on use of film titles - >> mind the _

mediamatic latest project names itself after the 1963 Godard film, which just recently has been reviewed some times. The project describes itself as ..

In Le MÃ©pris, Voulon wants to show the construction of angst and the deliberately causing a feeling of loss of identity. The ‘postmodern’ togetherness and the mixing of fiction and reality-characteristic for both contemporary art and the real world-has caused an ambiguous atmosphere. While Godard only preludes to this ambiguity in his film, now seems to be the time for further analysis.

.. and it is quite unclear if they take over more then this general idea, but I want to look here at its attempts to relate to recent ambiguities with reason to look more intensely at this elder Godard piece which wasn’t always reviewed that well as Rosenbaum describes quite detailed from his own experience.
And as nice as the quote put into Bazin’s mouth is, I could not find an other source than the Godard film for it. So he might be right that it is literarlly existing, but an extract from another …. Nevertheless this quote eventually fits the best to the project announced by mediamatic.

“‘The cinema,’ Andre Bazin said, ‘substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.’ Contempt is the story of this world.”

Eventhough a reference to reknown film projects seems at the moment the unevitable task for an exhibition which attempts to be named actual for the moment (see also Truffaut’s ‘Night for Day’ for the Withney Biennale) just rarely a convincing connection towards the filmic terrain can be established by the initiators. Evenmore so the filmic reference in those cases I have seen is the more persuading one, but leaves one behind with the question of the relevance for the whole project. May be it is hidden in the rediscovery of the filmic project as a complexity of moving images with more or less failing narrative but transposable structures onto the real which does not necessarily be the one of the time – as film never had to be …

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.