Film Notes: Contempt (1963)

Contempt is the story of that world…

This is my favorite Godard film. From beginning to end, Contempt endlessly fascinates me. Emotionally, it is tragic. It makes me sad, and Georges Delerue’s score—one of the most achingly beautiful scores ever written for a film—makes that sadness feel personal. The film centers around the production of an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and all the major figures involved have their own vision of what the film should be and what Homer should mean. That makes Contempt a film about filmmaking, certainly, but also about interpretation: of art, of marriage, and of other people.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins refers to Godard as “cinema’s greatest terrorist.” Let’s return to that idea, because what Godard is doing in Contempt foreshadows what would make him such a force to be reckoned with in films like La Chinoise and Week-End. A lot of Godard fans dismiss Contempt as not quite the film the auteur really wanted, characterizing it as the kind of filmmaking he would spend much of his later career attacking. But that just makes me like it even more. For instance, the film was shot in CinemaScope—not something we necessarily associate with Godard, although neither was 3D when he made Goodbye to Language in 2014. Given the resources of prestige European filmmaking, Godard does not surrender to them. He turns them against themselves. 

Whose contempt does the title refer to? Godard’s? Sure. His contempt for producers and film financiers is easily recognizable onscreen. Jack Palance’s American producer, Jeremy Prokosch, has contempt for the art-film aspirations of Fritz Lang, playing himself. Lang, meanwhile, represents an older European cinema and an older history: this is the filmmaker who fled Germany after the Nazis came to power, now finding himself answering to an American producer who tosses film cans around when he doesn’t like what he sees. Hovering over all of this is playwright Bertolt Brecht. His concept of the “alienation effect”—in which a work deliberately exposes the mechanisms of its own construction rather than allowing us to disappear comfortably inside an illusion—is everywhere in Contempt. Godard gives us cinema while continually reminding us that we are watching cinema. In doing so, he anticipates not only his own increasingly radical work but filmmakers across New Hollywood, New German Cinema, the Japanese New Wave, punk cinema, and the American independent cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Contempt, then, becomes more than the film’s subject: it becomes Godard’s method, a way of turning cinema against the very machinery that produces it.

And then there is Brigitte Bardot.

As Camille, Bardot is the film’s emotional core, introduced to us, seemingly, as an object of desire. In the famous opening bedroom scene, she asks Paul (Michel Piccoli) what he thinks of her body, moving piece by piece through it as Godard’s camera looks on. On the surface, this seems like the ultimate male-gaze sequence: one of the most famous sex symbols in the world, naked in CinemaScope. But Godard is setting a trap. The sequence was added after the film’s producers demanded more nudity from Bardot. Godard responds by giving them exactly what they asked for…and then making the producers’ demand itself visible. Bardot’s body becomes almost an inventory. Do you like my feet? My knees? My thighs? My breasts? The very process by which cinema fragments and commodifies a woman’s body becomes the subject of the scene. That matters because Camille will spend the rest of Contempt discovering that the same process exists outside the movie camera.

Paul wants to be an artist, but he also wants the money Prokosch offers him to rewrite Lang’s Odyssey. Worse, he seems willing to allow Prokosch access to Camille, encouraging her to ride alone with him and failing—or refusing—to understand what that gesture means to her. Something changes, Camille looks at her husband differently, and suddenly the title becomes devastatingly intimate. Her contempt is not irrational, nor is it simply the mysterious emotional volatility of a beautiful woman. She has seen something in Paul that she cannot unsee. The man who tells her that he loves her has nevertheless participated in a world in which she can be looked at, appraised, exchanged, and offered up. Thus, Paul spends much of the film trying to understand the precise moment when Camille stopped loving him, but perhaps that obsession is itself his failure. He keeps searching for an explanation while refusing to see what she has already seen.

This is where Bardot becomes much more than a vehicle for Godard’s ideas about alienation. Her performance grows colder and more distant as the film progresses, but that distance is expressive. Camille withdraws from the systems attempting to define her: husband, producer, filmmaker, and, ultimately, audience. Even the extraordinary apartment scenes turn domestic space into an emotional CinemaScope battlefield. Paul and Camille occupy the same home but increasingly seem to inhabit separate worlds. Walls, doorways, furniture, and that enormously wide frame divide them long before their marriage has formally ended.

That is why Contempt remains so moving to me. For all its intellectual games, classical mythology, Brechtian alienation, jokes about producers, and arguments about what cinema should be, its tragedy is painfully simple: a man loves a woman, and then, one day, she looks at him differently.

The tragedy is that he never completely understands why.