With scenes taken from Contempt and M, Jean-Luc Godard and Fritz Lang talk about cinema. “Class me as a dinosaur if you want to”, Lang says. In Contempt, Lang – a central figure to the film – in fact embodies a dying god who has done his time. What is a director? What is censorship? These questions are tackled face to face by Godard.
Lang: “When we were working together, in Contempt, I noticed a great difference between the two of us… I want to speak about the car accident, where Ms. Bardot dies. I would have shown the car driving off, then the car moving faster and faster, etc. I’d have shown the action. You don’t show the action. You only show the moment when the stars die, squashed between two lorries. And this is because you find the consequences much more important than the accident itself.”