Penlope2.0001

Penelope2.0001_Godard

Jean-Luc Godard, director, Le Mépris (Contempt), motion picture, 1963.
Adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1954 literary adaptation of the Homer's Odyssey, Il Disprezzo (The Ghost at Noon trans. 1999 as Contempt by Angus Davidson) — indeed the extended use of the Odyssey paradigm is Moravia’s for Godard to adapt. Penelope is the critical issue in this film, not Odysseus as many would anticipate.
Characters from the Moravia novel translate here to Riccardo and Emilia Molteni, Rheingold (=Lang), and Battista (=Prokosch). The background story is all about Prokosch's theory that Penelope was unfaithful to Odysseus. Indeed, some see this film as Godard's cinematic deconstruction of Bardot's mystique. If so, what better vehicle than a psychological inquiry into Penelope's reception of Odysseus?

A pair of insightful essays masquerading as mere blog posts: David Blakeslee, review of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, on his blog CriterionReflections.
Jamie S. Rich, review of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, on his blog, CirterionConfessions.

This thoughtful film bears repeated viewing and close scholarly inspection.
Philip Lopate's thoughtful essay, "Contempt: the story of a marriage," (Criterion Collection website) is a good place to start.

Useful glimpse at three contemporary (negative) reviews beside Godard's own statement from Cahiers du Cinéma reprinted in translation in J. Douchet (1999) French New Wave (Paris: Cinémathèque Française), 269-71 (click here).

Plot: This highly intriguing film is clearly about film-making. The opening credits make that clear by deconstructing the process of filming a tracking shot, while a disembodied voice reads audibly the details of director, producer, cinematographer, etc. The skeletal narrative treats an international production of the filming of an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. An insufferably boorish American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) has tired of the German director’s (Fritz Lang, ipse) waning attempts to construct a film an American simpleton can understand. Accordingly, the producer has summoned a new French screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli) to the ragged studios of Cinecittà for a consult. The screenwriter’s wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot) is clearly a Penlope, but here she is drawn away from her failing Odysseus by the questionable attractions of the American in a red Alfa Romeo droptop. The film-within-a-film is an artsy Odyssey, but it is structured enough and sufficiently recurrent to provide the subtext and framework upon which the couple’s agonizing failure can be hung and dried. One critic calls Contempt “Godard’s richest study of human relations, and a film very much about a tortured kind of movie love.”

Prokosch promotes from the start his thesis that Penelope is unfaithful to Odysseus. Lang and Paul see the fault as Odysseus’ and his specifically criticize his apparent eagerness to stay away for 10 years beyond what he could have achieved.

The Criterion Collection has done a tremendous service by overdubbing the film (reissued 2002 as Criterion Collection #171) with a provocative audio commentary by Robert Stam.

A fine essay by Phillip Lopate, “Totally, Tenderly, Tragically” (copyright 1998, available excerpted on the Criterion’s website) is very useful (click here). — He calls Palance’s Prokosch “vilely virile”.

Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey, edd., Godard’s Contempt: essays from the London Consortium, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Joanna Paul, "Homer and Cinema:translation and adaptation in Le Mépris," in A. Lianeri and V. Zajko, edd., Translation and the Classic: identity as change in the history of culture, Classical Presences (OUP 2008), 148 - 65. — scanned article archive Paul_HomerCinemaGodardContempt.pdf

Brief contextualization in the short overview of “The French New Wave (1959 – 1964)” in Bordwell & Thompson’s Film Art: an introduction 475 – 77.

Valuable for its contributions by Godard himself: Histoire(s) du cinéma — St. Charles, Ill.: Olive Films, 2011, 2 videodiscs (266 min.): sd., col.; 4 3/4 in., French HBLL Media Center Desk —Description: "An extraordinary look at motion pictures as seen through the eyes of the reknowned filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who transformed the face of cinema with his prolific, influential, and revolutionary body of work, which includes such classics as Breathless, Weekend, and Contempt. Consisting of eight episodes made over a period of ten years, the series covers a wide range of topics, from the birth of cinema to Italian neo-realism to Hollywood and beyond.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.