Word: godard
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This scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's poignant, invigorating For Ever Mozart, lasts 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...
...Woman, Masculine- Feminine--were acerbic love stories set in Left Bank cafes, sketches of men and women rubbing each other raw, arguing, smoking, drinking, anecdoting their lives away. The scenarios, rambling and aphoristic, could have been scrawled on napkins; their emotions were spiked with absinthe. Films poured out of Godard, two or three a year, and each was an incendiary device--an event for his admirers, an affront to the cinematic status quo. Andrew Sarris called him "the analytical conscience of the modern cinema." Because of Godard, it seemed, movies would never be the same...
Thirty years later, movies are samer than ever--more conservative, more in the thrall of spectacle and sensation. And Godard...is he still around? In fact, he made 15 films in the '80s, nine more in the '90s. A man in Mozart says, "There's no such thing as grownups." Godard, who'll be 67 this year, still has the intellectual energy--the need to know and show everything--of a precocious child...
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...
...film's own behind-the-scenes story is also instructive. When producer Carlo Ponti saw the finished film, he was upset at the absence of Bardot nudity. Godard then shot the famous opening scene, of Bardot asking Piccoli if he likes her eyes, breasts, ass--a catalog that commercializes her body, just as Ponti demanded--and Piccoli replying that he loves her "totally, tenderly, tragically...