Previously we said that two people may feel certainty about statements that appear to be inconsistent. The example was from my youth when I was taught that Protestants could not enter Heaven and my neighborhood chums, who were Protestant, were taught that they would have no such impediment merely because their beliefs were different from the Roman Catholic Church.
This is a good example. Both sides use the same Holy Book.
We concluded that even though both sides feel certainty, this feeling cannot imply the truth of the statements made.
We have a procedure of verifying statements which is heavily influenced by our history of scientific work over hundreds of years.
What was Aristotle's verification procedure? We do not really know. When Aristotle affirmed certain things about sea creatures, he made some howling mistakes. However, he must have thought them correct.
How did he go about verifying propositions about sharks, let's say?
Did he walk down to the harbor, talk to the fishermen, who in turn winked at each other and proceeded to give the old professor an outrageous cock and bull story?
Perhaps.
We do not know. We know his Logic, but the basis for the truth of some of his statements about the world is a mystery.
We have procedures for verification. We test, we re-test, we insist on third-party reproducibility of the tests, and so on.
I have heard it said recently that Science can prove anything.
Not really.
Let us assume that you and I attend a Cure concert. Not the original Cure, the later Cure.
I say it rocked, you say it sucked.
Consider the statement: " The Cure concert was great."
There is nothing apparently odd or paradoxical about this statement, "The Cure concert was great."
Is does not strike us as funny, unusual, nor a play on words.
Yet if a scientist were to try to prove it true or false, he would run into problems.
If a scientist said it was true, we would present your contrary opinion. If he said it was false, I would state my opinion.
The scientist would have to formulate a new statement and a procedure to implement it.
He would say, "Let us set up a survey and we shall ask the opinions of all who were at the concert."
Then we would have a result such as "51% liked the show and 48% did not and 1% was getting high."
This has a great deal more information than did the original statement, "The Cure concert is great.", but it is not the original. It has been transformed out of recognition into a form which science can actually act upon.
So how do we verify my childhood quandary where the statement might have been "Protestants will not enter Heaven." I said the statement is true, my friend Christian Johann ( he was indeed my friend) said it is false.
We cannot appeal to the Bible, for we already have done so.
There is no verification procedure for such a statement.
( We could wait until Judgement Day, but then we probably won't be arguing such niceties.)
Well, after a long time of looking at Truth and how it is used, it finally dawned on me that statements such as "Protestants will not enter Heaven" cannot be given a truth-value. They cannot be judged to be true nor false.
As paradoxical as this sounds, it also indicated to me the meaning of Faith.
In brief, faith is the way we deal with all statements which cannot be called true nor false, and FAITH is the way we deal with religious statements which cannot be called true nor false.
Notice that Faith or faith is not some garbage dump of the indecisive. Faith is not some second-best alternative for things that are perplexingly not proveable as true or false.
Beyond our normal understanding of Faith, it is a concept which ties Logic to Emotion and Belief.
As shown by our example, "The Cure concert was great.", the algorithmic nature of language allows us to spin out an infinity of such statements.
I can propound as many such statements as I want, using the template: "The X is Y" and "I believe Y" and "Someone else believes not-Y" and Y is based in our emotional life.
In this instance, "believe" becomes close to "feel".
And you say, of course, it is a matter of individual taste and everyone knows that all people differ in such things.
However, people also differ from each other in much the same way in their religious outlooks.
Am I saying religion is a matter of taste?
No. I am saying that religious statements cannot be proven true or false. Since this is so, we have Faith, or not, as the case may be.
If religious statements were proveable, the concept Faith would be totally unnecessary.
So the Cure was great, for me.
And this looks suspiciously like the language of Moral Relativism wherein we hear such oddities as, "If I indulge in certain actions, they are good...for me...even though most people find them appalling."
Before we go any further, let me remind you of where I am coming from.
I worship the one God.
I do not require an Intelligent Designer, which I hold to be Idolatry.
I do not require proof of God's existence.
At a certain point, I have learned to shut my mouth, be silent, and act according to my sense of the Holy; to visit the sick, those in jail, to honor one's parents...
I need no diagrams of the prophecies of the End of Times. I want no visual aids. I want to be charitable, truthful, loving, and loyal.
And if I never spoke about metaphysics again, it would not bother me in the slightest.
I do not admire St. Francis for his metaphysics.
I do not respect Abraham for his proofs of God's existence.
I do not admire the Caliph Omar because he published theories of the Holy.
These people reflect the Holy in their lives.
And actions are always true.
--
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See what you think of these articles. I pursued them because Contempt was as boring to me as it was to you, yet I didn’t feel that way about it 30 years ago.
Roger Ebert
`Contempt'' was Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 attempt at a big-budget, big- star production, and more or less satisfied his curiosity. It was not the direction he wanted to move in, and the rest of his career can be seen, in a way, as a reaction to the experience. Not that the film itself is a compromise; you can see the tension between Godard and his backers right there on the screen, and hear it between the lines of the dialogue, in this newly restored print.
The film is about a failed playwright (Michel Piccoli) who is hired by a corrupt American producer (Jack Palance) to work on the script of a movie by a great veteran director (Fritz Lang, playing himself). The playwright is married to a sexy former typist (Brigitte Bardot) that the producer has his eye on. The film is going to be based on The Odyssey, but Palance has a ``Hercules''-style ripoff in mind, while Lang wants to make an art film.
Many critics have interpreted ``Contempt'' as a parallel to The Odyssey, with Piccoli as Odysseus, Bardot as Penelope and Palance as Poseidon, but it is just as tempting to see the frustrated screenwriter as Godard; the woman as Godard's wife, Anna Karina, and the producer as a cross between Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti, who were both attached to the project. There's a scene where Palance views a rough cut of the movie (which looks like stark modernist wallpaper) and shouts at Lang, ``You cheated me, Fritz! That's not what's in the script!'' As Palance hurls cans of film around the screening room, we may be reminded that the film opened with a curious, extended scene in which Bardot's naked (but not explicitly revealed) body is caressed and praised by Piccoli. Insecure, she asks him about her thighs, her arms, her breasts, and he replies in every case that he gazes upon perfection. This sequence was belatedly photographed after the producers screamed at Godard that he had cheated them by shooting a film starring Bardot and including not one nude shot. In revenge, he gave them acres of skin but no eroticism.
Fritz Lang sails through the movie like an immovable object, at one point telling Palance, ``Include me out--as a real producer once said.'' The others carry the real weight of the story. Early in the film, after the disastrous screening, Palance storms out and then offers Bardot a ride to his Roman villa, leaving his secretary and Piccoli to follow behind. Palance makes a pass at Bardot, who turns him down contemptuously, and is then disturbed when Piccoli doesn't seem to defend her as he should--is he trying to provide his wife to the producer? That leads to the film's second act, an extended marital argument between Piccoli and Bardot, shot in the disconnected cadences of real life; couples do not often argue logically because what both sides are really asking for is uncritical acceptance and forgiveness. Then comes the third major location, a sensational villa jutting out high above the Mediterranean, its roof reached by a broad flight of steps that looks like the ascent to a Greek temple.
Godard's screenplay, based on the novel A Ghost at Noon, by Alberto Moravia, contains many moments to be savored by those who have enjoyed Godard's long battle with the film establishment. He has the crass producer constantly misquoting or misusing halfunderstood snippets of Great Quotations, and at one point shouting, ``I like gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.'' Lang's character includes details from his own life (we are told the possibly exaggerated story about how Goebbels offered him the film industry, and he fled Germany on the midnight train). Lang also frequently seems to be speaking for Godard, who was forced to shoot in CinemaScope, and has Lang say, ``CinemaScope is fine for snakes and coffins, but not for people.'' Jack Palance is not well cast as the producer; perhaps he was too much of an outsider himself to play a craven money man. He seems ill at ease in many scenes, unconvinced by his own dialogue.
(THE STORY IS THAT HE HATED THE FILM AND GODARD AND WANTED TO GET OUT OF IT RIGHT FROM THE START: GIL)
Bardot, whose role is emotionally easier to understand, seems very natural. And Michel Piccoli (in his first role!) is persuasive as a man with few talents and great insecurities; his screenwriter is quite different from the typical Piccoli roles of years to come, when he played men who were confident, smooth, devious.
As for Godard, he stays, as always, a little aloof. All of his films are, in a way, about filmmaking; he breaks the illusion of the fourth wall in order to communicate directly with the audience, usually in such an enigmatic way that he seems to be satirizing the whole idea of communication. He likes mannered shots that call attention to themselves, and here, faced with the great width of the CinemaScope screen, he has moments when he pans slowly back and forth from one side of the room to the other, using an unbroken take but refusing to place both characters on the screen at the same time.
When wide-screen movies are shown on TV these days, they are often subjected to the annoying ``pan and scan'' practice, in which the sides are chopped off and then the camera moves back and forth to show two people who were originally meant to be seen at once. I can only imagine how the pan and scan process would look if applied to this movie, in which Godard has built his own panning into the wide-screen compositions. The worst scenario: The movie pans in two directions at once. (THAT IS THE VERSION WE SAW)
``Contempt'' is not one of the great Godard films, for reasons it makes clear. In a way, it's about its own shortcomings. A drama exists at ground level involving the characters, while the film fights between the tendency to elevate them into art (Lang) or vulgarize them into commerce (Palance). It is interesting to see, and has moments of brilliance (the marital argument, the use of the villa steps), but its real importance is as a failed experiment. ``Contempt'' taught Godard he could not make films like this, and so he included himself out, and went on to make the films he could make.
(PERHAPS HE WAS EXPRESSING CONTEMPT FOR HIMSELF?)
BY CHARLES TAYLOR | in the credit sequence of "Contempt" -- Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film, re-released in a dazzling new Cinemascope print under the sponsorship of Martin Scorsese -- an imposing Cinemascope camera turns and points directly at us, as if we were somehow being called to witness a time when giants presided over the movies. "Contempt" evokes an era when the belief that movies mattered was an article of faith, when there seemed no turning back from the endless potential of movies, and when an eager (if not always large) audience existed for the directors ready to realize that potential.
Nobody tried to get more of those possibilities on screen than Godard. "Contempt" is the sixth of the 15 movies he made between 1959 and 1967, a run still unequaled by any director since in its exploration -- and exhaustion -- of what movies could do. But "Contempt" has always seemed the misfit among the director's '60s work, his one foray into the world of glossy international co-production. The largeness of the film's scale (which has partly to do with the use of Cinemascope) is light-years away from the caught-on-the-run feel of "Breathless" or "Vivre Sa Vie." And the mournful, almost stately pace of "Contempt" contrasts sharply with the stylistic and intellectual hyperdrive -- Godard's equivalent for the feel of urban life -- that characterized his other films.
The rerelease of "Contempt" is, however, a revelation -- it emerges as one of Godard's most emotional films. Like Olivier Assayas' recent, wonderful "Irma Vep," "Contempt" is a movie about the making of a movie. But if Assayas' film is a sign of life, Godard's is an elegy. "Contempt" ("Le Mepris") links the dissolution of the marriage between a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his wife (Brigitte Bardot) to the end of classical Hollywood moviemaking, represented here by a film of "The Odyssey" directed by Fritz Lang (the director of "Metropolis" and "M," who appears as himself). It's fitting that Godard has Lang working on a film of Homer's epic. He's saying that the world of filmmaking Lang represents is as lost to us as antiquity. What Godard couldn't have foreseen, but what accounts for the overwhelming sense of loss that "Contempt" imparts 34 years later, is that the world Godard himself represents has also vanished.
"Contempt" is built on a single moment of seeming inconsequence. Paul Javel (Piccoli), a promising young French writer, is courted by Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance), a brash, vulgar American producer, to rewrite the screenplay for Lang's film. Paul and his young wife, Camille (Bardot), visit the studio one day, and Prokosch invites them to his home for a drink. He suggests that Camille ride with him in his sports car and Paul follow in a taxi. Despite Camille's objections, Paul agrees. He arrives at Prokosch's to find his wife out of love with him, convinced Paul left her alone with Prokosch so the producer could make a pass at her. While coping with the unraveling of his marriage, Paul has to decide whether to work on the rewrite, which is expressly against the wishes of Lang. From that scenario, "Contempt" becomes another of Godard's explorations of how much of ourselves we can sell and still remain true, a questioning into how love or work is possible in a world constantly urging us to name our price.
On its surface, "Contempt" is a sexy slice of the Euroangst so popular with art-house audiences of the '60s. But the bitter disillusionment, the self-incriminating emotions roiling around beneath that surface are as far as you can get from Antonioni's interminable, distanced movies in which the idle, boring rich suffer and pose photogenically. "Contempt" points the way toward the tortured romanticism of "Pierrot le Fou" and the stunning essayistic brilliance of "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" and "La Chinoise." In it, Godard wrestles with both the breakup of his own marriage to the actress Anna Karina (at moments, Bardot dons a black wig reminiscent of Karina) and his realization that the Hollywood he idolized as a young critic was now turning its back on the filmmakers (like Lang) he revered. Palance's Prokosch is a broad, garish caricature of American money and power, one of the new breed of false gods who had replaced the real thing. The courtly Lang (who had already made his last movie) knows that his "Odyssey" will be wrecked, but he goes on working anyway, almost as if to illustrate Godard's quote: "I await the end of cinema with optimism."
For Godard, movies were always inextricable from women. The faces of Karina, Jean Seberg, Marina Vlady and others seem to carry the whole meanings of his films within them. Here, it's the wounded, slightly feral expression on Bardot's face -- the shocked, defensive look of unguarded love betrayed -- that carries the deepest, most conflicted emotions. (There is no point debating whether Bardot is an actress when her presence is as overpoweringly tender and touching as it is here.) In "Contempt" the betrayal of the movies is echoed in Paul's betrayal of Camille. Godard leaves it open whether Paul consciously prostitutes his wife. It seems more likely that he's guilty of a far more common masculine sin: obliviousness.
The film opens with Paul and Camille in bed, talking silly flirtatious endearments. The scene was ordered by the producers in order to squeeze in a shot of Bardot nude (and she is gloriously so). The scene's relaxed carnal freedom serves as our glimpse of what's shortly to be poisoned in their marriage. The heart of the film is a devastating 35-minute sequence between Paul and Camille in their Rome apartment. The half-hour hotel scene in "Breathless" was about a boy trying to get a girl into bed; this sequence is about what happens when what happens in bed is no longer enough. A thicket of crossed signals and misunderstandings, the scene follows Paul and Camille as they bicker, almost reconcile, then grow more distant, their roundabout squabbling recalling every lovers' quarrel you've ever had with someone who knows you all too well.
Godard called "Contempt" "the story of castaways of the Western world ... [who] one day reach a mysterious island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery." Everything in the film evokes a pitiable isolation -- the circular movement of Georges Delerue's sorrowful score, the emptiness of the film's apartments and villas and studios and screening rooms. Shot by the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard in hard reds and yellows and blues, "Contempt" paints its actors as solitary figures bathed in a Mediterranean light that's both pitiless and softening. A stray flashback shot of Bardot running by a lake framed with golden fall leaves is a postcard from a lost paradise.
In the last sequence, Lang sets up a shot (which serves as the final shot of the film) of Ulysses gazing at his homeland across the sea after 10 years' absence. It's a homecoming that feels like a leave-taking. Godard was beginning his odyssey in search of what, in "Masculin Feminin," he called "the film we all carried in our hearts. The film we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live." But seen now, "Contempt" feels as if Godard must have foreseen our current predicament: audiences and filmmakers separate as castaways, catching only occasional glimpses of one another on our separate islands. "Contempt" is a film of farewells, not the least of which is directed to those of us sitting in the theater.
July 4, 1997
By Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader
Much as William Faulkner once credited his success as a novelist to his failure as a lyric poet and Dizzy Gillespie explained his early trumpet style as an abortive attempt to imitate Roy Eldridge, what Godard can't do is fundamental to what he winds up doing. If Contempt invents a new way of thinking about the world--combining the whole complicated business of shooting a movie with reflections on antiquity and modernity, love and filmmaking, sound and image, art and commerce, thoughts and emotions, and four different languages and cultures--it arrives at this vision mainly through a series of detours and roadblocks. Indeed, it might be argued that Godard fails as a storyteller, as an entertainer, as an essayist, and as a film critic in the very process of succeeding as an artist.
How does he fail as a film critic? Contempt begins and ends by showing the execution of a particular tracking shot. The first of these accompanies Francesca down a patch of the Cinecitta back lot while a male voice, after reciting the film's major credits, intones the following: "'The cinema,' Andre Bazin said, 'substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.' Contempt is the story of this world." Godard is clearly fond of this quotation, because he cites it again in both Histoire(s) du cinema and his latest feature, For Ever Mozart. But as far as I've been able to determine, neither the quotation nor the attribution is correct. A likelier source is a much wordier passage by the controversial Cahiers du cinema critic Michel Mourlet. One of the most passionate defenders of Lang's Indian films, he wrote in 1959, several months after Bazin's death: "Since cinema is a gaze which is substituted for our own in order to give us a world that corresponds to our desires, it settles on faces, on radiant or bruised but always beautiful bodies, on this glory or this devastation which testifies to the same primordial nobility, on this chosen race that we recognize as our own, the ultimate projection of life towards God."
How does Godard fail as a storyteller and entertainer? The plot of Contempt proceeds by fits and starts over an afternoon in Rome and a morning in Capri, interrupted by constant digressions and labyrinthine ruminations. Palance as Prokosch is a screaming caricature of an oracular producer, Bardot the unlikeliest "former typist"imaginable. We're supposed to revere Lang as a great artist, but the rushes of the film he's purportedly making look simply awful. At one point Piccoli packs a gun, but he never winds up doing anything with it. When two of the characters die at the end in a car crash, Godard can't even bring himself to show us the accident; we only hear it offscreen, then see an awkwardly posed shot of the wrecked car and passengers that resembles a freakish piece of modernist sculpture. Sometimes Godard eliminates the sound track entirely (except for the repeated motifs of Georges Delerue's score, which Scorsese recently used in Casino); in one sequence, at a noisy audition in a movie theater, he periodically turns off the ambient sound in order to let us hear the dialogue. 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. How does Godard fail as an essayist? By refusing to pursue a single linear argument or even theme, even when he isn't telling a story, spattering his dialogue with Wise Sayings and assorted quotes fromDante, Holderlin, Brecht, and even Lang, inserting gratuitous film references anywhere and everywhere. (We find out what's playing at the theaters in Rome: Rio Bravo and Bigger Than Life. We see posters for Hatari!, Psycho, Vanina Vanini, and Vivre sa vie. We also know what's playing at the theater where the auditions are being held: Viaggio in Italia.)
And how does Godard succeed as an artist? By turning the above mess into a discourse with its own kind of necessity, wasting nothing. Bazin might not have been the source of the film's opening quote, but as the Socratic inquisitor into what cinema was, he should have been. The broken rhythms of the storytelling in Contempt and the frequent slippages between stars and characters, characters and caricatures, films and ideas about films, incidents and ideas about incidents all point to innovative ways of thinking, as Godard enters the material from different angles to tease out its hidden meanings. And if these meanings take the form of a cubist mosaic rather than a linear narrative or argument, that's because stories and essays take us only part of the way in perceiving the modern world and its contradictions.
*
Erich Auerbach in "Odysseus' Scar"--the first chapter of his Mimesis, and the best piece of literary criticism that I know--makes an extended comparison between the style of Homer and the style of the Old Testament: "On the one hand [meaning Homer], externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in a leisurely fashion and with very little suspense. On the other hand [in the Old Testament], the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and 'fraught with background.'" If Contempt has a single, overarching subject it's the aching distance between the two styles Auerbach outlines and the two ways of perceiving the world they imply. Using these styles more broadly to describe antiquity and modernity, it should be obvious that Contempt is not simply a look at antiquity from the vantage point of modernity--Fellini Satyricon is closer to that. Contempt is something more nearly akin to the reverse: a look at ourselves as we might appear to the Greek gods. Layering one antithetical style over another--classical over modern--Godard necessarily produces a work shot through with contradictions. In terms of Auerbach's two modes, Godard's serene camera movements and the film's lush, melancholy score stand in for Homeric style, as do various other signifiers of epic and odyssey. But what his camera is traversing (including the Mediterranean, as in the final shot) and what the score accompanies is generally fraught with turbulence, whether it's obvious or not.
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.
THE FILM WAS ORIGINALLY DONE WITH ACTORS SPEAKING IN FOUR LANGUAGES. GODARD TOOK HIS NAME OFF THE ITALIAN VERSION WHEN EVERYONE WAS DUBBED INTO ITALIAN. ITS NOT KNOWN WHAT HE FELT ABOUT THE VERSION WE SAW.
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