A Conversation about Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard
Chris Fujiwara, Edward McCarry, and Ethan Spigland, 2026
The following conversation took place on March 16, 2026—the 100th anniversary of Jerry Lewis’ birth—and is published here to accompany Metaphysics of the Pratfall: Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard, a series of Lewis/Godard double bills at Anthology Film Archives.
Chris Fujiwara has written and edited several books on cinema, including Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall; The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger; and Jerry Lewis. Formerly Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival, he has curated film programs for other institutions.
Ethan Spigland is a professor in the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute. He is also an acclaimed filmmaker, visual artist, critic, and curator, with extensive writings on French and Japanese cinema.
Edward McCarry is a co-founder of The Theater of the Matters.
Ethan Spigland: Thinking about Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard… there are many striking parallels between their trajectories. They’re from roughly the same generation: Lewis was born in 1926, Godard in 1930. They both made their first films as directors in 1960, low-budget black-and-white films—The Bellboy and Breathless. By the end of the ’60s, they both seem to hit a kind of impasse or crisis. And then, in 1980, they each make something like a comeback film—Hardly Working and Sauve qui peut (la vie).
As I reflect on how the two are connected, I keep coming back to something you mention in your book, Chris—Serge Daney, writing about one of Lewis’s films, talks about moving from one thing to another and leaving the transitions up to chance; letting go of strict narrative logic, so the plot almost becomes a pretext. Instead, what you get is a series of set pieces or situations with this sense of discontinuity and unpredictability, where it feels like anything could happen from one moment to the next.
Reading that about Lewis made me think of Godard. I often have the same feeling watching his films.
Chris Fujiwara: Yes, that’s a good point. With Godard, of course, one tends to think in terms of montage—the relationship between shots, one shot colliding with another. Two shots confront each other in a way that isn’t typical of conventional narrative technique but is closer to Soviet montage theory. You could also think about how Godard radicalizes the reverse shot. The reverse shot of an image might be another image that contradicts it. He once gave the example of Israel and Palestine: images confronting and contradicting one another.
ES: Something dialectical.
CF: Yes, perhaps. And I sense something similar in Lewis, to some extent—though not in the same way, and Lewis probably wouldn’t appreciate that example. But when a shot changes in Lewis, you really feel it. It’s almost like: my God, it’s a different shot. Something happens that isn’t supposed to happen. As you said, it becomes unpredictable. The relationship between shots becomes unclear—almost anything could happen.
There’s also a kind of violence in both filmmakers. Not violence like Sam Peckinpah, but a violence of thought, a violence of images clashing. I think that happens in Lewis as it does in Godard. Godard recognized that. He once said that if Lewis had been alive in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, he would have made revolutionary films—great masterpieces.
Godard also talked about the “blackboard quality” of Lewis’s images. I was trying to remember exactly where he said that. I think he said that Lewis was the only American director who uses the screen like a blackboard. Do you recall that quote?
Edward McCarry: I do remember the quote about Lewis making great communist films. That was during one of Godard’s U.S. tours, when he was being polemical—bringing up Jerry Lewis in front of American critics who were completely flabbergasted by it. So it may have been on that occasion.
But could you talk a little more about the “blackboard” idea? It’s an incredible concept.
CF: Well, the blackboard in Godard is a literal image. There’s a blackboard in Le Gai Savoir, and there’s one in Sauve qui peut (la vie). There’s also the flatness of the image that Godard often works with. I think when he says “blackboard,” he means that the screen can present an idea very clearly: you put the idea up and state it directly.
In Lewis’s films, those ideas often concern identity, but also the roles people play in organizations or in society. For example, in Which Way to the Front? there’s a scene early in the film in a recruiting office where a man stands in front of a poster that says, “This man will die.” That’s a kind of blackboard idea: a soldier is someone who dies.
Another example is the way Lewis sets up workplaces. Of course in The Bellboy, but really throughout his films—down to Hardly Working, and even Smorgasbord (Cracking Up). The workplace appears again and again. He often shows these spaces in a very flat, direct way so that you see their shapes clearly. You see exactly what the space is designed for. The mise-en-scène is already there; he simply places the camera and shows how it works. Think of the hotel in The Bellboy, or the gas station in Hardly Working. Those settings almost feel like Godard scenes already. Or take The Nutty Professor.
ES: Which also has a blackboard.
CF: Yes, exactly. And there it’s about identity again, but also about the mise-en-scène of the university classroom. It’s almost like a factory—something being demonstrated that’s supposed to make sense.
ES: That also makes me think of The Ladies Man and Tout va bien. You can understand why Godard and Gorin would have been intrigued by the dollhouse set in The Ladies Man. Both films lay bare the artifice and reveal the construction itself.
This connects to what you were saying about Godard’s pedagogical side, but also to Jerry Lewis’ Brechtian side. With Godard it’s more obvious, but there’s a Brechtian tendency in some of Lewis’s films as well—breaking the fourth wall, revealing the mechanics and artifice of cinema.
CF: Yes, that’s interesting—Brechtian, because with Lewis it’s also about acting and performance. Although I wonder if that might be a place where the two differ. I’m not sure. With Lewis—although, as Serge Daney wrote, everything is masks and there’s no ultimate reality of the person—each persona confronts the others. It becomes difficult to say which is the “true” one. In The Family Jewels, which is the true Jerry Lewis? We can’t really decide. Even in The Nutty Professor, the question of which identity is true gets reversed at the end.
And yet I think with Lewis there’s still a sense that the films are about himself. They feel like attempts to understand himself, to say something about his own life and his place in the world, and the psychological struggles between the different parts of himself.
EM: Right. In The Total Filmmaker, there’s a section where he talks about the director being in conflict with the writer within himself. That kind of internal conflict. And it’s interesting to connect that with psychology, and to the way he projects that outward through the multiplication of personas and characters.
CF: Yes. Though I’m not entirely sure how that fits with Brecht. My understanding of Brecht is that the actor “quotes” the character. The actor’s job isn’t to become the character and create the illusion of reality, but to quote it.
EM: To present the character.
CF: Exactly. Does Lewis do that? Perhaps.
ES: I think he does in places—for example, in The Errand Boy, when he shows how dubbing is done. And he shows that a screen persona is kind of a construction, right? Someone else might be doing the voice or singing. He exposes the mechanics of it.
EM: Yes, and in a very elemental way. One of Brecht’s ideas is that there’s no disappearing inside a character—you’re always bringing yourself. Every time we see Jerry Lewis on screen, we know it’s Jerry Lewis. We don’t fundamentally believe in the character, in the illusion of it; we believe in Jerry Lewis.
CF: Absolutely.
EM: And one thing this series does is allow us to take Jerry Lewis more seriously—and Godard less seriously. It highlights the playful side of Godard. There’s a quote where Godard says the production of Pierrot le Fou was like making a Mack Sennett film. On some level, it’s about the hypnosis of being on a set, being carried away by it. The set almost undermines the plan, and they lean into that. That side of Godard—pure antics—isn’t emphasized very often.
CF: Yeah, that’s really important. And when Godard casts himself as an actor, like in Anne-Marie Miéville’s After the Reconciliation or in Soigne ta droite, it allows him to show that more playful, ludic side. Like when he jumps through the car window in Soigne ta droite…
ES: Soigne ta droite has so many direct references to Jerry Lewis. It’s one of his most underrated films, I think. And maybe beginning around Prénom Carmen, Godard develops a kind of jester persona—almost a clown.
CF: Yes, like the crazy uncle in The Family Jewels. There’s definitely a Lewis element in those Godard characters. And you’re right to emphasize this idea of play. Even in the earlier films, where Godard doesn’t appear, or only appears in small bit roles.
ES: And I think that sense of play is also tied to experimentation more broadly; experimenting with the medium, with the limits and possibilities of cinema.
CF: Definitely.
ES: Especially with early Godard, there’s always that sense of breaking the rules. It’s almost like: “You can’t do that in cinema? Then I’m going to do it.”
CF: Yes, exactly. Lewis, of course, had gone through a long apprenticeship learning how films were made. It’s not like Orson Welles, who said that Gregg Toland taught him how to make a film in about two hours. They walked around the set, Toland showed him what things did, and Welles said, “Okay, now I know how to direct.”
Jerry Lewis wouldn’t have accepted that approach. For him, it meant studying, learning, talking to people, really understanding what everyone was doing. It was a very different path to reaching the point where you could play—where you could treat filmmaking like a train set.
EM: He was a very serious technician. You have to understand the rules in order to break them. Like his mentor Frank Tashlin. Godard and Tashlin actually corresponded at one point, and Tashlin wrote in a letter that cinema is a deadly serious art and cannot be taken lightly. Jerry Lewis’s fascination with cinema also came from its material aspects. He wanted to know what all the crew members were doing on set. He was fascinated by celluloid itself.
ES: That’s something he shares with Godard, too. They were both deeply interested in the mechanics and materiality of cinema—understanding how the camera works, what different lenses do, really learning every aspect of filmmaking.
CF: Right. Although my understanding is that Godard had relatively little practical filmmaking experience before Breathless. He worked on a few films and made some short films, but not much more than that. Is that correct?
ES: I think that’s true. He gained more experience later. Lewis, on the other hand, had that long apprenticeship beforehand.
CF: Yes. And when Godard was making Breathless, I think he later said something like: “I thought I knew what I was doing because I’d watched all these films, but actually I didn’t.” And because he didn’t know, he ended up discovering things—like making jump cuts to shorten shots.
ES: I sometimes feel he’s a little disingenuous when he says that, but still it’s true he had only made a few shorts.
CF: It’s interesting to think about Tashlin here. Lewis discovered Tashlin before Godard did, before Lewis even became a director himself. And of course Godard was fascinated by Tashlin. For Godard, Tashlin was probably as important as Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, or Douglas Sirk. What Godard responded to in Tashlin was something very American. Tashlin revealed something true about America—something that was hidden or not really addressed in other films. That way of thinking probably prepared Godard to receive Lewis in a similar way.
When Lewis began directing his own films, Godard saw them as revealing something about America. In Lewis’s films you can see what America is like, almost as if it’s written on a blackboard. Godard’s relationship to America was never simple admiration. Even when he was writing for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, it wasn’t just “America is great.” It was more the attitude of a somewhat left-wing French intellectual—someone fascinated by America but also critical of it. Tashlin reinforced that view, because his films show America as a very absurd place.
EM: Right.
CF: And I think that stayed with Godard in his attitude toward Lewis, even to the very end. I was thinking about this recently: in The Image Book you can see a shot from The Nutty Professor—the transformation scene with the paint on the floor. On the soundtrack, a text is being read that says something like, “The fate of France is to follow America.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it’s paired with the Lewis image. And that shot also appears in Godard’s earlier short film The Old Place—or actually The Origins of the 21st Century, where the same image appears with a different text being spoken.
ES: Is it also in Histoire(s) du cinéma?
CF: I thought it might be, too, but I couldn’t find it. It’s definitely in The Origins of the 21st Century, though the spoken text there relates to German Romanticism. I’m not entirely sure how the connection works.
ES: What’s fascinating about those later essay films is how Godard keeps recycling the same images and words, but constantly reshuffling them—re-contextualizing everything.
CF: Yes. And I think he still saw Lewis as fundamentally an American filmmaker—as someone who perhaps wasn’t fully conscious of how his films were revealing something about America. Godard may have felt that Lewis wasn’t aware of what his films were really saying about the country. It’s a bit like the Jekyll-and-Hyde idea: Hyde can do something that Jekyll doesn’t know about.
ES: Maybe that also reflects Godard’s view of America itself—that it has a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality. A side he loved and a side that seemed monstrous.
CF: Yes, exactly.
ES: And when you think about some of Godard’s films from the 1960s, with their commentary on American consumerism and the influx of American commodities into Europe…even the use of color sometimes evokes Lewis’s films from that period, and certainly Tashlin’s as well.
That raises another question about color, composition, and framing. In that famous Dick Cavett interview, Godard calls Lewis a painter. He talks about Lewis’s use of space, color, framing, and composition. Maybe you could say something about that in relation to both filmmakers.
CF: Yes, color is definitely central. When Godard called Lewis a painter on Cavett, I suspect he had Lewis’s use of color in mind, especially. That may well have been what he meant.
ES: I think when he says that—yes, he’s talking about color, but also about composition and framing.
CF: Yes, the frame. Because he says to Cavett that Lewis is a great framer, that comedians have to be good at framing. They have to know where the frame is. That’s actually a fascinating insight. You can see how important the sides of the frame are in Jerry Lewis’s films. So many things happen where, just by tracking the camera five inches, the joke happens. What was off-screen becomes on-screen and suddenly changes everything. And that's really true, and that's actually a fascinating insight, how important the sides of the frame are. That may be why Lewis never worked in CinemaScope, now that I think of it. His mentor Frank Tashlin did, of course, but Tashlin doesn’t use framing in the same precise way. His compositions are bigger, more expansive. Lewis is very exact about where the frame line is. And then the color—of course. In The Nutty Professor, there’s that shot Godard uses in The Image Book, where it looks like paint is being mixed on the floor of the laboratory.
ES: I’m not sure my memory serves me correctly, but I think in your book you mention that the different colors of paint in that scene correspond to different aspects of the character’s psyche.
CF: Maybe I did say something like that. I can’t quite remember. But it does feel that way. It’s like something is being born—liquids being mixed together. It’s messy, almost about birth. And then think of The Ladies Man or Three on a Couch—how strong the colors are in those films. Godard certainly responded to that. He uses color in similar ways in the 1960s. There’s something very beautiful about the colors in Godard’s films from that period—just as Lewis’s films are visually beautiful.
ES: Yes. Godard’s colors from that period have a kind of Pop Art sensibility. He’s referencing Fauvism and other movements as well, but there’s also this comic-book quality. It makes me wonder where Lewis is drawing from in terms of his color world.
CF: I imagine some of that sense came from Tashlin, but also from earlier filmmakers like Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen. By the time An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain were made, Lewis was already a big star, but I’m sure he saw those films and was impressed by them. When I interviewed him, I think he mentioned An American in Paris. So Minnelli’s films may well have influenced him.
ES: Technicolor—the whole Technicolor aesthetic.
CF: Exactly. He loved that glamorous movie-world image—the artificial but beautiful look of it. It was probably connected to his childhood, too. Many cinephiles feel that way: we respond to the richness of color in this unreal cinematic world. With Godard it’s a little different. We don’t usually think of him as sentimental about cinema or color, but there is still a kind of love there.
EM: Maybe not sentimental, but emotional.
ES: Right—it might even be nostalgic, tied to the comic books he read as a child. Jean-Luc Godard was also exposed to modern painting from an early age and even painted when he was young. The color palettes in his early work closely resemble those that appear later in his films.
The use of color in Three on a Couch is particularly striking. During the Janet Leigh character’s psychoanalytic sessions, her office is nearly blank, yet vividly colored lights, with no diegetic source, are projected onto the walls.
CF: Yes—it’s almost like Mario Bava.
ES: There’s almost something expressionistic about it.
EM: And Three on a Couch is interesting because it’s almost at odds with itself. Lewis is trying to pivot toward a more adult persona, but he can’t quite help himself—there are still moments of excess and cross-dressing that undermine that attempt.
CF: Yes, that’s true. To me that film and also The Big Mouth and to some extent Which Way to the Front? are about Lewis’s place in the world: in culture, in the film industry, in society. In a way, all of Lewis’s work is partly about that. Even the telethon, I think of it as part of his authorial body of work. If you watch the clips on YouTube, you can see how he’s constructing something on screen.
EM: And that connects to his filmmaking method. He was always performing for a live audience—the public was invited onto his sets.
CF: Yeah, that’s definitely true. Three on a Couch is very much a film where he’s questioning: where am I? How do I belong in this world that’s changing around me? At the same time, he himself is physically changing and aging. Those films from the late ’60s seem very much about that—an acknowledgment of aging, together with an understanding of the fragility of one’s social place. That fragility was always there with Lewis, but now it appears in a different way.
And maybe some of that comes into the Godard persona as well—when Godard presents himself as the crazy uncle, or as the film director in Soigne ta droite. He’s a film director there, right?
ES: Yeah, yeah—he has something like one day to complete a film.
CF: Right, he’s carrying reels of film.
ES: Of course there are so many direct references to Lewis in that film. But then there are the airplanes. Lewis seems to have been fascinated by airplanes—there are at least two or three famous plane sequences in his films.
CF: Right. I haven’t seen that film in such a long time, and now I want to watch it again since it’s in your program. It’s always been one of those Godard films that people don’t seem to love very much, and maybe I was unfair to it because of that. But I want to see it again. I remember the reel of film, and the car… and the plane scene is so strange.
ES: Yeah. Some of those scenes inside the plane really remind me of moments from The Family Jewels.
CF: Yes, exactly. I was thinking the same thing. In The Family Jewels, they’re on a plane, and at one point Lewis opens a door—like it’s going to lead to a service area or maybe a restroom—and inside there’s his son’s band playing in a tiny cabin. Lewis looks at the camera and then closes the door. That reminds me of Godard, too, because Godard will suddenly introduce rock music—there’s a band, or a rehearsal happening.
ES: Yes, in Soigne ta droite, we see the French band Les Rita Mitsouko. You see them in the process of recording a song, a little in the spirit of Godard’s film with the Rolling Stones—One Plus One.
CF: And I think both Lewis and Godard treat that material at a kind of distance. They don’t present themselves as fully part of that world; they’re showing it, or documenting it a little bit. I think that’s how Lewis treats rock music as well.
ES: Godard was very interested in the creative process, in collaboration, how things are made. And Lewis seems interested in that as well.
CF: Yes, although Lewis often debunks or dismantles it. Like in The Patsy, in the recording studio scene where the producer can’t hear anything.
ES: Right. And both directors play with sound in really inventive ways. They often deconstruct the relationship between sound and image—playing with diegetic versus non-diegetic sound. Godard will have scenes where you hear music and wonder where it’s coming from, and then later you see the entire orchestra.
EM: Like in Every Man for Himself.
ES: Exactly. It’s very much the kind of gag Jerry Lewis might have done.
CF: Yes. That reminds me of another moment in The Errand Boy. Lewis falls into a water tank in the studio commissary. Then a frogman in a tuxedo descends into the tank. They can’t speak underwater, so they communicate by writing messages on blackboards and holding them up to the camera. The scene becomes a kind of shot–reverse shot with these written messages. It’s incredible, and it feels very Godardian—the image itself takes over and becomes what we’re focused on.
ES: One thing Lewis and Godard both talk about is the early days of cinema—before the screenplay dominated everything. Godard often said that in the time of Mack Sennett, filmmakers would just get on set and play, improvising ideas. Godard always had a kind of distrust of language, at least of language as a transparent medium.
But Lewis also emphasizes the importance of the visual over the verbal in comedy. And the way he uses language is fascinating. It sometimes feels like another kind of mistrust and subversion.
CF: Yes, I think that’s fair. I wrote a chapter about language in my book, though it probably only scratches the surface. Lewis often uses language in ways that make it meaningless—or he says things that ridicule the very possibility of communication. If language can mean anything, then it doesn’t mean much at all. It’s almost a savage attack on language, and you see it throughout his work. Even during the telethon he would suddenly break into these linguistic routines.
ES: Even in his talk-show appearances, he constantly disrupts his own discourse. If he starts developing an idea that seems too serious or coherent, suddenly another side of him appears and derails it.
CF: Yes, exactly. And Godard is always talking about language too. In the later essay films, images reappear in different contexts, with different texts attached to them. Often there’s a direct critique of language…how it can deceive, or how changing just a few letters can change the meaning of a situation. That kind of play is everywhere in Godard.
ES: Yes—his fascination with puns and wordplay. Every word contains other possible words. It undercuts the idea of language as something linear and transparent.
EM: Right.
ES: Changing the subject a bit… another connection is their fascination with war, especially World War II and the Holocaust.
CF: Yes. When Scott Hamrah and I did a talk for Theater of the Matters about The Big Mouth, we talked about the Vietnam War. The Big Mouth is really a Vietnam War film.
EM: Which is fascinating—and that conversation actually helped inspire this program.
CF: And also Which Way to the Front?—which to me might be the most underrated Lewis film. There’s a great scene in Which Way to the Front? where Lewis is trying to learn German from a record. Of course, it’s an LP, which didn’t even exist in 1943, when the film is set. The scene becomes a shot–reverse shot between the teacher on the record and Lewis’s incompetent student. But the incompetence is deliberate—it’s his way of expressing contempt for the Nazis. There’s also a scene where a guard asks for a password. Lewis’s character simply makes fun of the whole idea of passwords and easily tricks the guard. I remember an interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin where he said Godard loved Lewis and watched Which Way to the Front? ten times.
ES: I remember reading that somewhere too.
CF: Yes—it’s hilarious to imagine. But to return to war: The Day the Clown Cried was an incredibly serious project for Lewis. It asks questions about responsibility, what it means to exist in a world that is completely evil. Lewis was very serious about these questions. The Day the Clown Cried is a profoundly serious project—a film about responsibility. Not just responsibility, but also the question of what place a person has, what it means to exist in a world that is completely evil. Lewis took that very seriously. And he didn’t often use the word evil in his writing or speaking. Probably Jean-Luc Godard didn’t use it much either—I’m not sure. But both of them confront evil, or at least something absolutely unacceptable, in their later films. You see that in Godard’s later work and also in Lewis’s early-1970s films. I think that confrontation is very important.
ES: One of our dream double bills—something we can’t actually do—would be The Day the Clown Cried and Histoire(s) du cinéma back-to-back.
CF: Well—someday.
EM: One other thing about this program: it also happens to be Jerry Lewis’s birthday. His 100th birthday.
ES: And we didn’t even realize that at first. I don’t think Ed knew either.
EM: No, it wasn’t planned.
Also, since Godard’s passing, there hasn’t really been a program dedicated to him in New York. For us, this series is partly just a pretext to present these films, but hopefully in a way that opens up new pathways into them. Both filmmakers are burdened with reputations that can be hard to see past. That was especially true for Jerry Lewis. So the idea was to find a way to pierce through those reputations and allow people to see the films again with fresh eyes.
ES: Yes—and to present them without any kind of smirk or condescension. I hope we’re past that point, where Lewis has to be treated ironically. The goal is simply to present them as filmmakers.
CF: I think we’re on the verge of getting beyond that, and it’s partly thanks to work like what you’re doing. I heard about the response to The Big Mouth screening, and it seems like people really are starting to move past those old attitudes. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m glad it’s happening.
One other thing that might come up when people watch these films is the question of eroticism in both Lewis and Godard. It can be a little troubling or disturbing in some ways, but it’s definitely present. In almost any of their films, if you look closely at how women are filmed, you’ll notice that the camera is very attentive to their bodies. That’s something worth discussing, but it probably has to come from watching the films themselves and comparing them. I haven’t really thought about it systematically, but I suspect it will come up when people see these films together.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
ES: With Lewis, especially in the earlier films, there’s a fear of sexuality—even a fear of women. In The Ladies Man, there’s that surreal pursuit/dance sequence with Miss Cartilage in the all-white room. In that scene, Miss Cartilage appears upside down at first, like a bat. It’s funny yet uncanny—almost like something out of Fellini. After fleeing the forbidden room and shutting the door behind him, Lewis, as Herbert, remarks, “Boy, what imagination can do for you.” Right afterwards, he discovers the black handkerchief Miss Cartilage had given him still in his back pocket—a trace of the fantasy in the real world.
CF: Yes. I think both Lewis and Godard are, in some way, disturbed by women. They’re trying to figure out how to deal with them. Sometimes they do it more successfully than at other times.
EM: And when Godard started working with Anne-Marie Miéville, the films become about the tension between the two of them. That tension becomes the film. And as you said earlier, Lewis’s films are often about himself—very personal, almost unfiltered thoughts. You could say a film like Numéro Deux is misogynistic, but it’s also radical to put those thoughts directly onto the screen and work through them in the process of making the film.
ES: Yes. With Godard, it feels like he’s aware of those aspects of himself: misogyny, other contradictions…and he’s trying to process them through the films.
CF: The Lewis film that comes closest to doing that might be Three on a Couch. I don’t want to be unfair to him, but that film gives the Janet Leigh character real space to make her case. Her relationship to language is completely different from Lewis’s—she’s speaking the language of psychoanalysis, and the film doesn’t simply ridicule it. You could say something similar about The Nutty Professor, where Stella Stevens’s character is allowed to be more than just an object.
ES: One last thought about the series. Part of the idea is simply to see these films back-to-back. We might already have ideas about connections between the double bills, but the real discovery happens when you watch them together and see what new connections emerge.
CF: Yes, it’s like what Godard did in Montreal, where he would show his own films alongside others, like films by Vincente Minnelli, and unexpected connections would appear.
ES: Exactly. His ideas about montage work that way too. It’s not always prescriptive—it’s about experimentation. What happens if we put these two things together? Let’s see what emerges.
EM: And you can see that even within a single shot in a Lewis film. He pushes a gag to the point where it almost falls apart. You can watch him thinking about how to get out of the situation he’s created. So there’s this sense of going out on a limb, taking a leap into the unknown.
ES: Which takes a lot of courage.
EM: Absolutely.
ES: Because you don’t know if it’s going to work or if you’re going to end up in the void.
CF: Yes. The Patsy has many scenes like that. And I imagine The Day the Clown Cried must have felt that way for Lewis too, asking himself, “Can I really do this?”
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