Contempt (1963)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Art film producer Jeremy Prokosch, unhappy with the work of his director, hires Fritz Lang (as himself) to direct an adaptation of The Odyssey, but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb, he brings in a screenwriter to energise the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
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20 films that influenced Contempt
What critics say influenced Contempt
Unsurprisingly for Godard, there are icons, totems, and references galore, from the hat and slacks the screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) wears in homage to Dean Martin’s character in Some Came Running to his wife Camille’s (Brigitte Bardot) preference for tucking her traffic-stopping blond locks underneath a wig that could represent a cheeky reference the hairstyle of Godard’s own wife at the time, Anna Karina.
Additionally, Godard pays tribute to several of his favorite films here, including several by Lang, Howard Hawks' Hatari!, Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running and many more.
The husband once penned crime novels and now finds himself as both whore and pimp, in his own mind he's Dean Martin in Some Came Running.
Finally, there is Vincente Minelli's Some Came Running, in which Dean Martin always wears a hat for luck (which Paul mimics in Contempt), and who takes it off only in honor of the woman who gave her life for the struggling artist hero (Frank Sinatra), just as the death of a woman in Contempt releases (one hopes) an artist.
There’s an old joke that’s designed to be funny ha-ha for men but is, I suspect, only bitterly funny for most women: “Show me the most beautiful woman in the world, and I’ll show you the guy who’s tired of fucking her.” Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt is many things: a free-verse editorial on the unholy alliance between art and commerce, a meditation on sea and countryside as landscapes of infinite sadness, a whirring phrasebook of intellectual thought that name-checks Dante, Bertolt Brecht, and Dean Martin in Some Came Running.
6. Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1959).
To buttress the meaning of his movie, Godard quotes from Dante, Holderlin, Brecht, and Louis Lumière, among others, and makes passing references to many movies, including Rio Bravo, Bigger than Life, Hatari!, Psycho, Vanina Vanini, The Big Knife, and his own Vivre sa vi.
* In an early treatment for Contempt, Godard describes Paul as a character from Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad who wants to be a character in Hawks's Rio Bravo.
Jean-Luc Godard adaptó una novela de Alberto Moravia en esta película de crisis matrimonial y cine sobre cine que contiene las usuales referencias-homenajes de su autor, en especial cinematográficas (la propia participación del gran Fritz Lang, carteles de “Hatari” o “Psicosis”, citas en diálogo al “Río Bravo” de Howard Hawks, a Dean Martin y “Como En Un Torrente”, etc., etc.).
To buttress the meaning of his movie, Godard quotes from Dante, Holderlin, Brecht, and Louis Lumière, among others, and makes passing references to many movies, including Rio Bravo, Bigger than Life, Hatari!, Psycho, Vanina Vanini, The Big Knife, and his own Vivre sa vi.
Numerous posters for influential films are glimpsed in the background, while at one point Paul mentions Nicholas Ray’s classic film Bigger Than Life .
(We find out what's playing at the theaters in Rome: Rio Bravo and Bigger Than Life.
Additionally, Godard pays tribute to several of his favorite films here, including several by Lang, Howard Hawks' Hatari!, Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running and many more.
In many instances Godard comments upon many things in literature from Dante to romantic poetry and films that have influenced him like Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy and Howard Hawks' Hatari!,as well as nods to his own films.
To buttress the meaning of his movie, Godard quotes from Dante, Holderlin, Brecht, and Louis Lumière, among others, and makes passing references to many movies, including Rio Bravo, Bigger than Life, Hatari!, Psycho, Vanina Vanini, The Big Knife, and his own Vivre sa vi.
We see posters for Hatari!, Psycho, Vanina Vanini, and Vivre sa vie.
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More important, Godard at times gives big-time filmmaking (Hollywood in The Bad and the Beautiful, Cinecitta in Two Weeks in Another Town) the same satirical and grandiloquent treatment as Minnelli.
The couple's disintegration is a virtuosic set-piece in an unfinished apartment, a whirl of bickering and wigs and bathtubs through doorways within doorways caught in lateral pans curiously evocative of Hitchcock's in Rope.
The most significant film reference occurs when the characters attend a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy .
(He does a much better job of evoking Lang's geometrical visual style in an overhead shot of Paul climbing the steps of Prokosch's villa--actually Curzio Malaparte's--in Capri, which harks all the way back to the Tower of Babel sequence in Metropolis.)
Nonetheless, "Contempt" somewhat draws a parallel to Godard´s real life in the mid 60s.Having said this, Godard shows his immense love and admiration for a famous German director, Fritz Lang, known for the films such as "Metropolis"(1927) and "M" (1931).
Alongside a director in a film studio (Godard casts the great Fritz Lang, who famously made the silent classic Metropolis at UFA in 1926 before a subsequent career in Hollywood on westerns and crime thrillers), Contempt boasts a central protagonist obsessed by his wife’s sexual peccadilloes, not to mention bleak, domestic, modernist architecture and mythical car crash aftermaths.
He's hired none less than the German expressionist director Fritz Lang, of M and Metropolis fame.
"Contempt" ("Le Mepris") links the dissolution of the marriage between a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his wife (Brigitte Bardot) to the end of classical Hollywood moviemaking, represented here by a film of "The Odyssey" directed by Fritz Lang (the director of "Metropolis" and "M," who appears as himself).
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Much as Antonioni was charting aspects of his relationship with Monica Vitti in all his films of this period (L'avventura, La notte, Eclipse, Red Desert), Godard was examining his relationship with Anna Karina in most of the films that immediately preceded and followed Contempt (Le petit soldat, A Woman Is a Woman, and Vivre sa vie beforehand, and Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, and Made in U.S.A. afterward).
While clearly influenced by Antonioni’s L’Avventura – especially in the scenes at the Malaparte Villa, replete with wedge-shaped brick-and-stone stairs and crags that rise from the sea – cinematographer Raoul Coutard, though working in color, proves that he actually had talent.
Despite a gorgeous aping of Michelangelo Antonioni’s style of shooting widescreen landscapes and his affinity for formal structures, Le Mépris lacks any of the metaphysical heft and narrative thrust that propel the best of Antonioni’s work, e.g., La Notte or Blow-Up .
Much as Antonioni was charting aspects of his relationship with Monica Vitti in all his films of this period (L'avventura, La notte, Eclipse, Red Desert), Godard was examining his relationship with Anna Karina in most of the films that immediately preceded and followed Contempt (Le petit soldat, A Woman Is a Woman, and Vivre sa vie beforehand, and Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, and Made in U.S.A. afterward).