Le Mepris

Jean-Luc Godard - 1963
I'll try and say some things about this great film by splitting into three parts. Any of the comments I make can surely apply to the other parts; the division is pretty much arbitrary, around when they crossed my mind (the division itself seems slightly justified; pretty flat, flat, Capri; if not definitive).
The first section, before Capri. Those wonderful, beautiful stately horizontal tracks. This is is so many ways an elogy for beauty, for classical art and its remnants in the modern renaissance and so on; for beauty. It is incredibly moving. We have those statues, eyes coloured. Throughout, we see the ancient as modern, the modern as ancient. Or as that just our hubris; was Ulysses really a modern neurotic. I have to side with Lang; it's a bad way of looking at things. The music, (which Greenaway has been listening to) makes us conscious that we are manipulated, pushed into this position; it doesn't lessen the effect. And then there is Lang. What beauty he has created, what cinema. Simply, what a great man, dwarfing those around him, all ironies aside. Yet Godard won't let us revel; ugliness so quickly intrudes, for all the bare emotion here. A key question here also seems to be; what is Bardot in the film? We look at Bardot, we look at her body. How is it possible to treat her, and not deserve her contempt? Godard again asks, who is he really filming? And we have a lot of the translation adventures in the first part. The lack of communication, the idiocy, cruelty in that. It is extremely funny, also, or because.
The second section, the flat. An excrutiatingly long analysis of a marriage, of the fluctuations, a meditation on screen time. Shot in those long takes, with the panning camera from a still point (and some wonderful framings; colour palette throughout is just...). And yet we know an eternity passes. How? The cinema. 'Realistically' justified, she can change dresses, hair, the house can change. The vacillations can seem ridiculous, all in one place. Cross this with Angelopoulos, past and present in the frame together; cinema and history. It is just.... The complexities of a relationship in time, all in one shot, a shot through time. Time is so important in this film; the long distances and slow movements, and the swelling music, called to mind the idea of cinema as movement through time, and for me the greatest single shots; 'La Dolce Vita', 'L'Eclisse' and 'Il Deserto Rosso', 'Kane'. And we also have the essayistic breaks in this movement. The turn to a voiceover and the image, sound and image together. This scene flaunts its length, toys with the audience; it isn't purely pleaurable, I partly thought 'it goes on too long'. But it might also be one of the greatest films there is.
The final section; Capri. We have the notion of fate. Godard's repeated motif; what one must do to live in the world. Again, Dreyer. Why must money shape the way things are? But as Lang says, the world is as it is. How to live with that, compromise. We see Piccolli compromise here, 'be to careful', allow his wife to go off with Palance. We see it isn't good enough. But how else to live? What does Lang do? Lang damn well fights, every inch of the way, every second, against the Palance's who are the world (who is not evil, who does have his phrases; he's just an idiot. But as he tells us, let's not get too superior, try to humiliate; it's his world). What Piccolli finds himsself in is a situation where he, like us, in the cinema and life, live in a world where we cannot but deseverve contempt for what we do (to survive is to prostitute oneself). There is no real exit here. There is just art, beauty, Lang. Does Godard disagree with Lang's boats beating on (why can't I think of a Lang phrase? He's light years ahead of Fitzgerald). Well, it's a different perspective, one of many in Godard;s films. The death of Bardot and Palance is, with the monumentalism, deserving of that move in, the swell and the 'Scope. This world has its fatefulness, it's measure, but always undercut. Not tragic, but in memory of it. Having to live, having to lose, deserving contempt.