Contempt (1963)

 Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt"

One thing I've noticed about writing/directing style of Jean-Luc Godard is that he always seems to try and capture tactful reality through film while also subverting reality through editing. His films are always grounded in a sense of realism. Yet, he also makes you aware of the artificiality of the film through his use of editing, music, and blocking. However, it seems like Godard really went for a fully realist piece of cinema with his 1963 effort, "Contempt." 

"Contempt" is based on the 1954 novel "Il Disprezzo" by Alberto Moravia. Godard changed many aspects of the original novel to fit his vision, but "with full permission" of Moravia. The film centers on a novelist named Paul who is tasked with adapted the Greek story of "The Odyssey" for Fritz Lang. An American producer is overseeing the project and making ridiculous demands of the story. After letting his wife Camille go off alone with the producer, much to her chagrin. When reuniting with them again, Camille starts to behave differently. The remainder of the film centers on Paul's desperation to figure out why Camille is treating him with contempt. He asks if the American said or did anything to her, to which she insists that he did not. All the while, Paul is caught in a compromise over compromising his vision for the film.

I feel as though "Contempt" is Godard at his most restrained. No rapid editing, no jazz-like flow, none of the things that made him popular through his breakout "Breathless." However, what Godard has always been keen on in his work is realism. He has always adhered to a particular visual realness that isn't fabricated except through post-production. In post-production, he contrasts the realism with visual abstraction, making the viewer more aware of the film in a post-modern lens. However, with "Contempt," Godard seems to be trying to create a more exacting realism. This realism is even more realized through the naturalist color gradient. Godard also films scenes with extended tracking shots, uses natural lighting, and visual displays things happening in near real-time. 

I began to wonder why Godard went through so much trouble to create a sense of exacting realism. My answer lied within the film itself. The film centers on a writer attempting to translate a popular work. He struggles with how to create something that accurate reflects the written words on the page, while also trying to make his American producer happy. Similarly, Godard himself was attempting to adapt a popular work and, at the same time, was receiving insisting notes from his American co-producers. In "Contempt," the American producers wants more 'sex' in the film. In real life, Godard's American co-producers wanted him to cast Bridgette Bardot, France's most sexualized actress at the time, to help the film's profits. Godard even had to film an extra scene after filming was completed of Bardot's nude body at the insistence of the American co-producers. In "Contempt," the writer Paul's marriage is unravelling as he desperately attempts to reconcile, despite erupting in fits of anger and even physical violence. In real life, Godard's marriage to Anna Karina was becoming contemptuous, as the two was in a constant state of fighting with Godard even being reported as being physically violent as well. All of this to say, Godard's "realism" that he seeks to capture with "Contempt" has somehow been captured as "meta-realism." 

Typically, with the type of post-modern films that Godard and other French New Wave artists made, the metatextual aspects of the film are meant to force recognition and realization about the artificiality of a piece of art and how that artificiality is somehow, despite its own artificial construction, able to demonstrate 'truth.' With "Contempt," Godard removes all construction all-together to allow the viewer simply to observe the metatextual truth as reality, without ever reminding them there is anything artificial present. And yes, of course the average viewer of the film isn't going to watch and go, "Ah yes, of course, this is all metatextually happening to Godard himself!" Of course not. The film is meant to be a film, end of story. But, within the confines of the story itself, our protagonist is constantly theorizing how to translate art to something that resonates in a real, truthful way. With this search, Godard somehow is able to eliminate the frames themselves to reveal life as his own personal reflection. Life is demonstrated as coldly and objectively as possible. Through this objective demonstration, Godard is able to take a adapted work of fiction and merge it with reality somehow. Fiction and non-fiction become inseparable. This is the exact accomplishment our story's protagonist wishes to attain. We all feel connected to art somehow despite its fictional component. So, how does one create something false that is somehow also transparent truth?

However, this metatextual accomplishment is not Godard's primary reach is. Rather, there is another reason why Godard felt so connected to the source material. The source material centers on a marriage in peril. Godard also felt his marriage to be in peril, as well. All throughout the film, our novelist is so confused as to why his wife now suddenly has contempt for him. And yet, the truth is right in front of him. He sells his soul to an American producer to make enough money to buy a new condo, he even 'sells' his wife to the producer as some sort of sexual offering, and he is physically and emotionally abusive to her. All of his actions are obvious to their returned contempt. Through the searching for truth, Godard has found the culprit of his own frustrations: himself. Through this metatextual lens, Godard is looking at himself as plainly as one would look in a mirror. He even outlays his own lack of clarity. Through the bright, colorful lens of the film camera, Godard displays his troubles like an open wound and receives the cold, harsh truth in return. It was Godard himself who said, "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty four times a second." Through his self-reflective construction of "Contempt," Godard has provided himself with this truth, plain to himself and world to see. 

The film "Contempt" is a snapshot of a man's life. To be more specific, "Contempt" is a snapshot of a man's life as he attempts to make "Contempt." This Godard work of art would be far more game-changing and celebrated, had it not been for Federico Fellini's masterpiece "8 1/2" which came out 9 months before. I feel as though "Contempt" and "8 1/2" are spiritually and metatextually the same exact film. That being said, "Contempt" is a far more restrained version of Fellini's maximalist version. That being said, I think "8 1/2" is a far more qualitative work. While Godard's film issues his self-reflective metatextuality in a cold, calculating realist construction, Fellini's film uses the artificiality of the film medium itself to expand upon this construction and take it in bold, magical places. While "Contempt" is meant to display life as objectively as possible, "8 1/2" displays life in a far more impressionist and expressionistic way, demonstrating the bounds and leaps the film medium can go to express not only life as it objectively is, but life as it subjectively is. I feel as though the only time "Contempt" breaks from reality is at the very end of the film when Camille leaves Paul for the American producer and they both die in a violent car crash. Godard's final point to be made about objective reality in cinema is that it can actually reach some subconscious level, albeit a dark, vengeful, and self-effacing expression. It is almost as if Godard viewed reality through this exacting self-examination and then, in the end, decided that the medium of film was actually a place for unreality after all. Film is an expression of the mind and of feelings and emotions, rather than a tactful, cold mirror. Even still, this final foray into subconscious vengeance is still self-reflective of Godard's compromising position in his own life. So, Godard's final note is that even in the subconscious do we still reveal truth.