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Contempt (film)
Encyclopedia
Contempt is a 1963 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
, based on the Italian novel Il disprezzo (1954) by Alberto Moravia
. It stars Brigitte Bardot
.
Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance
) hires respected Austrian director Fritz Lang
(playing himself) to direct a film adaptation of Homer's
Odyssey
. Dissatisfied with Lang's treatment of the material as an art film
, Prokosch hires Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a novelist and playwright, to rework the script. The conflict between artistic expression and commercial opportunity parallels Paul's sudden estrangement from his wife Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot
), who becomes aloof with Paul after being left alone with Prokosch, a millionaire playboy.
While founded on Alberto Moravia
's story of the progressive estrangement between a husband and wife, Godard's version also contains deliberate parallels with aspects of his own life: while Paul, Camille, and Prokosch correspond to Ulysses
, Penelope
, and Poseidon
, respectively, they also correspond in some ways with Godard, his wife Anna Karina
(his choice of female lead), and Joseph E. Levine
, the film's distributor. At one point, Bardot dons a black wig which gives her a resemblance to Karina. Michel Piccoli also bears some resemblance to Brigitte Bardot's ex-husband and Svengali
, the filmmaker Roger Vadim
.
Also notable in the film is a discussion of Dante
– particularly Canto XXVI of Inferno, about Ulysses' last fatal voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules
to the other side of the world – and Friedrich Hölderlin
's poem, "Dichterberuf" ("The Poet's Vocation").
approached Jean Luc Godard to discuss a possible collaboration; Godard suggested an adaptation of Moravia's novel Il disprezzo (originally translated into English with the title A Ghost at Noon) in which he saw Kim Novak
and Frank Sinatra
as the leads; they refused. Ponti suggested Sophia Loren
and Marcello Mastroianni
, whom Godard refused. Finally, Bardot was chosen, because of the producer's insistence that the profits might be increased by displaying her famously sensual body. This provided the film's opening scene, filmed by Godard as a typical mockery of the cinema business with tame nudity. The scene was shot after Godard considered the film finished, at the insistence of the American co-producers. In the film, Godard cast himself as Lang's assistant director, and characteristically has Lang expound many of Godard's New Wave
theories and opinions. Godard also employed the two "forgotten" New Wave filmmakers, Luc Moullet
and Jacques Rozier
, on the film. Bardot visibly reads a book about Fritz Lang that was written by Moullet, and Rozier made the documentary short about the making of the film, Le Parti Des Choses
.
Contempt was filmed in and occurs entirely in Italy, with location shooting at the Cinecittà
studios in Rome and the Casa Malaparte
on Capri
island. In a notable sequence, the characters played by Piccoli and Bardot wander through their apartment alternately arguing and reconciling. Godard filmed the scene as an extended series of tracking shot
s, in natural light and in near real-time. The cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shot some of the seminal films of the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard's Breathless.
original, haunting musical score, features a very different light jazz score written by Piero Piccioni
.
Most DVD releases of the film now use the multilingual French release.
critic Colin MacCabe
called Contempt "the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe."
Antoine de Gaudemar made a 1-hour documentary in 2009 about Contempt, Il était une fois... Le Mépris (A Film and its Era: Contempt) which incorporated footage from Jacques Rozier's earlier documentaries Paparazzi (1963), Le Parti Des Choses (1964), and André S. Labarthe
's Le dinosaure et le bébé (1967).
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, based on the Italian novel Il disprezzo (1954) by Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....
. It stars Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...
.
Plot
American film producerFilm producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...
Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance
Jack Palance
Jack Palance , was an American actor. During half a century of film and television appearances, Palance was nominated for three Academy Awards, all as Best Actor in a Supporting Role, winning in 1991 for his role in City Slickers.-Early life:Palance, one of five children, was born Volodymyr...
) hires respected Austrian director Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
(playing himself) to direct a film adaptation of Homer's
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
. Dissatisfied with Lang's treatment of the material as an art film
Art film
An art film is the result of filmmaking which is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience...
, Prokosch hires Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a novelist and playwright, to rework the script. The conflict between artistic expression and commercial opportunity parallels Paul's sudden estrangement from his wife Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...
), who becomes aloof with Paul after being left alone with Prokosch, a millionaire playboy.
While founded on Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....
's story of the progressive estrangement between a husband and wife, Godard's version also contains deliberate parallels with aspects of his own life: while Paul, Camille, and Prokosch correspond to Ulysses
Odysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....
, Penelope
Penelope
In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is eventually reunited with him....
, and Poseidon
Poseidon
Poseidon was the god of the sea, and, as "Earth-Shaker," of the earthquakes in Greek mythology. The name of the sea-god Nethuns in Etruscan was adopted in Latin for Neptune in Roman mythology: both were sea gods analogous to Poseidon...
, respectively, they also correspond in some ways with Godard, his wife Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
(his choice of female lead), and Joseph E. Levine
Joseph E. Levine
Joseph E. Levine was an American film producer.He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His Embassy Pictures Corporation was an independent studio and distributor responsible for such films as Hercules , The Carpetbaggers, Harlow, The Graduate, A Bridge Too Far and The Lion in Winter.Levine is famous...
, the film's distributor. At one point, Bardot dons a black wig which gives her a resemblance to Karina. Michel Piccoli also bears some resemblance to Brigitte Bardot's ex-husband and Svengali
Svengali
Svengali is a fictional character of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby. Svengali "would either fawn or bully and could be grossly impertinent. He had a kind of cynical humour that was more offensive than amusing and always laughed at the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place...
, the filmmaker Roger Vadim
Roger Vadim
Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and actor, who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the film And God Created Woman.-Early life:...
.
Also notable in the film is a discussion of Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
– particularly Canto XXVI of Inferno, about Ulysses' last fatal voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules
Pillars of Hercules
The Pillars of Hercules was the phrase that was applied in Antiquity to the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. The northern Pillar is the Rock of Gibraltar in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar...
to the other side of the world – and Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his...
's poem, "Dichterberuf" ("The Poet's Vocation").
Production
Italian film producer Carlo PontiCarlo Ponti
Carlo Ponti was an Italian film producer with over 140 production credits, and the husband of Italian movie star Sophia Loren.-Career:...
approached Jean Luc Godard to discuss a possible collaboration; Godard suggested an adaptation of Moravia's novel Il disprezzo (originally translated into English with the title A Ghost at Noon) in which he saw Kim Novak
Kim Novak
Kim Novak is an American film and television actress. She began her career with her roles in Pushover and Phffft! but achieved greater prominence in the 1955 film Picnic...
and Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
as the leads; they refused. Ponti suggested Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren, OMRI is an Italian actress.In 1962, Loren won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Two Women, along with 21 awards, becoming the first actress to win an Academy Award for a non-English-speaking performance...
and Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
, whom Godard refused. Finally, Bardot was chosen, because of the producer's insistence that the profits might be increased by displaying her famously sensual body. This provided the film's opening scene, filmed by Godard as a typical mockery of the cinema business with tame nudity. The scene was shot after Godard considered the film finished, at the insistence of the American co-producers. In the film, Godard cast himself as Lang's assistant director, and characteristically has Lang expound many of Godard's New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
theories and opinions. Godard also employed the two "forgotten" New Wave filmmakers, Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.Though such influential...
and Jacques Rozier
Jacques Rozier
Jacques Rozier is a French film director and screenwriter. He is one of the lesser known members of the French New Wave movement and has collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard. Three of his films have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival...
, on the film. Bardot visibly reads a book about Fritz Lang that was written by Moullet, and Rozier made the documentary short about the making of the film, Le Parti Des Choses
Le Parti Des Choses
Le Parti Des Choses is a short documentary directed by Jacques Rozier on the making of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris. It is included on the Criterion Collection DVD of Le Mépris.-Cast:...
.
Contempt was filmed in and occurs entirely in Italy, with location shooting at the Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
studios in Rome and the Casa Malaparte
Casa Malaparte
Casa Malaparte is a house on Punta Massullo, on the eastern side of the Isle of Capri, Italy. It is one of the best examples of Italian modern and contemporary architecture....
on Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
island. In a notable sequence, the characters played by Piccoli and Bardot wander through their apartment alternately arguing and reconciling. Godard filmed the scene as an extended series of tracking shot
Tracking shot
In motion picture terminology, a tracking shot is a segment in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly, a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken...
s, in natural light and in near real-time. The cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shot some of the seminal films of the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard's Breathless.
Releases
The French, Italian and American theatrical releases differed significantly. The French release was multilingual (French, English, Italian and German), while the American and Italian releases were entirely dubbed into English and Italian, respectively. The French and American releases differ only slightly in editing, but the Italian version is significantly shorter (only 82 minutes) and, instead of George Delerue'sGeorges Delerue
Georges Delerue , was a French film composer who composed over 350 scores for cinema and television. He won numerous important awards including Rome Prize , Emmy Award , Genie Award , ACE Award and Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1979 for A...
original, haunting musical score, features a very different light jazz score written by Piero Piccioni
Piero Piccioni
Piero Piccioni , was an Italian lawyer turned major film score composer. A pianist, organist, conductor, composer, he was also the prolific author of more than 200 film soundtracks.-Early life:...
.
Most DVD releases of the film now use the multilingual French release.
Reception
One of the most notable blurbs about the film: Sight & SoundSight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
critic Colin MacCabe
Colin MacCabe
Colin MacCabe is a British writer and film producer. He is distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh, professor of English and humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and a visiting professor at the University of Exeter....
called Contempt "the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe."
Antoine de Gaudemar made a 1-hour documentary in 2009 about Contempt, Il était une fois... Le Mépris (A Film and its Era: Contempt) which incorporated footage from Jacques Rozier's earlier documentaries Paparazzi (1963), Le Parti Des Choses (1964), and André S. Labarthe
André S. Labarthe
André S. Labarthe is a French actor, film producer and director. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie * L'amour fou...
's Le dinosaure et le bébé (1967).
External links
- Criterion Collection essay by Phillip Lopate
- Raoul Coutard talks about the filming of Contempt at Web of Stories
- Rafferty on 40th anniversary
- New York Times movie review by Bosley CrowtherBosley CrowtherBosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
from December 19, 1964