Thinking with Film: On John Carvalho’s reading of Godard’s Le Mépris

Authors

Deborah Knight, Queens Univeristy, Kingston, Ontario, CanadaFollow

Abstract

In Thinking with Images, John Carvalho is especially interested in situations where we do not know what to think about a work of art — where it perplexes us, where we cannot find answers to the questions it raises. I will focus on Carvalho’s final chapter which discusses Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Le Mépris (Contempt), adapted from the novel by Alberto Moravia. I argue that Le Mépris is not primarily about its literary content involving the collapse of a marriage during the filming of an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. I recommend that instead we think about such things as Godard’s decision to cast Fritz Lang in the role of the director of the film-within-a-film, the contest between art and commerce represented by the American producer of Lang’s Homer epic, and Le Mépris’s network of allusions to a range of Hollywood and European films admired by Godard and the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma. Rather than thinking about Le Mépris in terms of its ostensible plot and themes, I argue that we should instead consider what it reveals about Godard’s thinking about the state of the cinema in 1963.