Working at the seminal Cahiers du Cinema with close friends and future-New Wave pals Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol, Godard wrote essays on film more than reviews the way we think of them today. In a particularly rapturous take on Bergman, Godard’s first sentence is, “There are five or six films in the history of cinema that one wants to review simply by saying, ‘It is the most beautiful of films,’ because there can be no higher praise.” The last sentence of the review is, “Five or six films I said, +1, for Summer Interlude is the most beautiful of films.”
     Godard must have been hurt, then, when Ingmar Bergman in 1972 cozied up to Godard’s most vehement critic, John Simon, and had this conversation:
Simon: Are there any young film-makers that you particularly like? I hope you don’t like Godard?
Bergman: No, no, no.
S: I detest him.
B: Yes, I do, too. In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can’t see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don’t understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he’s bluffing, double-crossing me….
     If you’ve seen any of Godard’s films you know what Bergman is getting at. They are not easy films to watch. Nor are they intended to be, which one could see as the director double-crossing the audience. And Godard himself did say, after the success of his first feature-length, Breathless, “Audiences trust me now. I hope I disappoint them. I prefer to work with people with whom I have to fight.”
     His actors and photographers could no doubt back that statement up. On the set of Breathless, Godard notoriously pushed his cameraman around in a wheelchair with a handheld camera and ran around shouting at everyone to do seemingly inane things. Once he decided he had enough footage, he shut down production. The day Breathless opened in Paris, the film’s producer, who had been talked into funding the film by Truffaut and Chabrol, had a fistfight with Godard in the lobby because he thought the director had intentionally tried to ruin him financially.
     Still, against all odds, Breathless was hugely successful and launched Godard’s career, as well as Jean-Paul Belmondo’s. Thanks to Godard, audiences now remember Jean Seberg as a charming if morally ambivalent pixie in a New York Herald Tribune T-shirt rather than the terrible actress from St. Joan and Bonjour Tristesse.
     After the success of Breathless, Godard said he hoped he hated his second film so that he would regain his love of film. He said he had thought of Breathless as the beginning of a new kind of cinema, but really it was just a sort of death of cinema, and that since filming it he had grown tired and had come to love film less.