Word: contempts
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...nature of police misconduct, if not the volume, has changed. In the past, brutality frequently took the form of a cop retaliating against someone trying to harm him. Often it went unnoted. Today there is frequently an element of police gangsterism. Small groups of police officers share a fermenting contempt for the people they encounter. Rogue cops band together and cover one another's crimes. When all this unravels in public, it seems as if entire cadres are corrupt...
Many of the current brutality cases show officers in an almost maniacal rage. The message of politicians to police that they are soldiers in a war may be driving these angry and violent expressions of contempt. It is common in war to dehumanize the enemy. And all wars produce atrocities...
...only a few seconds--yet it serves as a surreal image, a joke and a requiem. After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 For Ever Mozart and Contempt, his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid, newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation. So it's time to praise Godard for what he was and still...
...Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly...
Godard has always been a canny guerrilla. He knows that film is an expensive art, that someone must subsidize his midnight raids on the prevailing culture. So he subverts the typical narrative by using all the handsome old tools. Contempt has movie stars, guns, car crashes, wide screen, beautiful color, the cliffs of Capri, the most rapturous music (by Georges Delerue, his violins sawing and soaring like Philip Glass in ecstasy). And, always, pretty women. A Ziegfeld of the Left Bank, Godard reinvented Jean Seberg and discovered Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Maruschka Detmers, Myriem Roussel, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy--glories...