Echydo
21May12
Glad to see that I am not the only who hated the score. I'm sure they will feature on my nightmares tonight.
Wall
Displaying wall posts 1 - 30 of 77 in total
johnsonisjohnson
12Mar12
"It's art, but will the public understand it?" "Yeah, it's in the script, but it is not what you have on that screen." - "Naturally, because in the script it is written, and on the screen it's pictures. Motion pictures, it's called." "Some years ago, some horrible years ago, the Hitlerians said "revolver" instead of "checkbook"."
Varun Anisetty likes this
Sudipto Basu
6Mar12
I guess this is one of the easiest Godard films to follow - at least on the surface of it.
Matt Turner
26Feb12
Second favourite Godard currently. I always seem to enjoy films that include the breakdown of relationships greatly, as odd as that may be.
Daniel Montiel
25Feb12
So far one of my favorite Godard's, a great philosophical insight into the schemes of commercial filmmaking and the nuances of married relationships. Unlike other Godard films I enjoyed the pacing, and the narrative, the visuals and the ideas really feel like they come together into an engaging passionate piece of cinema
AntioneOscar69
16Feb12
One of Godard's best films, a tragic, romantic, bitingly funny look at the ugliness of studio film-making and the perils of mis-communication, as well as one of the rawest, most down-to-earth portraits of marriage this side of L'Atalante and Scenes From a Marriage.
DeJardinblum
12Jan12
Comparable to an elegy on language/romance/classicism that persists in the bottomlessness of a cinema where storytelling is inseperable from the extinction of the essential historical characteristics of novelistic form, where the beautiful image is a syntagmatic event thresholded in a dialectical fracture, modern and post-modern engaging fetish/commodity with tragic resonance. The only Godard film I truly love.
Seen Said likes this
James Kang
14Dec11
Contempt without the score is still pretty great, but that music makes this film monumental and a lot more fun to turn over in your head. At first, the score sounds deeply romantic, then sorrowful and finally disastrous.
Samir likes this
Arsaib
13Dec11
"...one of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking, a movie that takes place amid the smoldering ruins of the studio system, creating much of the language and spirit of the new cinema even as it deeply, solemnly mourns the loss of the old. A film that teeters between filial loyalty and Oedipal revolt, between allegiance to a unified, classical system and an angry impatience to get on with the new, Contempt is one of those works in which you can feel the aesthetic ground shifting beneath your feet. Like a Cézanne still life or a Sullivan skyscraper, it yields a low rumble - the sound of rules changing." —Dave Kehr
Varun Anisetty and 4 others like this
ILoveCourtneyHate
6Nov11
If you haven't already, I would advise anyone to check out Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of this - dissects Godard better than anything I have read, who himself admitted to making 'an attempt at cinema'. Possibly my favourite 60s Godard film.
Daniela
25Oct11
I feel like I could have liked this film . . . but didn't. Also, that score that comes on every five seconds drive me crazy!
trolley freak
15Sep11
Godard's most commercially successful film, no doubt due to the prescence of Brigitte Bardot. I enjoyed it but I don't think I'll ever be a fan of the New Wave's most controversial director. Having said that, I respect his 60's work -at least up until the time late in the decade when he became way too political and avant-garde for my personal taste. As John Lennon famously said, 'Avant-garde is French for bullshit'..
D_m_a_T_T
8Sep11
Godard does his best to adapt the book to movie form, but it did not succeed in the crucial need to build the psychological component of the protagonist's feelings regarding his marriage. In the book, we read his existentialist musings and examination of his wife's every word. Through the film, we view each painful act amidst Godard's consistently stunning mise-en-scene, but we fail to fully connect with his psyche.
Richard White
15Aug11
This is one of the really great and valuable films of its era. It operates at many levels, but one of the most important is the conflict between film as commodity and film as culturally meaningful artifact. The relationship between Bardot, Piccoli, and Palance is a complex metaphor of this conflict. They are both real humans with real relationships but they also work out the metaphor in their characters and relationships, with Bardot as the goddess of art, Beauty, whored by Javal to Palance for money, and lost to Javal for that reason. Just as in the great Greek dramas, referred to by the frequently cut-in shots of classical statues, the lives of the characters in the drama work out a larger Olympian archetypal metaphor, rich with meaning for the modern age of the commodity.
WhatsUpWill
10Jun11
Men and women are different. Underneath all of our complexity lies a primal emotion of jealousy, carelessness, anger, and fear of abandonment. People act out on these emotions because they can never be too sure about the other in the relationship.
Matilde Ricon Peres and 2 others like this
Kamran
10Jun11
Whatsupwill: The aesthetic is experienced; Some aspects of the aesthetic are brilliant - beautiful shots and sounds that please the senses - while others are simply unpleasant. At certain moments, the jarring aesthetic inhibits one from truly letting go and getting into the film; it alienates the viewer, purposely, and, though this alienation speaks to the theme of Contempt, these moments are rather distasteful.
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WhatsUpWill
10Jun11
the music perfectly fits the aesthetic. read your statement then read mine again. that's all i was talking about. the music is her ruminating on the things that have transpired.
Kamran
17May11
most of the time it feels arbitrary, loud, and overly dramatic. The piece is filled with action, but it's used, nonchalantly, for actionless moments, such as in the middle of a trivial conversation. It feels as if a baby was given a button (to execute the sample), and, while the film was playing, pressed it arbitrarily. Here, and Here, and Here. Enough already! Beautiful aesthetic, and intelligent film otherwise. 4*
Echydo likes this
Kamran
17May11
Besides a few brilliant moments - scenes of nature, the ending etc - the soundtrack, albeit a beautiful one, is distracting, disjunctive, and, in almost every instance, completely unsuitable; this is the primary reason for me not loving this film - just about everything else is excellent. Not only do they reuse the same 30 second sample like a billion times, it is rarely used well - it rarely FITS the aesthetic;
Echydo likes this
