 book “Totally, Tenderly, Tragically.” Contempt was the 1963 film by legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard… 

Contempt, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s greatest masterpieces, has a stately air that breaks with the filmmaker’s earlier, throwaway, hit-and-run manner, as though he were this time allowing himself to aim for cinematic sublimity. It is both his richest study of human relations, and a film very much about a tortured kind of movie love. The film has inspired passionate praise—Sight & Sound critic Colin McCabe may have gone slightly overboard in dubbing Contempt “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe,” but I would say it belongs in the running. It has certainly influenced a generation of filmmakers, including R.W. Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese (who paid his own homage by quoting from the Godard film’s stark, plangent musical score in Casino, and cosponsoring its re-release). Scorsese has called Contempt “brilliant, romantic and genuinely tragic,” adding that “It’s also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of filmmaking.”

In 1963, film buffs were drooling over the improbable news that Godard—renowned for his hit-and-run, art house bricolages such as Breathless and My Life to Live—was shooting a big CinemaScope color movie with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, based on an Alberto Moravia novel, The Ghost at Noon. It sounded almost too good to be true. Then word leaked out that Godard was having problems with his producers, Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine (the distributor of Hercules and other schlock), who were upset that the rough cut was so chaste. Not a single nude scene with B.B.—not even a sexy costume! Godard obliged by adding a prologue of husband and wife (Michel Piccoli and Bardot) in bed, which takes inventory of that sumptuous figure through color filters, while foreshadowing the couple’s fragility: when she asks for reassurance about each part of her body, he reassures her ominously, “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”

Beyond that “compromise,” Godard refused to budge, saying: “Hadn’t they ever bothered to see a Godard film?”

Ironically, Contempt itself dealt with a conflict between a European director (Fritz Lang playing himself) and a crude American producer, Jerry Prokosch (performed with animal energy by Palance), over a remake of Homer’s Odyssey. Prokosch hires a French screenwriter, Paul (Michel Piccoli), to rewrite Lang’s script. Paul takes the job partly to buy an apartment for his wife, the lovely Camille (Bardot); but in selling his talents, he loses stature in her eyes. Through a series of partial misunderstandings, Camille also thinks her husband is allowing the powerful, predatory Prokosch to flirt with her—or at least has not sufficiently shielded her from that danger. Piccoli, in the performance that made him a star, registers with every nuance the defensive cockiness of an intellectual-turned-hack who feels himself outmanned.

According to Pascal Aubier, a filmmaker who served as Godard’s assistant on Contempt and many of his other sixties pictures, “It was a very tormented production.” Godard, unused to working on such a large scale, was annoyed at the circus atmosphere generated by the paparazzi who followed Brigitte Bardot to Capri. B.B., then at the height of her celebrity, arrived with her latest boyfriend, actor Sami Frey, which further irritated Godard, who liked to have the full attention of his leading ladies. The filmmaker was also not getting along with his wife (and usual star) Anna Karina, and seemed very lonely on the shoot, remembers Aubier; “but then, that’s not unusual for him. Godard also has a knack for making people around him feel awkward, and then using that to bring out tensions in the script.” He antagonized Jack Palance by refusing to consider the actor’s ideas, giving him only physical instructions: three steps to the left, look up. Palance, miserable, kept phoning his agent in America to get him off the picture. The only one Godard got on well with was Fritz Lang, whom he idolized. But Lang was not feeling well, and had to cut short his participation.

No sign of the shooting problems mars the implacable smoothness of the finished product. Godard famously stated that “a movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” Contempt, however, adheres to the traditional order: it is built like a well-made three-act tragedy. The first part takes place on the deserted back lots of Rome’s Cinecittà studios and at the producer’s house. The second part—the heart of the film—is an extraordinary, lengthy sequence in the couple’s apartment: a tour de force of psychological realism, as the camera tracks the married couple in their casual moves, opening a Coke, sitting on the john, taking a bath in the other’s presence, doing a bit of work, walking away in the middle of a sentence. (This physical casualness is mimicked by a patient, mobile camera that gives the artful impression of operating in real time.) Meanwhile, they circle around their wound: Paul feels that Camille’s love has changed since that morning—grown colder and contemptuous. She is indeed irritated by him, but still loves him. With the devastating force of an Ibsen play, they keep arguing, retreating, making up, picking the scab, until they find themselves in a darker, more intransigently hostile space.

The third part moves to Capri—the dazzling Casa Malaparte, stepped like a Mayan temple by a disciple of Le Corbusier—for a holiday plus some Odyssey location shooting. Capri is an insidious, “no exit” Elysium where luxury, caprice and natural beauty all converge to shatter the marriage and bring about the inevitable tragedy.

Part of Contempt’s special character is that it exists both as a realistic story and a string of iconic metaphors, connecting its historical layers. Palance’s red Alfa Romeo sweeps in like Zeus’ chariot; when he hurls a film can in disgust, he becomes a discus thrower (“At last you have a feeling for Greek culture,” Lang observes dryly); Bardot donning a black wig seems a temporary stand-in for both Penelope and Anna Karina; Piccoli’s character wears a hat in the bathtub to imitate Dean Martin in Some Came Running (though it makes him resemble Godard himself); Piccoli’s bath towel suggests a Roman toga; Lang is a walking emblem of cinema’s golden age and the survival of catastrophe, his anecdotes invoking Dietrich and run-ins with Goebbels; the Casa Malaparte is both temple and prison. Meanwhile, the CinemaScope camera observes all; approaching on a dolly in the opening shot, it tilts down and toward us like a one-eyed Polyphemus. Or is it Lang’s monocle? (“The eye of the gods has been replaced by cinema,” observes Lang.) Primary colors are intentionally used as shorthand for themes. Bardot in her lush yellow robe on the balcony in Capri incarnates all of paradise about to be lost.

What makes Contempt so unique a viewing experience today, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience’s intelligence as well as its senses. Complex and dense, it unapologetically accommodates discussions about Homer, Dante, and German Romantic poetry, meditations on the role of the gods in modern life, the creative process, the deployment of CinemaScope ) Lang sneers that it is only good for showing “snakes and funerals,” but the background-hungry, color-saturated beauty of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s compositions belies this).

It is also a film about language, as English, French, Italian and German speakers fling their words against an interpreter, Francesca (admirably played by Georgia Moll), in a jai alai of idioms which presciently conveys life in the new global economy, while making an acerbic political comment on power relations between the United States and Europe in the Pax America. (More practically, the polyglot sound track was a strategy to prevent the producers from dubbing the film.)

“Godard is the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject,” wrote critic David Thomson. Certainly Contempt is shot through with film buff references, and it gains veracity and authority from Godard’s familiarity with the business of moviemaking. But far from being a

smarty-pants, self-referential piece about films, it moves us because it is essentially the story of a marriage. Godard makes us care about two likable people who love each other but seem determined to throw their chances for happiness away.

Godard is said to have originally wanted Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak for the husband and wife. Some of Novak’s musing, as-you-desire-me quality in Vertigo adheres to Bardot. In her best acting performance, she is utterly convincing as the tentative, demure ex-secretary pulled into a larger world of glamour by her husband. Despite Godard’s claim that he took Bardot as “a package deal,” and that he “did not try to make Bardot into Camille, but Camille into Bardot,” he actually tampered with the B.B. persona in several ways. First he toyed with having her play the entire film in a brunette wig—depriving her of her trademark blondeness—but eventually settled for using the dark wig as a significant prop. More crucial was Godard’s intuition to suppress the sex kitten of And God Created Woman or Mamzelle Striptease, and to draw on a more modest, prudishly French-bourgeois side of Bardot for the character of Camille. In her proper matching blue sweater and headband, she seems a solemn, reticent, provincial type, not entirely at ease with the shock of her beauty.

When she puts on her brunette wig in the apartment scene, she may be trying to get Paul to regard her as more intelligent than he customarily does—to escape the blond bimbo stereotype. (Her foil, Francesca, the dark-haired interpreter, speaks four languages and discusses Hölderlin’s poetry with Lang.) At one point Paul asks Camille, “Why are you looking so pensive?” and she answers, “Believe it or not I’m thinking. Does that surprise you?” The inequalities in their marriage are painfully exposed: he sees himself as the brain and breadwinner, and her as a sexy trophy. Whatever her new-found contemptuous feelings may be, his own condescension seems to have always been close to the surface. “You’re a complete idiot,” he says when they are alone in Prokosch’s house, and later tellingly blurts out, “Why did I marry a stupid twenty-eight-year-old typist?”

On the face of it, her suspicion that Paul had acted as her “pander” by leaving her with his lecherous employer seems patently unjust. Clearly he had told her to get into Prokosch’s two-seat sports car because he did not want to appear foolishly, uxoriously jealous in the producer’s eyes; and we can only assume he is telling the truth when he says his arrival at Prokosch’s house was delayed by a taxi accident. Still, underneath the unfairness of her (implicit) accusation is a legitimate complaint: he would not have acted so cavalierly if he were not also a little bored with her, and willing to take her for granted. Certainly he is not particularly interested in what she has to say about the minutiae of domesticity: the drapes, lunch with her mother. All this he takes in as a tax paid for marrying a beautiful but undereducated younger woman. Her claims to possessing a mind (when she reads aloud from the Fritz Lang interview book in the tub) only irritate him, and he becomes significantly most enraged when she has the audacity to criticize him for filching other men’s ideas (after he proposes going to a movie for screenwriting inspiration).

Camille also says she liked him better when he was writing detective fiction and they were poor, before he fell in with that “film crowd.” His script work does put him in a more self-abasing position, since screenwriting is nothing if not a school for humiliation. We see this in the way Paul, having watched Prokosch carry on like an ass in the projection room, nevertheless pockets the producer’s personal check, after a moment’s hesitation. (It is precisely at this moment in a Hollywood film that the hero would say: Take your check and shove it!) Paul compounds the problem by seeming to blame her for turning hack, saying he is only taking on the job so that they can finish paying for the apartment. It is important to remember that we are not watching the story of an idealistic writer selling out his literary aspirations, since “detective fiction” is not so elevated a genre to begin with, and since Paul’s last screenplay was some junky-sounding movie called Toto Contra Hercules (a dig at Joseph E. Levine), so that, if anything, the chance to adapt Homer for Fritz Lang is a step up.

More important than issues of work compromise is that Camille has come to despise her husband’s presumption that he can analyze her mind. Not only is this unromantic, suggesting she holds no further mystery, but insultingly, reductive. She is outraged at his speculation that she’s making peace for reasons of self-interest—to keep the apartment. As the camera tracks from one to the other, pausing at a lamp in between, Paul guesses aloud that she is angry at him because she’s seen him patting Francesca’s bottom. Here the lamp is important, not only as an inspired bit of cinematic stylization, but as a means of hiding each from the other, if not from the audience. Camille shakes her head in an astonished no at Paul’s misinterpretation, then catches herself. She scornfully accepts his demeaning reading of her as jealous, saying, “Okay, let’s admit that it’s that. Good, now we’re finished, we don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

After he speculates that she no longer loves him because of his dealings with Prokosch, she tells him: “You’re crazy but…you’re intelligent.” “Then it’s true?” he presses, like a prosecutor. “I didn’t say that…I said you were intelligent,” she repeats, as if to link his “craziness” with his intellectual pride, as the thing responsible for his distorted perceptions.

More than anything, the middle section traces the building of a mood. When Paul demands irritably, “ What’s wrong with you? What’s been bothering you all afternoon?” he seems both to want to confront the problem (admirably), and to bully her out of her sullenness (reprehensibly). At first she evades with a characteristically feminine defense: “I’ve got a right to change my mind.” We see what he doesn’t—the experimental, tentative quality of her hostility: she is “trying on” anger and contempt, not knowing exactly where it will go. Her grudge has a tinge of playacting, as though she fully expects to spring back to affection at any moment. She even makes various conciliating moves, assuring him she loves him, but , because of his insecurities, he refuses this comfort. Paul is a man worrying a canker sore. Whenever Camille begins to forgive, to be tender again, he won’t accept it: he keeps asking her why she no longer loves him, until the hypothesis becomes a reality. Paul is more interested in having his worst nightmares confirmed than in rehabilitating the damage.

Perhaps we can understand this Godardian dynamic better by referring to a little-known but key short of his, “Le nouveau monde,” which he shot in 1962 as part of the compilation film ROGOPAG. The protagonist goes to sleep and wakes up to find everything looking the same but subtly different. Pedestrians pop pills nervously, his girlfriend tells him she no longer loves him—just like that. “The New World” has a sci-fi component: while our hero slept, an atomic device was exploded above Paris, which may account for his girlfriend’s spooky, affectless indifference. But the short is also a dry run for Contempt: one day you wake up and love has magically disappeared.

All through the sixties, Godard was fascinated with the beautiful woman who betrays (Jean Seberg in Breathless), withdraws her love (Chantal Goya in Masculin-Féminin), runs away (Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou) or is faithless (Bardot in Contempt). What makes Contempt an advance over this somewhat misogynistic obsession with the femme fatale is that here, Godard seems perfectly aware how much at fault his male character is for the loss of the woman’s love.

The film’s psychology shows a rich understanding of the mutual complicities inherent in contempt, along with the fact that trying to alter another person’s contemptuous opinion of yourself is like fighting in quicksand: the more you struggle, the farther in you sink. As William Ian Miller wrote in his book The Anatomy of Disgust: “Another’s contempt for or disgust with us will generate shame and humiliation in us if we concur with the judgment of our compatibility, that is, if we feel the contempt is justified, and will guarantee indignation and even vengeful fury if we feel it is unjustified.” Paul responds both ways to his wife’s harsh judgment: 1) he agrees with her, perhaps out of the intellectual’s constant stock of self-hatred, 2) he considers her totally unjust, which leads him to lash out with fury. He even slaps her—further damaging her shaky esteem for him. In any film today, a man slapping a woman would end the scene (spousal abuse, case closed); but in Contempt we have to keep watching the sequence for twenty-five more minutes, as the ramifications of and adjustments to that slap are digested.

In assessing the film, much depends on whether one regards the director’s sympathies as balanced between the couple, or as one-sidedly male. Some women friends of mine, feminists, report that they can only see the male point of view in Contempt: they regard Bardot’s Camille as scarcely a character, only a projection of male desire and mistrust. I see Godard’s viewpoint as more balanced. True, Piccoli’s edgy performance draws a lot of sympathy to Paul; even when he is being an ass, he seems interesting. But Camille also displays striking insights; her efforts to patch things up endear her to us; and her hurt is palpable.

Pascal Aubier told me point-blank: Godard was on Camille’s side.” In that sense, Contempt can be seen as a form of self-criticism: a male artist analyzing the vanities and self-deceptions of the male ego. (And perhaps, too, an apology: what cinematographer Coutard meant when he called the film Godard’s “love letter to his wife,” Anna Karina.)

Still, it can’t be denied that in the end Camille does betray Paul with the vilely virile Jerry Prokosch. It has been Prokosch’s thesis all along that Homer’s Penelope was faithless. Lang, and Godard by extension, reject this theory as anachronistic sensationalism. Godard, you might say, builds the strongest possible case for Camille through the first two acts, but in Act III this Penelope proves faithless.

Bardot’s Camille is a conventionally subservient woman, brought up to defer to her man. “My husband makes the decisions,” she answers Prokosch when he invites her over for a drink. Later she tells Paul, “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” It is her tragedy that, in experiencing a glimpse of independent selfhood—brought about through the mechanism of contempt, which allows her to distance herself from her husband’s domination—she assumes she has no choice but to flee into the arms of another, more powerful man.

Contempt is an ironic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. At one point Camille wryly summarizes the Greek epic as “the story of that guy who’s always traveling.” But Paul’s restlessness is internal, making him ill at ease everywhere. In modern life, implies Godard, there is no homecoming, we remain chronically homeless, in barely furnished apartments where the red drapes never arrive. Paul’s Odysseus and Camille’s Penelope keep advancing toward and retreating from each other: never arriving at port.

But the film also resembles another Greek tale, OedipusRex. Paul is infantilely enraged at the threatened removal of the nurturing breast, and jealous of a more powerful male figure who must be battled for the woman’s love. The way he keeps pressing to uncover a truth he would be better off leaving alone is Oedipal, too. His insistent demand to know why Camille has stopped loving him (even after she denies this is the case) helps solidify a tentative role-playing on her part into an objective reality (“You’re right, I no longer love you”). Anxious for reassurance, he will nevertheless only accept negative testimony which corroborates his fears, because only the nightmare has the brutal air of truth, and only touching bottom feels real.

Even in Capri, when the game is up, Paul demands one last time: “Why do you have contempt for me?” She answers: “That I’ll never tell you, even if I were dying.” To this he responds, with his old intellectual vanity, that he knows already. By this point, the reason is truly unimportant. She will never tell him, not because it is such a secret, but because she was already moved beyond dissection of emotions to action: she is leaving him.

Godard spoke uncharitably about Alberto Moravia’s The Ghost at Noon, the novel he adapted for Contempt, calling it “a nice, vulgar read for a train journey.” In fact, he took a good deal of the psychology, characters and plot lines from Moravia—a decent storyteller, now neglected, who was once regarded as a major European writer. Perhaps Godard’s ungenerosity toward Moravia reflects an embarrassment at this debt, or a knee-jerk need to apologize to his avant-garde fans.

The exigencies of making a movie with a comparatively large budget and stars, based on a well-known writer’s novel, limited the experimental-collage side of Godard and forced him to focus on getting across a linear narrative. In the process he was “freed” or “obliged” (depending on one’s point of view) to draw more psychologically shaded, complex characters, whose emotional lives rested on overt causalities and motivations, more so than he had ever demonstrated before or since. Godard himself admitted that he considered Paul the first fully developed character he had gotten on film. Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master’s most “orthodox” movie. The paradox is that it may also be his finest. Pierrot le Fou has more epic expansiveness, Breathless and Masculin-Féminin more cinematic invention, but in Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords.

If the film records the process of disenchantment, it is also a seductive bouquet of enthrallments: Bardot’s beauty, primary colors, luxury objects, nature. Contempt marked the first time that Godard went beyond the jolie-laide poetry of cities and revealed his romantic, unironic love of landscapes. The cypresses on Prokosch’s estate exquisitely frame Bardot and Piccoli. Capri sits in the Mediterranean like a jewel in a turquoise setting. The last word in the film is Lang’s assistant director (played by Godard himself) calling out “Silence!” to the crew, after which the camera pans to a tranquilly static ocean. The serene classicism of sea and sky refutes the thrashings of men.

Phillip Lopate

This Orson Welles-directed film didn’t get very good reviews at the time of its release, but it has been reconsidered over the years due to some brilliant direction on the part of Welles. This review comes from Variety magazine, April 14, 1948, by William Brogdon…

The Lady from Shanghai is okay boxoffice. It’s exploitable and has Rita Hayworth’s name for the marquees. Entertainment value suffered from the striving for effect that features Orson Welles’ production, direction and scripting.

Script is wordy and full of holes which need the plug of taut story telling and more forthright action. Rambling style used by Orson Welles has occasional flashes of imagination, particularly in the tricky backgrounds he uses to unfold the yarn, but effects, while good on their own, are distracting to the murder plot. Contributing to the stylized effect stressed by Welles is the photography, which features artful compositions entirely in keeping with the production mood.

Story tees off in New York where Welles, as a philosophical Irish seaman, joins the crew of a rich man’s luxury yacht. Schooner’s cruise and stops along the Mexican coast en route to San Francisco furnish varied and interesting backdrops. Welles’ tries for effect reach their peak with the staging of climatic chase sequences in a Chinese theatre where performers are going through an Oriental drama, and in the mirror room of an amusement park’s crazy house. He has satirized human foibles in the courtroom scenes of the murder trial, getting a sting into depicting justice and the people who gather to watch human drama unfold on the witness stand.

There’s a complicated murder pattern involving Welles, Miss Hayworth, latter’s husband, Everett Sloane, and Glenn Anders, crazy law partner of Sloane’s. Plot is often foggy of purpose and confusing to follow, but apparently deals with Welles’ yen for Miss Hayworth. That leads to his acceptance of scheme to stage a phony murder of Anders which turns into a real killing, a trial and final, poetic justice for the evildoers.

Welles has called on players for stylized performances. He uses an Irish brogue and others depict erratic characters with little reality. Hayworth isn’t called on to do much more than look beautiful. Best break for players goes to Everett Sloane, and he gives a credible interpretation of the crippled criminal attorney.

The excellent lensing is by Charles Lawton, Jr., in the mood of Heinz Roemheld’s music score. There’s also one song, “Please Don’t Kiss Me,” used in shipboard scene.

William Brogdon

This article on the famous Carol Reed-directed film (starring Orson Welles) comes from Michael Wilmington — Nov. 8, 1999 — from the Criterion website. This film is highly recommended…

In The Third Man—probably the greatest British thriller of the postwar era—director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene set a fable of moral corruption in a world of near-Byzantine visual complexity: the streets and ruins of occupied Vienna. It is a Vienna far removed from the rollicking erotics of Ernst Lubitsch or the wistful elegance and melancholy beauty of Max Ophüls. Decadence and rot have seeped into the city’s very soul, poisoned it, left almost nothing unstained. This Vienna is a movie milieu as densely evocative and haunting as Curtiz’s Casablanca or Sternberg’s Morocco—yet, unlike them, it is primarily the real Vienna, the real streets, the real rubble: shot by Reed and cameraman Robert Krasker in such a striking style (almost constant off-angle compositions and wide-angle lens distortions), that it takes on a patina of nightmare. Through this macabre landscape—over which Anton Karas’ legendary zither score jangles with ironic jauntiness—the tale unwinds. A naïve and foolishly romantic American novelist, Holly Martins (a specialist in Zane Grey-style westerns) pursues the murderers of his best friend, Harry Lime; spars with the cynical British police major, Calloway; hunts for the mysterious “third man” who witnessed Harry’s death; and falls hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with Harry’s mistress, Anna. Finally, in two symbolic settings—a ferris wheel towering above the city, and the shadowy chaos of the sewers—Holly comes face to face with the supreme evil, the supreme betrayal: both Harry’s and his own.

The Third Man is one of those rare films that captured its audience immediately and was regarded as a classic almost from its first release. It marks one of those unusual conjunctions of script, director, subject, cast and setting—and, of course, music—in which everything works. Graham Greene’s script, based on his novel, is a brilliant evocation of the urban battleground of good and evil, with just the right proportions of drama, atmosphere, action, rich character and tense construction. The acting ensemble is superb, with the mixture of Americans and Europeans in the cast creating an ideal balance: Trevor Howard as the pragmatic and brutally unsparing Calloway; Bernard Lee as the gentle Sergeant Paine; Wilfred Hyde-White as Crabbin, the slightly addled literary entrepreneur; Ernst Deutsch as the sinister, ferrety “Baron” Kurtz; Alida Valli, exuding fatalistic romance as Anna; and those two refugees from Citizen Kane, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, as the two old friends torn asunder, the dark side and the light, Harry and Holly—their names so similar Anna often confuses them. Welles’ relatively brief performance as Harry Lime is perfection itself: the bemused, lightly condescending, affectionate look with which he greets Holly; the murderous fluency of his Machiavellian story of the cuckoo clock (which Welles himself wrote); or the wild desperation as he flounders in the sewer. This is magnificent, highly charged film acting.

Because the two great set pieces in The Third Man—the ferris wheel confrontation and the chase through the sewers—both revolve around Welles, and because they’re shot with the kind of weirdly angled grandiloquence and impudent virtuosity for which he’s noted, there’s been a temptation to believe that he directed them. Invaluable as Welles’ contributions and performance were, the directorial triumph is Reed’s. He is the hero, and dominating influence—insisting that it be shot in Vienna; insisting that Welles play Harry Lime over distributor David Selznick’s forceful nomination of Noel Coward; resisting Selznick’s usual indefatigable memos and attempted “Americanization” of the script; discovering Anton Karas and his zither in a tiny beer and sausage restaurant (“The Harry Lime Theme” became a major hit record of its day); and finally, rejecting even Graham Greene’s suggestion of a climatic rapprochement between Anna and Holly. (Ironically, there is a famous moment in Welles’ performance which is Reed’s too: Harry Lime’s hands, reaching desperately through the sewer grating, fingers flailing in the windy night air, actually belong to a stand-in—the director.)

Yet, perhaps Carol Reed took too seriously the suggestion that Welles’ hand lay somewhere in The Third Man. He never again caught the peculiar and vibrant visual stylization, the special “look” which makes this film and his earlier Odd Man Out such a stunning experience. (William Wyler, after watching the film, presented Reed with a spirit level, to place on his camera next time, forcibly preventing any angle shots.) This was the one time Reed, as a director, reached perfection; and he did it as much by assembling and marshalling a brilliantly talented company as by the power of his own vision. Together he and Greene—and Welles, Cotten, Howard, Valli, Karas, Krasker, Korda and all the others—created a portrait of postwar corruption and the death of idealism that has lodged ever since in our collective consciousness. Together, they made a rich, moody masterpiece of guilt, love, and ambivalent redemption.

Michael Wilmington

French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard started out in the 1950s writing articles on cinema.  Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows being selected to represent France at the Cannes Film Festival (thanks to the machinations of French culture minister and New Wave champion André Malraux). The year before, Truffaut had been barred from Cannes as a critic because of his Cahiers du cinéma attacks on the festival…

As soon as the screening was over, the lights came up in the tiny auditorium. There was silence for a few moments. Then Philippe Erlanger, representing the Quai d’Orsay, leaned over to André Malraux. “Is this film really to represent France at the Cannes festival?” “Certainly, certainly.” And so the minister for cultural affairs ratified the selection committee’s decision to send to Cannes, as France’s sole official entry, François Truffaut’s first full-length feature, The 400 Blows.

What matters is that for the first time a young film has been officially designated by the powers that be to reveal the true face of the French cinema to the entire world. And what one can say of Truffaut could equally well be said of Alain Resnais, of Claude Chabrol if Les cousins had been chosen to represent France at Cannes, of Georges Franju and Head Against the Wall, of Jean-Pierre Melville and Two Men in Manhattan, of Jean Rouch and Moi, un noir. And the same words apply to other Jeans, their brothers and their masters: Renoir and his Testament du Docteur Cordelier, and Cocteau, of course, had Raoul Lévy at last made up his mind to produce Testament of Orpheus.

The face of the French cinema has changed.

Malraux made no mistake. The author of La monnaie de l’absolu could hardly help recognizing that tiny inner flame, that reflection of intransigence, shining in the eyes of Truffaut’s Antoine as he sports a man’s hat to steal a typewriter in a sleeping Paris; for it is the same as that which glittered twenty years ago on Tchen’s dagger on the first page of La condition humaine.

The director of L’espoir was better placed than anybody to know what this reflection meant: the principal form of talent in the cinema today is to accord more importance to what is in front of the camera than to the camera itself, to answer first of all the question why, in order to then be able to answer the question how. Content, in other words, precedes form and conditions it. If the former is false, the latter will logically be false too: it will be awkward.

In attacking over the last five years in these columns the false technique of Gilles Grangier, Ralph Habib, Yves Allégret, Claude Autant-Lara, Pierre Chenal, Jean Stelli, Jean Delannoy, André Hunebelle, Julien Duvivier, Maurice Labro, Yves Ciampi, Marcel Carné, Michel Boisrond, Raoul André, Louis Daquin, André Berthomieu, Henri Decoin, Jean Laviron, Yves Robert, Edmond Gréville, Robert Darène . . . what we were getting at was simply this: your camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word, you don’t know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is.

And we have more right than anyone to say this. Because if your name is emblazoned like a star’s outside the cinemas on the Champs-Élysées, if people now talk about a Henri Verneuil film or a Christian-Jaque just as they talk about a Griffith, Vigo, or Preminger, it is thanks to us.

To those of us who on this paper, in Cahiers du cinéma, Positif, or Cinéma 59, no matter where, on the back page of Figaro littéraire or France-observateur, in the prose of Lettres françaises and sometimes even the schoolgirl stuff of L’express, those of us who waged, in homage to Louis Delluc, Roger Leenhardt, and André Bazin, the battle for the film auteur.

We won the day in having it acknowledged in principle that a film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. Film auteurs, thanks to us, have finally entered the history of art. But you whom we attack have automatically benefited from this success. And we attack you for your betrayal, because we have opened your eyes and you continue to keep them closed. Each time we see your films we find them so bad, so far aesthetically and morally from what we had hoped, that we are almost ashamed of our love for the cinema.

We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are. Today, victory is ours. It is our films that will go to Cannes to show that France is looking good, cinematographically speaking. Next year it will be the same again, you may be sure of that. Fifteen new, courageous, sincere, lucid, beautiful films will once again bar the way to conventional productions. For although we have won a battle, the war is not yet over.

Jean-Luc Godard

This informative article examining Godard’s work duing his 60s heydey of filmmaking is dated May 1, 2005 and comes from the website A Girl and a Gun. I am not sure who the author of this piece is (I apologize) but I believe it is by the person who ran the site… 

In the early and middle 1960s, when I was young and starting to turn at once mildly hopeful and vaguely pessimistic about the world becoming a better place, there was one event which commanded my attention and that of many of my friends like no other: a new film by Jean-Luc Godard. Since I spent much of that time in Portland, OR, these releases came late, far too long after we’d read the admiration expressed by a handful of sympathetic big-city critics and the dismissals of mainstream jerks, but they were new to us and we leaped. I lost touch with Godard in the mid-1970s, after Tout va bien, when his work had trouble (for political but also commercial reasons) finding US distributors no matter where you were, even New York. But a few months ago, I caught up with the wonderful new one, Notre musique, and then the slightly earlier Eloge d’amour, and thought, he’s still got it, the old magician. I doubt that many young people, whatever their admiration for Godard of today or yesterday, have any sense of the electricity which each new release of roughly 1960-67 sent through his audiences. I didn’t doubt then that those years were the most creative, imaginative, innovative, stimulating, and original run that any director–any director, ever–has enjoyed, and a selective viewing of the releases from those years  has done nothing to change my mind.

It’s important to keep in mind a fact so well-known that it’s sometimes taken for granted: Godard, like several others in the New Wave, came out of a group around the periodical Cahiers du cinéma, and they were all committed to some degree–although few to the extent of Godard–to using film as a tool of cultural criticism with which to examine (and flay) contemporary views on art, politics, sex, social class, anything you cared to mention. Much of Godard’s work sets aside the customary narrative focus of films and devotes itself to this criticism. What keeps it from being off-putting, for the most part, is both the daunting intelligence and curiosity of the man and his always-at-work sense of humor.

His first feature, A bout de souffle (forever Breathless to English-speaking audiences, but more properly Out of Breath, which is what the hero becomes at the end), opened in Paris in March 1960 and achieved instant attention all over the film world not long thereafter. Godard had shot if for about a third of what ordinary French films then cost (perhaps $90,000 in 1960 dollars), he shot it with a skeleton crew, without synched dialogue (that was added in sound mixing), and saw no reason whatsoever to observe the conventional proprieties of editing and narrative presentation. It is the story of Michel, a petty thief who commits a couple of murders, and who runs into Patricia, a young American hanging out in Paris while waiting to start classes at the Sorbonne. Michel stays one step ahead of the cops while trying–successfully–to get Patricia into bed. But Godard is not interested in narrative flow; he wants to get at character and interrelationships, at people who are more interested in themselves than anything else in the world, including each other, and–especially in Michel’s case–who are constantly adjusting their poses and appearance in order to conform with some idealized self. This petty thug famously models himself on Bogart, a cinematic image more real to him than anything in life. Patricia is also trying to find an image that fits, but more distractedly, which leads her to resist and then sleep with Michel, to protect him and then to turn him into the police. 

Godard’s rough cut came in at 135 minutes; his producer insisted on a film at ninety. Out came the scissors, although instead of cutting whole scenes (although that did happen), Godard cut within scenes. Example: someone is walking across a room or down a street; conventionally, the camera follows the movement from one or perhaps two and even three points of view, but always seeking continuity; Godard would begin with the first few steps, then abruptly show a few frames from later on, then just as abruptly the arrival. Thus, from necessity, was born (actually reborn, from silent days) the fabled jump cut. The film made a huge star of Jean-Paul Belmondo, then twenty-six, and owed a little of its popularity to Jean Seberg, who came with pre-packaged pubilicity of her “discovery” by Otto Preminger for a role in Saint Joan and Bonjour, Tristesse. After 45 years, the film is still as fresh, invigorating, and exciting as when I first saw it, and it’s not hard to see how Godard got people to thinking lots of new and different ways about films.

Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier) was ready for release later the same year; but it dealt with the Algerian war for independence, and the resistance of French colonials and colonialists to them, subjects that devoured France at the time the way Vietnam came to dominate American politics from about 1967 until the mid-1970s. The Gaullist censors watched and said, resoundingly, Non! It did not appear on screens until 1963, by which time the Algerian war had achieved a negotiated peace. It tells of a hit man for the pro-colonial side who is operating out of Geneva, Switzerland, and who falls in love with a young woman, a situation which only complicates his professional life. There are cool, candid scenes of torture–perhaps the number one issue in the political debate over the war–long monologues, profuse quotations from various literary and philosophical sources, and like most of Godard’s films from these years, a death at the end. I have always liked Le petit soldat and found a viewing after nearly thirty-five years rewarding; the film has life and energy and stays just far enough outside the political thriller conventions to be interesting. It’s also his first film with Anna Karina, the Danish model with whom he fell in love, married, and helped into a brilliant but all too brief screen career. 

For someone so rigorously intellectual, politically serious, and high-minded about the functions of cinema, it’s amusing to watch Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), which came out in 1961 and was Godard’s tip of the hat and poke in the ribs at romantic musical comedy. Karina is a young wife who wants a child, but whose husband, Jean-Claude Brialy, is reluctant. To get him off the dime, she starts cultivating the interest of Belmondo, and with a lot of delicate playing and teasing, it works. There is singing, dancing, and all manner of charming silliness, with no hint whatsoever at anything adjoining reality: these are actors performing in front of a camera, that and not the illusion is the truth. Although Godard had wanted to shoot in a real Parisian apartment (a rather plain and drab one, as appropriate to the couple’s circumstances), he was finally forced to build a set. But while sets meant control and the possibility of making the scenes “real,” Godard recorded the sounds of the crew moving about and left them in the finished film. A film impossible to dislike.

Then, of course (and by this time we should have seen it coming), a sharp turn in 1962: Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, although I think Living Her Life is a little closer). This is the harrowing story, “in twelve scenes,” of a young Parisian who has little economic choice but to go into prostitution. She is wretchedly unworldly, gullible when she should be skeptical, trusting when she should have her guard up, taking financially motivated favors for generosity, gradually losing her grip on anything like control of her life. The black-and-white photography is unlike anything I had seen to that point: with a clarity, power, and extraordinary compositions by Raoul Coutard, who had begun working with Godard in A bout de souffle and soon became nearly as famous. Karina has by this point gone from charming to a talented actress, and her portrait of deterioration–at which she never ceases to be astonished–is abundantly moving. 

Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen, 1963) lulls us into thinking we’re watching a spoof of war movies, and perhaps of waritself. Michelangelo and Ulysses are a couple of witless peasants who leave their girlfirends, Cleopatra and Venus, to join up in a war which a distinct Orwellian aroma–two undefined sides fighting over undefined issues and objectives. Off they go, and gradually we see, in large part from newsreel and other documentary footage, some of the reality of war. There is senseless carnage and endless destruction aplenty, but eventually the guys return home, not exactly victorious, but exuberant with their experience as it is encapsulated in a huge stack of picture postcards they sent home. This famous sequence is put on with enormous imagination and humor, as the men show their women all the famous sights they have seen or claim to have seen–the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, St. Peter’s Square, museums, natural wonders, and so forth. We realize that these prefabricated images which are so immediate to them are like so many images–lies of real experience–meaning that the documentary footage we saw earlier falls into the same category. Images cannot capture the vicious brutality of war; only experience, unmediated by art of an attempt to create enjoyment. Suddenly, Les Carabiniers becomes a new film.

Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) was Godard’s first comparatively big budget production. He was by now an international brand name of sorts, and Sam Levine put him to work. The story was about a screenwriter with political and aesthetic principles who compromises them to get work with a philistine American producer, and in the process earns the contempt of his wife. A fair chunk of the money went into the contract for Brigitte Bardot as the wife. It may be difficult for younger people to appreciate what a presence BB was in the early ’60s; nobody has dominated the media since to such an extent unless it was Princess Diana in the ’90s. It so happened that she was a neighbor of Godard and Karina in the chi-chi Paris 16th arrondissement and agreed to work with him. Bad idea. She immediately began playing star, late on the set, pissy about her lines, in short a royal pain in the ass. To make matters worse, that great, great American actor Jack Palance, who played the producer, decided that Godard had no idea how to make a film and refused to speak to him for most of the shooting, although Godard spoke near-perfect English. Le Mépris never works very well for very long, but there is a marvelous scene in the couple’s apartment where, for about twenty minutes, we get a complete rehearsal and visualization of how the marriage has unraveled, thread by thread. Fritz Lang plays the famous German director Fritz Lang who has been hired to direct the film, and who, having seen it all, acts as something of a Greek chorus on the insanities of movie-making and how–maybe–something like art can be salvaged from the process. When Levine saw the rough cut, he blew a gasket: there were no nude scenes of Bardot. Godard got her back together with the crew and filmed some, then pasted them onto the beginning and end, where they seemed to turn the most famous derrière on earth into a joke. Henceforth, Godard went back to low-rent but autonomous filmmaking.

He seems to have felt reinvigorated, for next came the masterpiece Bande à part (1964), a lovely little piece about two film-mad young men who are always looking for the easy franc. They are casing the suburban house where they think riches dangle ripe for the mere plucking, and they enlist the reluctant support of the lovely but insecure and even rather gawky girl who works there. She finds herself drawn to them–literally: in one remarkable scene she runs through the entire suburban neighborhood to be with them, and we understand how much she thinks she needs them to complete her, for all her misgivings about their project. It’s not really a caper film, but a film about “outsiders” and how they got that way, how they are with each other, how they bumble forward but also backward. There is lots of conversation, many monologues, but we pick up their internal dynamics through one stunning moment when they dance to a cafe jukebox. The dance is called “The Madison,” Godard dubiously claimed to have invented it, and it is one of the most charming and subtly revealing passages in his work. Predictably, one of the characters comes to a tragic end, although there are flickers of a possibility of romantic escape as well.

I have always found Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), a day-in-the-life film, and Alphaville (1965), sci-fi/noir mélange, to be rather labored and a little abstract. They have moments of sharp images and telling, funny comments, but moments only, at least for me. I think Godard may have been marking time, throwing stuff up on the wall to see if anything stuck, trying to find his way out of a dead end. This sense is, again for me, reaffirmed by Pierrot le fou (1965), which seems to have been intended as a sort of summing up of where he’d been in the last five years, and which indeed Godard himself described as: “A little soldier who discovers with contempt that one must live one’s life, that a woman is a woman and that in a new world one must live as an outsider in order not to find oneself breathless.” The earlier themes are here–freedom, death, the centrality of film–along with the quotations and speeches and the inescapability of suffocating from imposed events beyond one’s control. Here, Vietnam has finally replaced Algeria and there is an air of pessimism which extends beyond the fact of death at the end. Narrative has become even less important: Belmondo plays a married man bored senseless at a party of advertising people who runs away to Karina, a former girlfriend,  who may–I say may–have killed a man (someone is reponsible for that dead body in her apartment). They steal a car and set off for the south of France, pursued by bad guys of uncertain provenance, but this is no thriller or melodrama. Godard is building atmosphere, charging the environment with darkness and hopelessness, creating moods which cannot be shaken by story line, and he’s immensely talented at it. I remember people coming out of the theater forty years ago saying, What the hell was that all about?” I could only answer, inadequately, it was about itself, it was about what you saw taken all together. Can’t do much better now. 

If Pierrot le fou was about where he’d come from, Masculin féminin (1966) pointed out some new directions. It is in fifteen scenes populated by young people roughly ten years Godard’s juniors (he was now thirty-six), and deals with their preoccupations with pop culture but also politics, sex but also how to live life decently. There’s no narrative here, just interviews and conversations and monologues designed to bring forth all sorts of information from which we can draw our conclusions (“make of it what you will” in the words of another intertitle). Roger Ebert (who as a young man “saw” Godard more clearly than most big-city newspaper critics)  has pointed out that while the film’s most famous intertitle is, “The children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” he thinks much of its sense lies in another line, “We went seeking greatness in movies, and were most often disappointed. We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live.” I think that’s this movie, and I think its a masterwork.

I didn’t bother watching Made in U.S.A. (1966) or 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her,1967), both of which left me cool at the time and which re-viewings ten years later did nothing to improve. Similarly with La Chinoise (1967). Most of the film is conversation amongst a group of French students, and the conversation is fascinating, earnest, thoughtful, but its connection to real-world possibilities hard to find. There is more than a whiff of agitprop to this film, although Godard remained just independent enough to annoy French Maoist intellectuals of the period (not actually a difficult feat). Incidentally, the marriage to Karina, which was all but unsalvageable in 1965, had by now ended, although she worked with him up through Made in U.S.A. Godard’s gargantuan tempers, his epic jealousy, and his moodiness had become impossible, divorce unavoidable. La Chinoise starred his latest romantic interest, Anne Wiazemsky, not yet twenty, whom he married after the film’s release. 

Later the same year, Godard brought out Weekend, a film with its own burden of agitprop, but which I also regard as one of his greatest works. The long tracking shot near the opening of a gigantic traffic jam composed of numerous wrecks is as pungent a statement as I have seen of how the end of urban capitalist society might be imagined. But that society has actually been coming apart from the very opening shots and it continues to degnerate into banditry, terrorism, and even cannibalism at the very end. It’s a grim, but still wildly funny–madcap, screwball funny, perhaps the only kind of funny that one could stand in such a world–view of the end of civilization as we know it, and there’s little evidence that Godard regrets its demise.

After Sympathy for the Devil in 1968, the politics more or less took over the films instead of being one of the areas he was exploring. Producers shied off, and even when they were lured out of the bushes by stars like Yves Montand and Jane Fonda inTout Va Bien (1973), audiences kept their distance. It was on to the really low-budget productions, digital filmmaking, and any number of other experiments. He hasn’t stopped, and I think we’re the better for it. Still, there’s been nothing like those early years, that burst of creativity and energy and joy–even with all the deaths, even with all the gloom–he gave us. I haven’t seen and don’t expect to see anything like it again in my lifetime, and you probably shouldn’t either. There have been many great directors, but early Godard was the one indispensable one. 

P.S.  Invaluable resource: Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artis at Seventy (2003).  MacCabe knows Godard, although there as been some separation recently, but worked with him on a number of films in the digital period, and provides a huge amount of information and insight, both personal and artistic.

http://agirlandagun.typepad.com/a_girl_and_a_gun/2005/05/sans_pareil.html