ABSTRACT
This book has attempted, through its case studies of ancient Rome on screen, to bridge any division between classics and popular culture, between the serious work and the commodity, but this perceived disjunction between classics and cinema has already been addressed by cinema itself. In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard directed a film that self-reflexively narrates an attempt to make a cinematic adaptation of the Odyssey at the Italian film studio Cinecittà. Le Mépris (or Contempt, the English title) expresses contempt for, among other things, the brash commercialism that Godard regarded as having now taken over the Hollywood film industry. The economic power and commercial goals of the crass American producer who appears within the film (played by Jack Palance) interferes with the shooting by a German director of an Odyssey which is far removed from the then-recent pattern of blockbuster epics set in antiquity. While the American producer assumes the fickleness of Odysseus's abandoned wife Penelope, and relishes the appearance on screen of some naked bathing beauties, the German director attempts to make an Odyssey which confronts the concepts of divinity and fatalism and which, in execution, is painterly, austere, and abstract. At issue was also the production of Godard's film about the making of a film. Godard's own sour relations with the commercial producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine were famously paralleled within Le Mépris by the interaction between the Hollywood producer of the Odyssey and its scriptwriter, director (played by Fritz Lang as himself), and assistant director (played by Godard). The narrative closure of Le Mépris then playfully marks the triumph of Godard himself over his own film's production constraints, for the irksome American producer is conveniently killed off in a car crash, to leave at the film's close the real artists Lang and Godard giving free rein to their directorial skills. 1
