“Men are more moral than they think, and much more immoral than they can imagine.”

Sigmund Freud

“Modernity possesses antiquity like a nightmare that creeps over it.”

Walter Benjamin

“I’ve seen the novel of today at the cinema…it’s called Le Mepris, the novelist is someone named Godard.”

Louis Aragon

In the 1960’s Jean-Luc Godard was shifting genres with what seemed like effortless bravado often mimicking the work of different directors. By 1964 it was clear that he had the various film genres – established primarily in Hollywood over the previous half century – in his pocket and he made extensive use of them in a quick succession of masterworks throughout the 1960’s that has no equal in film history. Godard’s films from the 1960’s comprise 25 features and 8 shorts. While other directors covered a lot of ground in terms of genres – one need only think of Howard Hawks’ filmography – they never did so in such an intensely concentrated and productive period using the same group of actors and technicians to help them realize that body of work.

Godard’s characters in his films from the 1960’s, including Le Mepris (Contempt, 1964) often find that they are in “the wrong film.” This is a typical Godardian strategy of displacement – often accomplished with tongue planted firmly in cheek. One thinks of Lemmy Caution in Alphaville, who is the proverbial tough guy detective who comes from Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles and the Noir school of American cinema but finds himself caught in a science fiction film set in contemporary Paris; or Emily Brontë who belongs in a BBC biopic but ends up (to her horror) in the wasteland of Weekend; or the pimps and gangsters in Vivre sa Vie, who come from the hardscrabble Hollywood gangster films of Raoul Walsh and Melvin LeRoy but find themselves in a film modeled on Carl Dryer’s slow, sensitive, metaphysical cinema – even they sense that they are in the wrong film, all dressed up and with nowhere to go.

Le Mepris is a film that mimics Michelangelo Antonioni’s aesthetic as Godard astutely copies Antonioni’s oblique modernist framing, mysteriously empty spaces, slow italicized camera pans, and ambiguous shifts in space – with humans never quite sure where they belonged or how they should act. In Antonioni’s work the famous “alienation” at hand was always an aftereffect – the main attraction was always the interaction of his beautiful main characters and the strange social world that mankind had created, seemingly ad-hoc – a social space that was, to a degree, efficient, logical, and clean – what French sociologist Marc Augé called a “non-place” in his “anthropological” study of contemporary (1994) urban life.¹ These “non-places” are often areas of high transit: airports, hospitals, subway stations, parking structures, business parks, and perhaps the most conspicuous of “non-places,” the corporate office. What Antonioni noticed was that these “non-places” were strangely ill suited to emotions, spontaneity, sexuality, and human quirks. These spaces required a flattening out of our nature producing a neutered emotional blankness seen to full effect in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey. While Antonioni was not the first or the only person to notice these sorts of spaces – one need only think, aside from Kubrick’s film, of Orson Welles’s The Trial, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, or Jacques Tati’s Playtime – he was the person who made such spaces a central characteristic in a consistent body of work.

While human factors were never suppressed or controlled by the state in Antonioni’s films – as we see in the work of George Orwell (1984) or Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)- they were nevertheless managed and directed, but how? Was it, as the Frankfurt School and Michele Foucault suggested, controlled by a cabal of conformist cultural producers, a plutocracy, and the state apparatus? Or was there a more complex, organic relationship at work? Were these emotions and instinctual appetites anachronistic or still in some way relevant, aside from their reproductive function? How does one navigate this new “non-place?” These were the central question at the heart of every Antonioni film and Godard here takes up these questions.

But while Antonioni’s films adhered to a form of neo-classical modernism Godard’s work didn’t follow those rules. Antonioni’s films were austere, detached, critical, ironic, and moralizing, and Godard managed to touch on all of these – sometimes lightly (A Married Woman) and sometimes bluntly (Weekend) – but he also brought with him his own ‘excess baggage.’ His work was full of unruly paradoxes and clashing contradictions that were carefully layered and juxtaposed. Le Mepris is emotionally extravagant but with a cool, sardonic edge; there is an uneasy tension between symbols and documentary realism, between romantic sincerity and hardheaded irony, between classical quotations and topical jokes; between heartfelt displays and mocking attacks. While Le Mepris evoked Antonioni – as Une Femme Est Une Femme evoked Vincente Minelli – Godard here was on his own.

Le Mepris conjures the Mediterranean wide-screen landscapes of L’Avventura (1960) but now in Technicolor. In this phase of his work Godard was contrasting straight from the can primary colors to natural hues. When one thinks of the color of his 60’s work what comes to mind are the extraordinary sequences that take place in the forest and the seaside in Pierrot le Fou, and are so beautifully contrasted to the city shots painted (by the production designer Pierre Guffroy) in red, yellow and blue; or the brown and gray landscape of suburban Paris, seen outside a train window, in La Chinoise, contrasted to the regular use of red throughout the film (presumably signifying Communism and/or Mao’s Little Red Book); or the beautiful trees in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, contrasted to the harsh primaries of consumer products and advertising that constantly surround the main characters. But in all of Godard’s color work flesh tones always play off primaries, most prominently here a bright yellow towel against Brigitte Bardot’s flesh in Le Mepris – a motif that returns twenty years later in Prenom Carmen.

Interestingly the following year from Le Mepris Antonioni would make Red Desert (1965) that would use color in a similar way, contrasting natural hues with man made primaries, but Antonioni’s palette was more traditional. For example the fruit cart painted in shades gray and beige in Red Desert might be a painting by Morandi, one of Antonioni’s favorite painters, but an erstwhile traditionalist, and anti-modernist within the schools of post-war art. Meanwhile Godard’s sensibility was more Pop using supermarket colors in a more seemingly random, ironic, offhand way and well within the modernist tradition of sixties art. For example, we can compare Godard’s work of the same period with James Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964-65), a satire of American consumer society and its military industrial complex (the F-111 was the most sophisticated fighter jet of the time) painted in bright day-glow primaries associated then with car dealerships, supermarkets and advertising. This confluence of Godard’s work with Pop art would reach an apotheosis with Made In USA, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and Weekend, all from 1967.

Brigitte Bardot plays Camille Javal, the disaffected Antonioni heroine of L’Avventura. They are linked by a crucial scene, that Godard quotes later in the film, where Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s film puts on a wig in front of her best friend, that she suddenly comes to resemble – a friend who will soon disappear, suggesting some form of metaphysical transference has taken place. Camille’s husband Paul (Michele Piccoli) wears a hat that links him to the American school of cinema, via Dean Martin’s role in Some Came Running (1958), name checked by Paul himself. Already their cinematic personas – conferred by their headdress – hint at irreconcilable differences. This is a recurring motif in Godard’s work from his first feature A Bout de Souffle, where, as Godard explained himself, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character was based on the the Crime/Noir school of American Cinema including The Harder The Fall (seen in poster form) and Jean Seberg’s character came from a previous film with Otto Preminger, Bonjour Tristesse.²

The plot of the Disprezzo/Le Mepris centers around the disintegration of a relationship, of Paul and Camille, a young recently married couple, who have not been together long. Camille is a former secretary/typist and Paul is a professional writer and aspiring playwright. Paul has been summoned to Cinecitta, the fabled film studio in Rome, to help doctor a script for a production already under way – an adaptation of The Odyssey, the 7th century BC Greek poem – being helmed by Fritz Lang playing himself and Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) an American producer. When a script doctor is called for during a production it usually means that there is trouble on the set, as is the case here. Paul and Camille have recently purchased an expensive apartment they need to pay for so the French couple head to Rome.

Godard starts his film with an extended take of Bardot nude on a bed with Paul as she asks him questions about her body – her own assessment allow us to both luxuriate on Bardot’s beauty, and question the questioning. This scene was forced on Godard by the film’s powerful producer Carlo Ponti, who specified in the contract at least one nude scene with Bardot, then a worldwide sex symbol of such outsize proportions that she was a phenomenon, scrutinized by pundits, critics, philosophers, and the Catholic church – everyone had to have an opinion on B.B. as she was then universally known. Instead of fighting Ponti Godard wisely turned that clause in the contract to his advantage.³ Simone de Beauvoir helpfully explains why B.B. generated so much adoration, imitation, criticism, and anger: “…this hostility exists because she (Bardot) does as she pleases, and that is what is disturbing. The character Bardot created challenges certain taboos accepted by the preceding age, particularly those which denied woman sexual autonomy.”⁴ In this prologue Bardot puts an emphasis on that autonomy, not only with her words but, more importantly, her tone, which is sly, ironic, self-possessed. It is she who puts forward the questions, and it is the man who must answer.

Because of the body language and casual banter the scene suggest a post-coital discussion. Godard carefully placed Piccoli and Bardot naked in a bed with the male sex carefully concealed and the female buttocks exposed. The bedroom is lit like a set, and Godard uses primary colored gels on certain shots so we understand we are not seeing the famous B.B. but a mediated image. Bardot is also posed reclining like the nudes of Manet, but she proceeds to give us a discourse on beauty that uses her own body not only as an example but as a sign of beauty, or as a hieroglyph – as if Olympia were speaking and finally assessing her own beauty and making a critique as she displays herself and asks questions. While she details her own body by naming parts (knees, thighs, etc.) that the gliding camera luxuriates over, the parts never coalesce into a whole. Godard suggests that Camille – her soul or persona – cannot be defined, in any definitive sense, by either Paul’s literal minded devotion (part by part) or Godard’s camera. Camille/B.B. does not escape the scrutiny – in point-of-fact Camille, literally, asks for it, but Paul/Godard cannot define who this person is despite their scrutiny. The crucial difference is that Godard is aware of this and italicizes it by changing the tints on his filters, and using strong key-lights to emphasize the cinematic lighting. In effect the bed becomes a stage (literally and figuratively) from which Camille/B.B.’s self cannot be defined, contained or explained. What we do know is that she plays a far larger role than she did in The Odyssey as a patient housewife and queen of Ithica, where her long suffering wait happens off-stage while Odysseus roams the world. In Godard’s version she gets equal time and a voice to express her grievances but it isn’t enough – her husband and her suitors are not up to snuff and so she moves on before a fateful meeting in a gasoline station brings her “odyssey” to a dramatic end. Perhaps Camille Paglia, the author of Sexual Personae, summed up Bardot’s presence here best: “…the camera caresses Bardot’s glossy curves as if she were an Arcadian landscape. Fusing Penelope with Circe and Calypso, she ultimately embodies immortal Aphrodite, the great goddess of love herself.”⁵

The film-within-the film structure of Le Mepris would seem to lend itself easily to postmodern intertextuality as Alberto Moravia’s Disprezzo was a book about the making of a film but Godard’s work is a film about a film. This aspect is made bluntly obvious during the opening credits when we see Raoul Coutard (the cinematographer of Le Mepris) move his heavy Panavision camera, laid down on tracks, in the back-lot of Cinecitta in one single take. After moving for the full length of the track the enormous camera – that is later visually compared to a Cyclops  – is moved by crank to pivot toward the viewer, as we come facet to face with the Panavision lens. But for the rest of the film Godard generally avoids the postmodern self-referentiality that we might expect from this introduction. While he does display an ironic skepticism (even a contempt) toward the “grand narratives” of modernism he does not attack the presumed certainty or stability of meaning in classical or canonical texts – The Odyssey itself being an obvious possible target here; and most importantly he avoids the moral and aesthetic relativism that were the hallmarks of postmodernism. In effect Godard, with his intertextual play, seems to anticipate the ideology of postmodernism that would come to reign in the world of fine art and film studies in the seventies, but he also goes beyond it to something entirely new and unanticipated.

Alberto Moravia wrote Disprezzo in 1954, and it was translated into English and French the following year becoming the basis for Le Mepris. But while Moravia stuck to traditional narrative conventions, filtered through Freudian symbolism popular with writers of the period, Godard took Moravia’s book in a very different direction. The novel is told sequentially in the first person, in one extended flashback, so we see all of the action through the eyes of Molteni (as Paul is called in Disprezzo) and through his consciousness as he tries to make sense of the decisions he has made, but with the foreknowledge that these choices ended with the death of his wife. From the beginning of the novel he is trying to resolve a basic question: is he guilty of his wife’s death? Molteni reflects constantly on his actions, but at times he ignores certain very obvious signals, and at others he passes a harsh judgment on himself – in either case he is at the center, often bending over backwards to justify an action or a situation. In effect, Molteni is the classic unreliable narrator.

In Disprezzo Moravia leaves no doubt that Molteni is self-deluded, but also that his integrity, that often manifests itself as self-doubt, is beyond reproach – it is also clear that in some sense Molteni is the alter-ego of Moravia, who worked as a screenwriter for twenty years, from The Sin of Rogelia Sanchez (1940) to A Roman Balcony (1960). Moravia, like Molteni was a gun-for-hire working on scripts not of his own choosing. Molteni also analyzes his own actions with a thorough knowledge of subconscious motivations and Freudian motifs – something that was an integral part of Moravia’s thinking process. For example, Moravia’s novels, such as The Empty Canvas (1960), are virtually Freudian character studies. For Molteni this knowledge of subconscious motivation is part of his training as a serious writer, which is something he aspires to do, not taking films very seriously. Moravia, like other screenwriters of the period, had similar doubts about films, seeing them as populist entertainment, and while they may, on occasion, aspire to serious art, as in the films of Dryer, Eisenstein, or Rossellini, more often that not they did not have the depth, the complexity or the gravitas that he accorded to novels, plays and poetry.⁶

In Le Mepris Paul is hopelessly entangled between Camille’s honest emotional responses to the way he is handling his current writing job, and Jeremy Prokosch’s thuggish American producer who is using him as a wedge to break Lang’s hold on the production. Prokosch casually beats his female assistant Francesca (Georgia Moll) as a form of sexual play but he also stands in for the new face of cinema as a blunt fist that thinks in terms of entertainment, power, and profit. Francesca, the gofer/secretary/translator and occasional plaything is significantly the person who literally makes it possible for everyone to understand one another – a typical Godardian joke where the lowest person on the power hierarchy is the one that makes everything possible. Godard was always attentive to those without power, to the losers in the shell game of History – not only obvious central characters such as Michel Poiccard in À Bout de Souffle or Nana in Vivre sa Vie, but minor characters come to mind: Henri Dickson, the old man on his last legs who remembers a time before computers in Alphaville, Daniele Girard, the English teacher in Band of Outsiders, the kind and patient waiter at the end of Prenom Carmen, Eglantine, the actress learning to say her lines in Eloge de L’amour, and perhaps most movingly, the hairdressers in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, who look directly into the camera while talking about their lives, their hopes, and their limited ambitions in the Paris of the 1960’s.

Francesca is one of those minor but important roles not only in terms of narrative but in the overall philosophy of the film – those characters alert us to the fact that there is no longer a “story,” but rather, that there are now only “stories” in the plural sense. Some of these stories are visible and others are not, some intersect and others do not, some crash into each other and some merely intersect (perhaps interplay) and move on. While Godard did not invent this thematic motif he took it further than anyone else by having these walk-on characters, however briefly, take center stage, at times even addressing the camera directly, thereby italicizing the moment. Before Godard such characters existed but only in the periphery of cinema. Clearly Godard was paying attention to the hapless classical music fans in Unfaithfully Yours, and to the smart, beautiful bookseller in The Big Sleep, as well as many others who populate the narratives produced by the dream factory. Godard asked himself two simple questions: Who are these people? What would happen if they looked into the camera and tried to answer that question?

After the producer beats Francesca as both a form of discipline and as a sexual stimulant, Paul comes in to comfort, and flirt with her. Camille sees this and confronts Paul and they have a fight. Godard then shifts aggressively to jump cuts that interrupt the flow of the narrative as if the fight between the two had started to affect the form of the film itself, crumbling to pieces – suddenly shots seem to be out of sequence and time itself is out of joint. Having the form of the film react to its content is a literary strategy, practiced most memorably by James Joyce in Ulysses, where a locale’s or character’s introduction, or sudden emotional epiphany, transforms the form of the novel. Two examples: When the main character in Ulysses visits a newspaper office the form of the novel shifts to short, pared down, newspaper style reports; and when the novel’s playboy Blazes Boylan makes an appearance the novel shifts to elaborately worded satire – a parody of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Godard adapts that literary technique to the cinema as we see later when in their new apartment Camille has put on a black haired wig – that makes her resemble Anna Karina – and Paul dislikes it leading to another fight. As they take a cab into the city one of the jump cuts leaves Camille, still wearing her wig, in close-up but switches from day to night – a shot made all the more disturbing by the following matching cut to the city at night seen from a windshield, confirming the sudden shift. With Godard it was always push/pull as we go from jump cut to classical matching reaction shot – the ground was always unsteady and the shifts could come at any time.

It is worth remembering that while Godard did not invent the jump cut – it had existed since the silent period in avant-garde works – he was the artist who brought it to bear on genre films and placed it in dialectical tension with traditional match cuts and a classical story arc. It is in the push/pull between the “tradition” and the “avant-garde” where we may locate Godard’s poetry, and his editing here, a virtual master-class on the subject, is the key. The jump cuts in Le Mepris are not an only an interruption in continuity but the shattering of continuity under the stresses of Modernism – this is also one of the principal themes of Antonioni – in their work it is as if we were seeing the classical (cinematic) mold break apart before our eyes, never to be put together again, except as pastiche.

In Moravia’s book Molteni and the producer, Prokosch, who is named Battista – are both Italian so there is no need for a translator. More to the point Moravia stresses their Italian connection as a bonding agent. This is how they speak to each other in Moravia’s version: “Battista reflected for a moment and then went on. “You see Molteni I don’t know him (Lang) at all well either, but I know more or less what he thinks and what he wants. In the first place, he’s a German, isn’t he? Whereas you and I are Italians. Two worlds, two conceptions of life, two different sensibilities.” I said nothing.”⁷ Molteni/Paul always hedges his bets to cozy up to the producer and more often than not this means that he is silent – but as Moravia shows (again in Freudian terms) this is a silence that speaks eloquently about Molteni’s motivations, since he understands that for Prokosch silence equals acquiescence.

Prokosch wants an epic adventure story with pretty girls and lots of action and Lang wants to use the Odyssey to see if it is possible to return to that classical world and find a state of grace before the fall, before Capitalism, before Modernism, before the “non-place.” Is such an enterprise possible? Whatever the answer Godard emphasizes the American qualities of Prokosch, just as Moravia emphasized the fact that both men bonded as Italians. The part of Prokosch is played with gusto by Jack Palance who emphasizes his American accent, accentuating his syllables, and speaking bluntly, aggressively, at times sarcastically, as a counter to Piccoli’s quiet, uncertain Frenchman. As Palance plays him Prokosch seems to wear his vulgarity like a suit of armor, a protective skin that he relishes and takes pleasure in showing off. This is a major shift not only in tone but in the very meaning of the film, as Godard sets up not only a struggle of two men, but of two cultures.

Godard’s major move away from Moravia is that he shifts the point-of-view from Molteni/Paul to a more formally removed position. Let’s see how he does it in the extended bravura sequence inside their unfinished modernist apartment – a scene that is a centerpiece in both the book and the film. Godard’s script shifts slightly from Moravia’s text toward Fritz Lang’s Hollywood melodramas while his camera mimics Antonioni’s decentered modernist framing – in Godard’s version we see the couple separated by mod furniture that takes up a large part of the Panavision frame. Paul is caught literally and figuratively with his pants down in the wrong film. In their extended fight, as they go from room to room, Godard seems to not take sides – they both seem to make good points – but it is clear, as Godard stages it, that Paul is hedging his bets because he wants the job Prokosch is offering him and he wants to use his wife as bait – while Camille is morally disgusted that not only does Paul go along with this emotional blackmail but that he fails to even acknowledge it to her, or even to himself – hence her contempt.

In Moravia’s text from the same sequence we see it only from Molteni/Paul’s point of view but Moravia’s genius lies in the fact that we can read between the lines and understand Molteni’s motivation in a way that completely eludes him. This is how Moravia describes the end of the apartment scene: “I was struck by the air of fatigue, almost of exhaustion, that was visible in her face, now more disintegrated, more irresolute than ever. It was as though she had undergone a superhuman strain while she had been speaking to me and caressing and embracing me; and as though she were preparing to undergo another, even more painful, during the kiss. Nevertheless, I took her chin in my hand and was on the point of bringing my lips close to hers. At that moment the telephone rang. “It’s Battista,” she said, disengaging herself with obvious relief, and running into the next room. From the sofa I saw her, through the open door, take off the receiver and say: “Yes yes, he’s here. I’ll get him at once…” As I had foreseen he was expecting me the next day at his office. I said I would come, and then replaced the receiver. Only then did I become aware that Emilia had left the room while I was speaking. And I could not help thinking that she had gone away because she had succeeded in persuading me to agree to the appointment with Battista; there was now no further need either of her presence, or of her caresses.”⁸

Godard eliminates the unreliable narrator, shooting his film from the traditional “third-person” point-of-view, but with jump cuts to “first-person” in both image and sound. In these sudden bursts of  “first-person” narration Paul or Camille explain themselves in voice-over or they remember something and we see it. This is a major shift from Moravia who consistently stuck to the male voice/narrator whereas in Godard’s version Camille gets a voice, literally and figuratively. At other times Godard moves away from the story of Camille and Paul altogether, which in Disprezzo is relentlessly up-front throughout the narrative, focusing on minor characters, such as Francesca, that play no role in Moravia’s book, and at other times shifting towards an undefined, poetic recreation of The Odyssey itself – but an Odyssey in pieces that seems distant, abstract, and immutable. This shift from the “prose” of Moravia’s narrative to extended scenes of “poetry” that focus on flashbacks, landscapes, architecture, and statues, is crucial to the structure of Le Mepris.

One of the key elements that Godard uses in the transitions from “prose” to “poetry” is music. From his first feature Godard had used music differently. He didn’t only use it to cue emotional responses – as in traditional or classical films – but as a counterpoint to diegetic urban sounds. He used music as punctuation, as an ironic aside, as a heartfelt reminder. His soundtrack completely revolutionized how sound is put together in a film – after Godard all of the sounds, dialogue and music need to be seen as one larger “orchestral soundscape.” The composer Georges Delerue created arguably his greatest work for Le Mepris and Godard took full advantage.

Godard’s exquisite outdoor shots of the classical sculptures that recur throughout the film – and are never mentioned in Moravia’s book – mirror similar shots in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), but Godard paints his statues with garish primary colors as they were painted when they were first created. Neorealism generally, and Rossellini’s film from 1954 in particular, were crucial inspirations for the New-Wave movements across the globe that found their bearings with neorealism. Journey to Italy often digresses into episodic fragments that touch on the narrative but take on an emotional life of their own – in a sense the fragment replaced the narrative arc

Godard and the French New-Wave took that idea further – continuity editing, narrative logic, and linear time progression – the visual narrative style that was the backbone of the studio system – was replaced by a field orchestrated in the editing process which was seen as the fundamentally unique aspect of cinema, where time could be, in Deleuze’s terminology, stretched and pulled to create a new “time-image” that represented not only duration but memory and thought. In this new domain the filmmaker could use different genres within the same film playing them off in counterpoint. These radical works did not eliminate linear plots, continuity, and clear emotional cues, but rather, would at times set them aside in favor of episodic fragments, digressions, quotations, and hard shifts in narrative. This collage was then grounded in an impassioned realism that often mimicked the documentary, italicizing the present moment, regardless of the genre(s) being deployed – Godard famously said that he shot À Bout de Souffle in the style of a documentary about a gangster film.⁹ Sometimes these various fragments, styles and genres would blend into a beautiful palimpsest (Resnais), sometimes they would offer us insights into the romantic narrative (Truffaut), sometimes they would comment upon our restricted and opaque moral universe (Rivette), and sometimes they would simply butt heads (Godard) to create a new film poetics.

Journey to Italy is set in Pompeii, where the Roman statues are reminders of a classical past lost to us and Rossellini smartly contrasts them to the plaster casts of the corpses from the volcanic explosion in Pompeii two thousand years ago. In both cases human forms are decaying, providing a memento-mori, and suggesting that this world of classical learning, philosophy, and art, are slowly turning to dust before our eyes. But Godard ups the ante, as in Le Mepris the unseen forces that inspired sculptors to make a statue of Poseidon in the first place are still very much present. In the classical world these sculptures were not simply expensive art objects for wealthy Italians but talismans. They have more in common with African or Caribbean voodoo objects than with our more limited and narcissistic contemporary notion of art as decoration or as a luxury good. In the classical world one made offerings to these statues – usually just a simple bowl of fruit or some spices – and treated them with respect and with caution lest they become enemies. Godard here is suggesting that we have lost the ability to see those invisible forces at work as Paul senses something is wrong but he is too modern, too skeptical, too neurotic, to see that the ground beneath his feet is shifting and an abyss is opening up under him.

In this mysterious “classical” space the cosmic and the psychic collapse – an event horizon from which there is no respite – it is in a sense always under our feet –dangerous, chilling, and inscrutable. One of its attributes was that of a portal to the underworld but there were many theories, stories, and poems about what might be on the other side of that divide aside from merely oblivion – often suggesting that our everyday reality is merely a thin layer, or façade, that conceals a far larger reality that we cannot see. In the classical world people spent time thinking about this space, and they surrounded themselves with objects of art from small amulets the size of jewelry to monumental statues to protect themselves. They understood nature in a way that we perhaps have lost because we mistakenly assume that we are on the verge of dominating, or even supplanting it. No ancient, no matter how foolish or uneducated, would have made that mistake.

Despite the fact that Paul is well into his thirties he is clearly a naïf, someone completely out of his league when it comes to Prokosch’s manipulations, many of which are set in motion purely for the pleasure of seeing them run their course. Prokosch is a player who likes to see how people follow the maze that he lays out for them. This form of entertainment ironically links him to the Roman oligarchs of an earlier period who, in their beach vacation homes in Capri and Pompeii, similarly toyed with people’s fates as a form of amusement. As Moravia has painted him Molteni/Paul is uncomfortable in his own skin – unsure of himself and (from Moravia’s Freudian viewpoint) symbolically castrated in the hierarchical system of capitalism as practiced in the Italy of “economic miracles” that occurred in the postwar era. In Cinecitta it is Prokosch who is the master and he knows it – everyone else is on the payroll. While the term “economic miracle” was invented by the journalists of the day, and seen as a positive element, Moravia understood that miracles touch only a few – the rest are left behind and must simply have “faith in the system.”

At the studio, we see a poster for Hatari! – a John Wayne film that features the traditional macho-male role playing that Wayne was known for. The mythic hero personified in Hatari! is comparable to the Homeric characters that Paul is writing about as he translates The Odyssey into a screenplay and makes for a strong contrast with his own modern confusion and insecurity. In the midst of Cinecitta, Prokosch, who treats the lot as his personal domain, manages to leave with Camille in his red coupé that only seats two, leaving Paul to walk by himself back to the screening room. At that moment Paul has intimations that all is lost and he cries out to Camille but too late. Godard then cuts to a statue of Poseidon, Odysseus’s nemesis. Delerue’s music here makes that difficult cut from Paul (in movement) to a statue a beautiful and emotionally moving transition full of tragic pathos. Paul realizes he’s made a mistake but, being a modern man, he questions his own feelings, he equivocates. Moravia and Godard both place an emphasis on this scene suggesting that Paul is subconsciously pushing Camille towards Prokosch, but to what end? Is it merely a job, or are there darker forces at work?

The scene with the car is simple and with little dialogue but is central to the book and the film because it is where Paul looses Camille. Here is Moravia’s version of events from Molteni’s/Paul’s point-of-view: “Emilia (Camille), without raising her voice, said quietly: “I’m going with my husband now. We’ll all meet in Naples.” I expected Batista (Prokosch) to give in without any more ado, but to my slight surprise he came running over to us. “Signora, you’re going to be with your husband for two months at Capri…and I,” he added in a low voice so as not to be overheard by the director, “I’ve had just a bit too much of Rheingold (Lang) in Rome, and I assure you he’s not amusing. Surely your husband doesn’t mind your coming with me. Do you, Molteni?” I could not but answer, although it was an effort for me: “No, not at all – but Emilia says you drive too fast.” “I’ll go at a snail’s pace” promised Battista facetiously, but with warmth. I don’t know what came over me at that moment. Perhaps I thought it was not worth while annoying Battista for so frivolous a reason. Without giving myself time to reflect, I said: “Come on Emilia…won’t you do this to please Battista? He’s quite right anyhow,” I added with a smile “there’s nothing you can talk to Rheingold about except films.” “Exactly” confirmed Battista, satisfied. Then he took Emilia by the arm – very high up, right under the armpit-saying: “Come along fair signora, don’t be unkind, I promise you I’ll go at walking pace.” Emilia threw me a glance which, at the time, I was quite unable to account for; then she answered slowly: “Very well, if you say so. Let’s go then,” and walked off with Battista, who still kept a tight grip on her arm, as if he feared she might escape. I was left standing in uncertainty beside my own car, gazing at Emilia and Battista as they moved away. She seemed to me at that moment, extremely beautiful; not the middle-class “fair signora” to whom Battista alluded, in that greedy metallic voice of his, but truly beautiful like some creature outside time or place, in harmony with the sparkling sea and the luminous sky against which her figure was outlined. And her beauty had about it a look of subjection, of reluctance, the cause of which I was at a loss to identify. Then as I looked at her I was struck by a thought: “Idiot… Perhaps she wanted to talk to you, to explain things once and for all, to confide in you…and you forced her to go off with Battista.” This idea brought a feeling of sharp regret, and I lifted my arm as though to call her. But by now, it was too late.”¹⁰

Moravia’s breaking up of that last sentence into two by having the “But by now, it was too late” as one whole sentence italicizes the moment as certainly as Godard’s jump cuts. When the narrator explains that “I didn’t know what came over me” before pushing his wife toward Prokosch the reader knows exactly what he was doing – and when the narrator further explains that “Emilia threw me a glance which, at the time, I was quite unable to account for” it is obvious that the glance is one of contempt – this is the most clear instance of the unreliable narrator in the whole book. Emilia/Camille’s beauty at that moment is “like some creature outside time or place, in harmony with the sparkling sea and the luminous sky against which her figure was outlined.” This quotation from Homer links Camille to Penelope, the classical heroine of the Odyssey, but now instead of the heroism of Penelope’s long but finally fruitful wait we have a Penelope full of “subjection and reluctance” – in essence a modern Penelope who has lost Odysseus to his new adventure in Cinecitta – a word meaning “the city of cinema.” When Battista drags her off to his car Moravia emphasizes how he aggressively holds her by the arm, high up, seeking to possess her “as if she might escape” since it is obvious that she would, in fact, love to escape. Both Moravia and Godard seem to suggest that within the confines of Modernity, and the “non-place,” the heroism of The Odyssey, that reconciles male and female principles (equated in Homer with action and reflection), is no longer possible.

Godard stages the struggle for sex and power in the Casa Malaparte, on the Eastern side of Capri. The house is not mentioned in Moravia’s book but becomes a central character in Godard’s film – acting as a bridge of sorts between the classical and contemporary worlds. In effect the house accomplishes what Lang would like his film to do. The Casa Malaparte is a masonry box, laid out with reverse pyramidal steps leading to a roof/stage – both modernist and ancient. Godard uses the house to full advantage as inside the concrete living room is a broken fragment of a classical bas-relief – the ruins of classical order now serving as decoration. On the roof is a freestanding curving white wall that seems purely decorative but also suggests the back of a proscenium. The house was designed by the architect Adalberto Libera and the writer Curzio Malaparte and is considered one of the masterpieces of Italian Modernism. One of the themes that Godard – and Antonioni who is the spiritual father of Le Mepris – stress in their work is that Modernism, which was supposed to have liberated mankind from the heavy Victorian ornamentation, patriarchy, and repression of the previous century, is simply another kind of trap. The ultramodern house in Zabriskie Point is a similar stage on which the monsters from the Id of Modernism come forth and show themselves.

When we see the rushes for Lang’s film they look like pedestrian Hollywood shots of pretty actresses of the period pretending to be mermaids – the typical sort of fare produced at Cinecitta with enough regularity that these films developed into a genre of their own, referred to as “sword and sandal films.” When Prokosch halts the viewing of the rushes to express his displeasure at Lang’s esoteric take on The Odyssey we see no evidence of it so must take it at face value. In the screening room after the rushes when the lights are turned on Prokosch, as a sign of contempt for Lang, takes one of the cans of film on the floor and throws it toward the projection room in the manner of a traditional discus thrower, turning himself into a faux Greek Olympian. When we look at Prokosch his name is associated with Mercury, the god of financial gain, commerce, travel, eloquence, luck, trickery, and thieving. The enemies of Mercury are the Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Mercury’s ally is Hermes, the herald of the gods for he can move between the worlds of the mortal and the divine – a conductor of souls into the afterlife. The gods are closer than we imagine, still playing games and tricks with mortals, often with tragic consequences, but they are silent when humans reach out to them – they seemingly are not interested in dialogue with us. Even when they were current the ancient Greeks needed a sphinx to talk to them, but the words of the sphinx were always in the form of a riddle.

When Lang mentions the culture of the original Greeks as our natural inheritance, as something positive that we must return to, Prokosch takes out his checkbook, and in one of the most famous sequences in the film replies that when he hears the word “culture” he takes out his checkbook, using his supine assistant Francesca as a table. As Lang points out this statement by Prokosch mirrors one made by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, who said that when he heard the word “culture” he took out his pistol. Godard makes the connection between violence, money and power within the cinematic universe of Cinecitta in a variety of ways, showing us how films were eventually co-opted by corporate entities and lawyers (symbolized by Prokosch himself) to become a “product” competing with other products in the marketplace. The franchise films and blockbuster spectacles of the 1970’s that would bury the “New Hollywood” – and arguably the French New-Wave itself – were just around the corner. It is to Godard’s credit that he was there while this transition was in its infancy and not only noticed it but was able to speak coherently about it in a work of art – a remarkable achievement.

It is in Cinecitta and later at the Casa Malaparte that Prokosch tentatively wins Camille’s affections and also where Paul looses his gambit with Prokosch – although that was clearly a foregone conclusion from the moment Poseidon first showed himself and Paul refused to acknowledge his nemesis. As if to prove Lang right about The Odyssey the film pivots toward classical tragedy as Prokosch runs off with Camille but he crashes his car and they are both killed. Homer’s Odyssey is re-mixed for the 20th century with dubious results for it is now Camille/Penelope who dies with the suitor. Meanwhile Lang, the victor, receives the spoils, that is, it appears that he gets to make The Odyssey his way. It seems that the fickle gods refuse to speak to Paul or to Lang, but they speak eloquently to Camille and Prokosch, not in words but in action, in their tragic end at the hands of a gasoline truck – a Deus-ex-Machina conceived by Moravia and photographed in Pop colors by Godard – that to us seems sudden and over-determined but one that the classical Greeks would have understood perfectly. In this scene we witness one of Godard’s most beautiful jump cuts – and the final one in the film. Using Delerue’s music to full effect, he cuts from Prokosch and Camille dead in the sports car under the wheels of a truck, to an extreme close-up pan of Camille’s traditional “goodbye letter” – but we are so close that we can only see two words: “tendresse” and “adieu.”

Molteni/Paul offers his wife as a sacrifice, but receives nothing in return – the gods in the end betray him and give the nod to Lang. In that horrifying turn at the end of the book/film Molteni’s/Paul’s sense of tragedy seems muted, seemingly not in mourning for Camille but for himself. They key is to be found in Paul and Camille’s journey to self-discovery. Both Le Mepris and Journey to Italy are stories of a journey. In Rossellini’s film it is two Americans in Naples, and in Godard’s it is a French couple in Italy. This aspect of the journey, as a mythical motif, was missing in Moravia’s book because everyone was Italian but Godard shifts the identities of the principals so the journey is explicit. This is Jose Carlos Huayhuaca: “Many foundational stories, in all cultures, revisit the form of a journey. In effect the major portion of classical texts that feature adventures, and nurtured our childhood, feature journeys. The power that these journeys exercise over our own souls is due to the symbolic aura implicit in the act of leaving behind the familiar and quotidian and simply taking off by some means, to adventure, thereby opening up the possibility of a renewal. This promise, that all journeys implicitly offer, is magnified to the point that we experience an initiation (emphasis Huayuaca).¹¹ This profound change, discovery or initiation is the fundamental crux of a journey in classical art, and so it is with Le Mepris.

At the film’s coda – not in Moravia’s book – the traditionally handsome actor playing Odysseus who climbs the steps to Lang’s set looks like the shallow hero of a sword and sandal film from the sixties, while Paul – the modern Odysseus – awkwardly limps away from Cinecitta and the magic world of cinema and The Odyssey, exiled with no chance of reprieve. Paul set up the narrative tropes for Camille’s death and his own failure by accepting Prokosch’s gambit and then pushing his wife towards him as a sacrificial victim. But Paul could never accept that exchange as an unpleasant but necessary Machiavellian strategy to further his career because it would have damaged his high self-esteem. While Paul assumed that Camille was not his equal (Camille was the typist to Paul’s published author) she was very much aware of his subconscious contempt. Paul not only pretended that this emotionally destructive contempt was not happening but he had to believe it himself – the only way forward was to suppress his own emotional reality setting the stage for the tragedy that follows.

We are reminded that in the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy we find Odysseus being consumed by eternal flames as punishment for his sins, schemes and scams that go nowhere. For us that may seem strange, for wasn’t Odysseus supposed to be a hero? But for the writers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it made sense because they saw Odysseus as a man who played off one god against another to get his way – a crafty strategist who thought himself their equal if not their superior. We are also reminded that The Odyssey is a fantasy where one man, in the end, sets everything right – or as the scholar Emily Wilson succinctly puts it: “The fantasy that at least one special person can get it all back, and that loss is not inevitable, is central to the plot of The Odyssey.”¹² For Christians that vision was fundamentally incorrect – for them humanity has suffered a fall and only God can set it right. As Dante tells it (mirroring Prokosch’s theory) when Odysseus returned to Ithica he became bored with Penelope and so set off with his men past the Pillars of Hercules (now Gibraltar) and into the unknown. As the voyage was just getting started a great storm (Poseidon again) sank the ship killing everyone, without leaving a trace. For Homer it was still possible to still scheme with gods or even outwit them – for Dante such heresies were narcissistic delusions of grandeur, doomed from the get-go. In the end of Disprezzo/Le Mempris Molteni/Paul cannot “get it all back,” as his adventure in Cinecitta defeats him. Moreover he fails to realize his own crucial part in the tragedy that he wrought, blinding himself to the point that even his own motivations elude him – but just because he cannot see them does not mean he can escape them.

From Moravia’s perspective there is no refuge from the subconscious, only denial. Moravia sough to find truths in Freud’s model of the subconscious, that is, that the truth might very well be hidden, but it was always somewhere to be found by an astute psychoanalyst or writer – the two functions were very similar for him. The novel was a way – a model – to ascertain and pin that truth down and set it down on paper, thereby bringing it out into the open. Not surprisingly in the final pages of Disprezzo Molteni finds that he is innocent of Camille’s death and that there is nothing he could have done to save her – a scene that Godard leaves out of Le Mepris leaving it ambiguous.

In the last scene at the massive roof of the Casa Malaparte Godard stages his final tracking shot facing the Mediterranean Sea, the same body of water navigated by Odysseus. The past, or Antiquity, rises again like a specter that haunts the present, just as the Panavision camera, the crew and actors are a “nightmare that creeps over it.” The crewmembers are filming the scene where Odysseus sees his homeland and he acknowledges its presence with an outstretched sword held ceremonially over his head. Godard, playing Lang’s assistant, appropriately sets up the final tracking shot. But this manqué Odysseus reminds us that not even the great Fritz Lang can bring Homer and the classical world back to life – the moment had long passed.

The film’s exploration of translation (Moravia) and quotation (Antonioni, Rossellini) would seem to be ready-made for the facile strategies familiar from postmodernist filmmakers and artists but they run contrary to the inchoate philosophy of Postmodernism. Rather than an acknowledgement that the expressive potential of cinema or art has been run to the ground, or that originality is a thing of the past, Godard affirms the enduring power and mystery of art to bring the past to life, to disturb, to entertain, to provoke, to reify the old texts (Homer included) and to bring those statues back to life. While in Rossellini’s film the statues remain dead and inert, coming to symbolize death itself, in Le Mepris the icy academic shroud falls away – Godard liberates the statues from their death. From the mausoleum/museum where they are entombed as “masterworks of the classical era” in Le Mepris they become de-monumentalized, uncertain, contingent, in the process of becoming – without a clear or well defined purpose or meaning – breathing the air of 1964.

Once reanimated how do those old gods stack up? For Godard the “truth” (now tentatively in quotes) is always in front of you – the materialism of Democritus is turned into cinematic poetry. As he so nicely put it himself in a later film (in voiceover): “Earth and sex are in us – outside there are only stars.”¹³ Hence for Godard the “truth” may be found in the tone of your partner’s voice as she reads a book in a bathtub; or in your cup of espresso as you put in some sugar cubes; or in the facial gestures of a young woman as she sells magazines (Cahiers du Cinema!) on the street in Paris on a beautiful Spring day; or in the body language of a young man as he tries (unsuccessfully) to light his cigarette in a cafe; or in the way an aging actor auditions to play a homeless man; or in the tears of a woman, forced to be a prostitute, watching an old silent movie. Meanwhile the gods, such as they are, establish an order that is beyond man, outside of his sphere of reasoning, and beyond his moral universe, constituting a kingdom that forever eludes him.