Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard are both members of the select group of filmmakers who helped to shape the development of cinema. They created some of the undisputed 20th-century cinematic masterpieces, such as Persona and Pierrot le Fou. Due to their radically different artistic sensibilities and shared end goal of elevating cinema to the highest of all art forms, their works were inextricably linked to one another.
Why did Bergman not like Jean-Luc Godard?
Godard’s movies and his overall cinematic sensibilities came under fire from Bergman, who said: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt artificial, pretentious, and totally lifeless. infinitely boring and uninteresting from a cinematic perspective. Godard is absolutely boring. He created his movies with critics in mind. Masculin Féminin (1966), one of the films, was filmed here in Sweden. It was so unbearably dull.
The exact reasons Bergman could not appreciate Godard’s works were revealed in a different 1971 interview. “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,” Bergman said. I always respect this.
But I can’t see his pictures, he continued. Because his pictures give me such anxiety, I sit for perhaps twenty-five, thirty, or fifty minutes before I have to get up and go. I constantly get the impression that he wants to tell me something, but I don’t know what, and occasionally I get the impression that he’s bluffing or double-crossing me.
