Lang and Godard: The Dinosaur and the Baby

In Le Dinosaure et le bébé (recorded in 1964 but released in 1967), Jean-Luc Godard interviews Fritz Lang—who recently worked with him on Le Mépris (1963)—to discuss the role of cinema in their careers, reflect on their filmmaking choices and contemplate the broader politics of the film industry. This article traces Godard’s long-standing admiration of Lang as a filmmaker who worked in America and was able to transcend the limitations of the Hollywood studio system and examines the reasons behind Godard’s decision to cast Lang as himself in Le Mépris . It argues that the conversation between the two directors about the car accident scene at the end of Le Mépris exposes an intersectional moment in classical and modernist cinema, in which different eras of film encapsulated by two different directors converge around the filming of a specific piece of action. This article concludes by further arguing that filmed interviews such as Le Dinosaure et le bébé enact a pleasurable form of cinephilia in which watching directors talk at length about their working methods and practices interweaves the poetic, the performative and the pedagogical.