I'd never seen it before, but it was a wonderful illustration of something that has been bothering me as well.

In it Godard talks about books. When we say "an old book" we usually refer to actual books that are beat up or were printed 50+ years ago. But if we saw a new edition of a Poe or Cervantes or Shakespeare book, we wouldn't call it an old book, just a book.

In reference to movies though, he said we think of Griffith or Gance as "old movies" even if we're watching brand new prints projected in a theater or watching them on new VHS, they're still old movies.

Godard says that most people have forgotten the cinema and to prove the point, he has Michel Piccoli go around and ask people if they're familiar with the names of directors, actors, and actresses from French film history.

"Do you know Jacques Becker?"

"Non, monsieur."

"Adieu Phillipine?"

"Non, monsieur."

"Rules of the Game? Gaston Modot?"

"Non, monsieur."

It reflects a culture that has only the immediate moment or the last few years as reference.

One of the people he asks hesitates. Godard suggests that the hesitation reflects a guilt, that by hesitating, one realizes they don't know and feel the shame of not knowing. Well, perhaps. But the overall point is clear and one I completely buy--people are shirking their responsibility to know history and the historical content of their culture.

That said, where are Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, Jean Cocteau and Jean Gabin when you need them?

I don't know if the cult of the director is such a bad thing (unless you're a screenwriter).

I have mixed feelings about auteurism--as a theory, it really has holes. But, the films and directors that the Cahiers crowd championed are really the ones I most respect (i.e. Hawks, Hitchcock, Ozu, Renoir, Lang, etc). And, Godard and Truffaut, Chabrol and Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, all ex-Cahiers critics, have all made great movies on their own. And the French New Wave mix of self-referencial joking and emotional exploration is wonderful. And, if nothing else, it's an alternative--once you're sick of the TV news and sitcoms, the same Hollywood style cinema, you can go into Vivre Sa Vie or Mother and the Whore and experience a different look, a different pacing of time, a different construction of events. Or, at least, it was different. Today, the worship of style and form has the New Wave beat to where it looks ancient. After all, Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and The 400 Blows are 40+ years old now.

That 40 years doesn't date those films for me, it just means that they look more modern than other films from that time but less modern than current films.

Here's a quote from Paul Theroux's book "Fresh-Air Fiend":

"A landscape looks different when you know the names of things - and, conversely, can look exceedingly inhosopitable and alien when it seems nameless. But there is a point where, when a place looks very strange, it is not an indication of its remotenes but simply a mark of your ignorance."

But I don't mean to sound pompous. I've never seen a Godard film, it's easier not to bother, and I think I'm lazier than most. But what a wonderful previous "level of significance" I must have had when I got all excited about seeing, on a TV documentary, colour test footage of Boris Karloff in his Frankenstein make-up!

I'd have thought the French would be quite informed about the history of their national cinema but then again - what sort of poll/sampling etc was Piccoli doing?

Ask the average Australian about our film history and 99.9999% are clueless and that includes cinema students.

One local TV interview I absolutely agreed with said that our cinema students had a defined knowledge of Hollywood and that's about it.

Myself, I never saw the interest in contemporary cinema with everyone discussing Tarantino etc. Interestingly even now, I overheard a first year student on the bus saying she was going to do the 'Tarantino essay'. When I did first year, my tutor told me how suprised many students were when they received a C grade for their papers when writing on 'Citizen Kane' - but continued to explain that so mant students wrote on it that few papers were stand-outs.

Its amazing the significant numbers who find subtitles/intertitles (ie silent film) a huge obstacle but I think its because there is a cool stigma attached to this academic field with most focused on Hollywood.

Upon learning that I don't see much contemporary film - a friend asked me if I felt I was missing the 'moment of history'. It was hard for me to convince him that it was more important for me to see older films since I may never get the chance again on a big screen.

I love the silent/talkie era. Sigh....

Godard, in another production, Histoire(s) du Cinema, talks about movies and history and the history of movies. There, he suggests that a lot of what we know about world history comes from cinema's representations of it. You can get the facts out of a book, but our notions of what things looked like or how people lived in different eras comes from media, either paintings and engravings from the past, some made centuries after the original historical incidents, and movies from the 20th century.

So, to say that movies don't have a connection to our history and current culture might be a mistake. Maybe the message is that our cinema, seen from 100 years in the future, might be about how blind we were trying to make ourselves.

I agree that the best part of Contempt is the first third. I like that the second third takes place entirely inside an apartment for like 40 minutes. Ultimately, it's hard to sustain a whole film based around the idea that the wife is reacting to his sell-out, it does seem to break down. I could say more in its defense, but that's not the point. Godard is both critic and filmmaker. You may dislike his films (and his notions about cinema) but still find merit in other things he has to say.

Cinesin--I don't know much about Aussie film history myself. I'm sure there was early exhibition and an attempt to make films by the 20s. Aussies always had a problem financing a national cinema and needed investment. The British Ealing studios made the attempt after WWII. The Overlanders came from that. Hitchcock made Under Capricorn there. Eureka Stockade bombed and Ealing pulled out. It wasn't until the 60s and television that Aussie cinema started to take off agin. Then came the great period of the 70s and 80s--Weir, Beresford, Miller, etc. And all those guys and gals got vacuumed up by Hollywood. I don't know what's going on in Aussie cinema today.

The Godard film stacks the deck, Piccoli goes around asking people who work in the hotel he's staying at, they are indentified as workers of the hotel in the credits, but they're too good-looking to be anything but actors. But, I don't doubt that man-on-the-street interviews would come up with similar responses.