Directors Blasting Other Directors

Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni:“Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own seriousness. He’s done two masterpieces, you don’t have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up (1966), which I’ve seen many times, and the other is La Notte (1961), also a wonderful film, although that’s mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection, have a copy of Il Grido (1957) and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura (1960), for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.”

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Jean-Luc Godard didn't have many fans amongst his contemporaries, apparently:

Ingmar Bergman: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a ****ing bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”

Orson Welles: “His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”

Werner Herzog: "Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film, a Fred Astaire picture, or a porno."

I like quite a few Godard movies, but I can see where they're all coming from.

I always understand most people's rejection of Godard, but I think it's always a mistake to take his intellectual sloganeering seriously. I think they're better seen as graffiti scrawled across his films. Not really terribly different from his jump cuts. Just another way for him to distort and play with form. Stuff whatever comes to his mind into the frame.


He's kind of a troll, but not in a bad way. It's what makes his films feel so alive and dangerous and sublime and delightfully confusing.


And I'm hardly surprised Bergman thought he was useless. Always more surprised that Welles couldn't appreciate him more, as he seems to like the idea of art as a mirage conjured by grifters. And it never matters what Herzog thinks, it just matters how hilariously perfect he phrases his dissatisfaction.

Some more directors attacking Godard:

Roman Polanski: In fact the worst thing possible is to be absolutely certain about things. Hitler, for example, must have been convinced in the certainty of his ideas and that he was right. I don’t think he did anything without believing in it, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it to start with. And I think Jean-Luc Godard believes he makes good films, but maybe they aren’t that good.

François Truffaut: You’re nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. […] You fostered the myth, you accentuated that side of you that was mysterious, inaccessible and temperamental, all for the slavish admiration of those around you. You need to play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I’ve always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job. But you, you’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

They all seem like the kind of reactions that directors who play with expectations, manipulate the elements of moviemaking, etc. receive. I've only seen Breathless, Contempt, Alphaville and Band of Outsiders, so I can't agree or disagree with any of them because if he's trolling in them, it's pretty tame. It would be interesting to know if Bergman said that before or after making Persona because you could definitely claim he's trolling in that one! I do believe some trolling is done in a bad way, i.e. mastrubatory and amounts to little more than showing off, though (Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, for instance).

You could be right! Speaking of him, he really needs to be on Hot Ones.

On Barbie:



On Reality TV:

I think one of the most blatant examples of a director trolling his audience, is The Boss of It All by Von Trier. Making a comedy where all of the camera work is generated randomly without the aid of any humans, therefore killing the rhythm that is essential to make the films jokes land.



And this kind of thing to me feels directly inspired by Godard. Those jump cuts in Breathless, which really don't seem like anything at all anymore, would have been enormously frustrating for so many people in the audience back in the day. They would expect there to be a reason why there was a cut at that specific moment. Would wonder what part of these conversations were being missed. Why the fragments they were seeing were the important parts. Why does it keep jumping ahead. And there isn't any real exact explanation for why these things are happening, or where he has chosen them to happen. He's just creating his own rhythms in film, which would have been completely at odds with what audiences would have been used to at the time (basically editing beats tied directly to narrative expectations)

What was once considered trolling becomes another tool in the toolkit, doesn't it? Those jump cuts didn't phase me that much because I'm more surprised when movies from the last thirty years don't have them. Think about how many cuts like that are in Soderbergh's movies.

Surprised there aren't any references to Godard's job before (movie critic)