Almost exactly 33 years ago, in October 1964, the critical reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s widest American release of his career and his most expensive picture to date was overwhelmingly negative. But now that Contempt, showing this week at the Music Box, is being rereleased as an art film–in a brand-new print that’s three minutes longer–the critical responses have been almost as overwhelmingly positive. It’s tempting to say in explanation that we’re more sophisticated in 1997 than we were in 1964–that we’ve absorbed or at least caught up with some of Godard’s innovations–but I don’t think this adequately or even correctly accounts for the difference in critical response. Despite all the current reviews that treat Le mepris as if it were some form of serene classical art, it’s every bit as transgressive now as it was when it first appeared, and maybe more so. But because it’s being packaged as an art movie rather than a mainstream release–and because Godard is a venerable master of 66 rather than an unruly upstart of 33–we have different expectations.

Even so, it was years before Contempt started to make much sense to me. And though today I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a masterpiece, and certainly one of the great films of the 60s–if not “the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe,” as critic Colin MacCabe labeled it in Sight and Sound last year–I still feel more comfortable with my earlier ambivalence about it than I do with its current acclamation as a timeless, unproblematic classic. Indeed, I would argue that Godard’s eclecticism must be acknowledged and understood before one can genuinely appreciate the film.

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  1. Michelangelo Antonioni. Paul and Camille’s exhaustive as well as exhausting scene in their significantly unfinished and mainly white-walled flat is in many ways the sequel to an almost equally protracted scene between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, though that was essentially a long seduction and this is a chronicle of growing disaffection. Unquestionably Antonioni, whom Godard interviewed at length in 1964, is the ruling influence on this scene–on its casual detachment from both characters, novelistic psychological ambiguities, protracted sense of duration, and remarkable feeling for the ebb and flow of a troubled relationship. Back in 1964, when I was blind to the Antonioni influence, I was turned off by Paul’s macho insensitivity and what I perceived as Godard’s uncritical identification with it; today I’m more inclined to read the same sequence as a profound self-critique.

Yet it seems Godard remained incapable of doing something truly Langian in the film within a film, except through a kind of abstraction. (He does a much better job of evoking Lang’s geometrical visual style in an overhead shot of Paul climbing the steps of Prokosch’s villa–actually Curzio Malaparte’s–in Capri, which harks all the way back to the Tower of Babel sequence in Metropolis.) Though Godard aims to evoke the lucid approach toward antiquity and the cosmos he associates with Lang, he’s guided by the very different example of Pollet’s 42-minute experimental film–the focus of a dreamy reverie on antiquity that Godard wrote at about the same time he was making Contempt. Pollet’s seminal Mediterranee cuts repeatedly between meditative camera movements around various subjects–Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish bullfight, a woman on a hospital cart, a fisherman–conjuring up a great many mysteries about their relation to one another. Seen today, Pollet’s plotless film looks a good deal like many of the lyrical interludes in Contempt.

In countless other ways Godard calls attention to his technique, thereby preventing us from simply following the story as story: he moves the camera back and forth between the quarreling Paul and Camille, periodically cuts to seemingly unmotivated flashbacks, fantasies, and even a flash-forward (most of which account for the three minutes deleted in the original American release), and even adds a blue or red filter in the middle of takes.

Godard, playing Lang’s assistant director in the film, has the last word, heard over the final tracking movement across the sea, a final command to the film crew, “Silence,” as the camera starts rolling–a command that’s then translated into Italian. Godard’s view of serenity and continuity is necessarily splintered, because the modern world is a Tower of Babel where languages and discourses compete for mastery over a purity that eludes our grasp. Not even silence is unmediated. There’s a French silence, an Italian silence, a German silence, and an American silence; maybe even a Greek silence, which the film prefers to remain silent about.