Ingmar Bergman’s scathing take on Jean-Luc Godard: “A fucking bore”
In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard made his feature debut as a director with Breathless, changing cinema forever.
Beginning his career as a critic for Cahiers du cinema, it was here that he bonded with other aspiring filmmakers who wanted to alter the landscape of modern moviemaking – alongside the likes of François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, Godard began experimenting with short films, but it was his first feature that would put him on the map as this exciting new voice in the industry.
Following the release of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which earned an Academy Award nomination, Godard would make his first major contribution to the nouvelle vague with Breathless, with a story conjured up by Truffaut. Most significantly, the film broke down all previous notions of conventional editing, with techniques like jump cuts and fourth wall breaks coinciding with on-location shooting and handheld camerawork.
It was at once more realistic and totally artificial, and this strange contradiction brought something utterly exciting to the silver screen – a far cry from studio-bound productions and what Truffaut decried as the “cinema du papa.” But not everyone was convinced by Godard’s supposed genius.
Over the coming years, he’d come to define the French New Wave with movies like Masculin Féminin, Le Mépris, La femme une est une femme, Bande à part, and Pierrot le Fou, and his influence quickly spread… Everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Wes Anderson cites Godard as a pivotal source of inspiration – you can especially see his influence in the latter’s visual aesthetic, which bears a striking resemblance.
But if you were to ask Ingmar Bergman what he thought of Godard’s movies, you’d get a rather scathing response. The filmmaker began his career quite a few years before the French auteur, making his debut, Crisis, in 1946, and through the 1950s, he’d make several masterpieces before Godard had even picked up a camera, like Summer with Monika and The Seventh Seal.
Bergman was a master of his craft, but he didn’t recognise the genius that many critics also identified in Godard, once stating, “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead.” One of the arguments often lobbied against Godard relates to his so-called pretentiousness, and it seems like Bergman saw straight through him, seeing his blend of pop culture and politics as a flimsy excuse for depth.
“Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore,” he added. It’s interesting because when you look at Bergman’s Persona, you can see many shared visual techniques, like when the characters break the fourth wall, but the Swedish filmmaker evidently thought Godard’s approach was much less interesting.
“He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring,” Bergman concluded. You can’t win everyone over, I suppose.
