ABSTRACT
This chapter enacts what is afforded still by the classic film known in the English-speaking world as Contempt (1963). It argues that the original French title, Le Mépris, denoting an indeterminate effect and posed as the subject of the film, substitutes for the indeterminacy of cinema as Godard thinks of it and for the indeterminacy of a human life positively aided by the absence of gods. The film was not, at first, positively received in the United States. At the time of its re-release in 1997, audiences were beginning to acquire the skills they needed to appreciate this challenging motion picture. This chapter uses such skills to realize what turns up in the film: Homer and Dante, reflections about the epic, theater, the novel and film, about the poetry of Hölderlin and about the concrete realities of the Mediterranean Sea. It picks up affordances presented in references to motion pictures in general as well as to the outsized personalities and commercial aims that present obstacles to their being made. It concludes that the film has as much to say to our current existential circumstances and film viewing experience as it did to audiences when it was originally screened.
