Working with his biggest budget to date, Jean-Luc Godard created a sublime widescreen drama about marital breakdown, set during pre-production on a film shoot.

Famously, producer Carlo Ponti was disappointed that Jean-Luc Godard’s adaptation of the Alberto Moravia’s novel A Ghost at Noon contained no nude shots of star Brigitte Bardot. With typical perversity, Godard compromised by adding an explicit scene of Camille (Bardot) naked on a bed as screenwriter-husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) lists her attractive features. The anecdote is appropriate for a film that features an American film producer (Jack Palance) exerting his crass influence over the Grecian epic being made by German genius Fritz Lang (playing himself).

While filled with playful cinematic references, Le Mépris is perhaps Godard’s most emotionally direct film, particularly intense in the long central apartment scene – masterfully shot by Raoul Coutard – in which the fractures in Paul and Camille’s marriage come to seem irreversible.

“Godard’s finest film is a deeply cynical study of the loss of artistic integrity and the loss of respect that comes from it, a warning to every artist who chooses to sell out for financial gain.” David Flint

“The ideal balance between a Godard work’s self-reflexivity and its penchant for the elegiac and transcendent. It’s at once a send-up of the institution of cinema and, somehow, a meditation on love and art’s profound mysteries.” Rielle Navitski

“The schematic beauty of the colours and the detached acting of the actors, in contrast to the lyricism of the music, make Le Mépris an obsessive story.” François Jost

Film	Year	Director
A Guest of Life: Alexander Csoma de Koros	2006	Tibor Szemzo
Andrei Rublev	1966	Andrei Tarkovsky
Come and See	1985	Elem Klimov
DAOMA ZEI	1986	Tian Zhuangzhuang
Le Mépris	1963	Jean-Luc Godard
El Mumia	1970	Shadi Abdelsalam
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes	1970	Billy Wilder
The Leopard	1963	Luchino Visconti
Roma città aperta	1945	Roberto Rossellini
Tongnian Wangshi	1985	Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Rod Bishop

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