Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey
The course will examine Jean-Luc Godard’s classic film as an outstanding example of how, as Roland Barthes puts it, a text is created out of a ‘fabric of quotations’. In the case of Contempt, Godard has made one of the greatest European art films by interweaving the origins of European poetry, Homer’s Odyssey, with Hollywood cinema. The film complicates the two with its theme of a film within a film. The European director exiled in Hollywood (Fritz Lang), clashes with the producer (played by Jack Palance) as they try to film The Odyssey in the cosmopolitan setting of Italy’s Cinecitta. As the film interweaves quotations, it also uses the presence of Lang, in particular, to reflect on the complex question of authorship.
One : The immediate source for the film
Contempt was adapted from the Moravia novel Il Disprezzo (1954. English title: A Ghost at Noon). This class will use the novel to examine the opposing aesthetics of classic and modern (reversed between director and producer from Moravia’s story). It will consider how the classic, European poetry (Dante, Holderlin quoted by Lang), and the modern, the Malaparte villa in which the film is set, function in Godard’s film.
Reading:
Alberto Moravia, A Ghost at Noon, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955)
Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (London: Faber and Faber 1975), pp.15-45
Two: The Odyssey
This class will look at the history of the reception of Homer’s texts from the 5th century BC to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which the Odyssey became in the twentieth century the major Homeric reference after 2400 years of playing second fiddle to the Iliad.
Reading:
G.S. Kirk, Homer and the Epic: A Shortened Version of ‘The Songs of Homer’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) pp. 208-217
Three: The New Wave
This class will look at Contempt as a late example of the French New Wave, which had gathered force at the end of the previous decade. It will examine the way in which its key directors had begun as critics for the Cahiers du Cinema where elite and popular culture were conjugated together under the influence of the journal’s editor, André Bazin.
Reading:
Jefferson T. Kline, ‘The French New Wave’ in Ezra, Elizabeth (ed.), European Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 157-175
‘Introduction’ in Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), pp. xv-xxiv
Andre Bazin, ‘La politique des auteurs’ in Peter Graham, The New Wave, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp.137-155
Four: Hollywood
In its critical reassessment of Hollywood in the 1950s, the Cahiers du Cinema created a canon of certain directors. This class will examine how Hollywood is evoked in Contempt. While Fritz Lang represents the European in Hollywood exile, Jack Palance represents Hollywood in ‘exile’, in Cinecitta, lured by advantageous financial conditions. As Contempt is a film within the ‘film about film’ genre, the class will trace the specific movies that Godard is evoking as another level of textual reference.
Reading:
Thomas Elsaessar, ‘Two Decades in Another Country’ in Elsaessar, European Cinema, Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 233-250
Richard Roud, ‘The French Line’ in Sight and Sound, 29.4 (Autumn 1960), pp. 167-171
Jim Hillier, ‘Introduction: Re-thinking American Cinema’ in Cahiers Du Cinema: Volume II: 1960-1968. New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 165-17 and Chabrol, Godard, Rivette, et al., ‘Questions about American Cinema: A Discussion’ (Dec 1963-1964), pp.172-180
Five: Bardot
When Brigitte Bardot agreed to star in Godard’s film she was the most famous European actress ever. One could argue that she has never had to resign that title. This class will trace the process by which Bardot, despite relatively few films, came to incarnate the new woman of post-war Europe. Out of this background the class will examine her role in Contempt, both in image and narrative.
Reading:
‘Brigitte Bardot: The Old and the New: What Bardot Meant to 1950s France’ in Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (LOndon: Continuum, 2000), pp. 82-109
Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Turin: Reynal, 1960), pp. 5-37
Six: Godard
When Godard shot Contempt he was already one of the world’s best known directors despite his young age and his relatively few films. The final class will re-look at the film and consider how Contempt was molded by and in its turn molded the concept of Godard.
Reading:
Jacques Aumont, ‘The Fall of the Gods: Jean- Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963)’ in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: texts and contexts, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000)
‘Jean Luc Godard: From Critic to Film-Maker: Godard in interview (extracts)’ in Jim Hillier, Cahiers Du Cinema: Volume II: 1960-1968. New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood (London: Routledge, 1986), pp.59-67
Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70, (London: Bloomsbury, 2004)
