Forms of Being

Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity

Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción cinematográfica

In each of the films discussed in this study - 'Le Mepris', 'All About My Mother', 'The Thin Red Line' - something extraordinary is proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.

1 Forming Couples (Contempt)

Contempt cements the couple. An arguably more plausible view would be that contempt drives the couple apart, a view supported – or so it has been maintained – by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, in which a wife’s sudden contempt for her husband deals the death-blow to an idyllic intimacy. The plausibility of this view depends on a rather simple yet irreproachable psychological reading: the feeling of contempt is incompatible with the sentiment of love. It is, in this respect, different from hatred of a loved object – hatred which, as our Western experts in passionate intimacy from Racine to Freud have shown, can generally be interpreted as the disguised expression of thwarted or guilty desire. Contempt, on the other hand, would be the blocking of any passionate attachment; indeed, it would depend on an act of judgment that at once presupposes and enacts the extinction of passion.

Godard himself perhaps invited such a reading when, in a 1963 interview, he spoke of the subject of his film as being ‘people who look at one another and judge one another, and who are then in turn looked at and judged by cinema …’¹ Looking is indeed central to Contempt, but the looks that express contempt as well as those that react to it, far from signifying the dissolution of the couple, reduce the entire relational field to the structure of the intimately conjoined couple. This effect can be missed only if we identify with the apparently despised husband in Godard’s film. Paul, the distressed object of contempt, obsessively seeks to understand why his wife now finds him contemptible, which for him means why she has turned away from him. He thus fails to see, in a sense we will presently elaborate upon, that she has never been closer to him. And criticism makes the same mistake when, rising above Paul’s anguish but remaining nonetheless faithful to his perspective, it describes Contempt as ‘a ceremony depicting a love lost’, the breakdown of ‘a complete and ideal love by instances of distrust’.² In other words, the interpretive point of departure for criticism, as for Paul, has been the destruction of the couple. The work of interpretation then consists of looking for the cause of the estrangement, a search conducted by Paul by means of his repeated, unsuccessful demand: ‘Dis-moi pourquoi tu me méprises [Tell me why you feel contempt for me].’

We want to ask a very different question: what is the appeal of contempt, both for Camille and for Godard as a filmmaker? This is by no means to suggest that Camille and Godard are, as it were, attracted to contempt for the same reasons. But in both cases we will be turning our attention away from the psychic origins of contempt and toward its effects in the world. In the case of Camille, this means examining the strategic advantages of contempt rather than the psychic events leading to a devastating ethical judgment. And in the case of the film-maker, the question can only be: what does contempt do to cinematic space? How does it affect the visual field with which Godard works, and especially the range and kinds of movement allowed for in that space?

Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a writer whose unrealised ideal is to write for the theatre, is offered a well-paying job by the brash, vulgar, macho American producer Jeremiah (Jerry) Prokosch (Jack Palance). Prokosch is producing a film version of Homer’s Odyssey; unhappy with the work of his director Fritz Lang (played by Fritz Lang), Prokosch wants to hire Paul ‘to write some new scenes for the Odyssey … not just sex … but more … more …’³ The producer, as Paul immediately sees, doesn’t really know exactly what he wants ‘more’ of (except for the sex), but he probably means more of the sort of Hollywood spectacle with which Lang is of course only too familiar and which he apparently refuses to provide. Paul, whose sympathies will be with Lang rather than with Jerry, is nonetheless tempted to accept the latter’s offer because, as Prokosch accurately and maliciously tells him, he needs the money and has a very beautiful wife. The wife is Camille, a twenty-eight-year-old former secretary (Brigitte Bardot), and Paul needs the money to pay for an apartment they have just bought in Rome (where the first two-thirds of the film takes place).

This potentially providential arrangement is endangered very early in the film when, invited by Jerry to come to his place for a drink after seeing some rushes from The Odyssey at Cinecittà, Paul encourages Camille to drive with Jerry in his red Alfa Romeo to the producer’s home while he, Paul, will take a cab. This begins the fall from that happy period of their love when, as Camille says in a voice-over later on, ‘Everything happened with a rapid, mad,enchanted spontaneity and I would find myself once again in Paul’s arms without remembering what had happened.’ Camille will now repeatedly look at Paul with distrust and aversion, and, at the end of the extraordinary scene in their apartment which takes up one third of the film – a scene at once tedious, oppressive and brilliantly executed – she announces to Paul that she no longer loves him, that in fact she has only contempt for him. Camille nonetheless accompanies Paul to Capri, where part of The Odyssey will be filmed. Her contempt is perhaps irrevocably confirmed when Paul, repeating his earlier, presumably despicable behaviour, encourages Camille to return with Jerry to the producer’s villa while he, Paul, stays on the boat where Lang and his crew have been shooting scenes from the Nausicaa episode in Homer. While Camille will later say that she would rather die than reveal the reasons for her contempt, and while Paul’s unrelenting and anguished pressure can make her say nothing more specific than the accusation ‘You’re not a man’, nearly all the film’s spectators seem to share Paul’s final speculation: Camille feels that Paul, sensing that Prokosch is attracted to her, has been encouraging her to be alone with the producer as a way of securing Jerry’s professional good graces. Although Paul, hoping to convince Camille that her suspicions are unfounded, will announce his decision not to continue with the film (and to return to his writing for the theatre), Camille’s contempt is unaffected by Paul’s sacrifice and she accepts a ride back to Rome with Prokosch. The two are killed in a crash seconds after Jerry speeds his Alfa Romeo out of a service station onto the autostrada and into a truck. The film ends with Paul’s farewell to Lang on the roof-terrace of the Villa Malaparte in Capri. Lang, who says that we must finish what we have begun, is shooting the scene of Odysseus’ first view of Ithaca at the end of his ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War. Godard’s and Lang’s cameras approach one another by means of diagonal tracking movements from right to left; at the point where they are about to meet, Godard’s camera continues its progress with a pan from right to left that leaves behind Lang and his crew (including Godard, who appears briefly as Lang’s assistant) and the actor playing Odysseus who is filmed from behind, arms raised, looking over the sea toward his homeland. The final image, in which we do not see Ithaca, is a still of the sea and the sky; we hear the word ‘Silence!’ twice (once in French, and once in Italian), and the word ‘FIN’, in blue letters against a black background, will itself disappear in a final black dissolve.

We risk the tedium of this plot summary in order to emphasise the unpromising and improbable nature of the film’s ‘story’. While the vast number of interviews Godard has given – and especially the more recent ones – bring an invaluable perspective to his work as a film-maker, some of his comments about Contempt don’t take us much further than the presumed psychological or ethical lesson to be learned from this story. The film, he claimed in an interview from the same year the work came out, should give us ‘a fleeting feeling of the vanity of all things’. Contempt is about men cut off from the gods and from the world, and the drama of Camille and Paul is that of a chance misunderstanding that somehow ends in catastrophe.⁴ Such statements might describe the mediocre novel by Alberto Moravia, Il disprezzo, from which the film was taken, but it has nothing to say about the confrontation between that novel, which also includes the account of a filmic version of The Odyssey, and the Godard film which at once imitates and betrays the relation in the novel between the doomed contemporary couple and the filming of the ancient epic that celebrates the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. Godard was aware of the poor quality of his literary source. He called Moravia’s novel a common roman de gare – the kind of book you buy before boarding a train – ‘full of classical and outmoded feelings, in spite of the modernity of the situations. But,’ he added, ‘it’s with that kind of novel that beautiful films are often made.’⁵

What is the secret of this cinematic alchemy? Godard puts into question the interest and even the ethical validity of a subject treated by Moravia with great seriousness: desire and lost love. Moravia’s work unintentionally parodies the literature of desire and of psychological analysis to which it belongs. While exploiting a mildly clever analogy and contrast between the desire-ridden modern couple and the (presumably) psychologically neutral couple of Homer’s world, Moravia manages to make of that contrast nothing more than the melancholy and mystified longing of a psychologically saturated consciousness. Godard is also interested in the relation to Homer – especially, it would seem, in the connections between the modern couple’s estrangement and Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage. His film implicitly asks how the modern couple ‘remembers’ the ancient couple, and in so doing it proposes an original and valuable view of any presumed relation to the past. Both the film and the novel offer an interpretation of Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage in which it prefigures the troubled union of Camille and Paul in Godard, and Riccardo and Emilia in Moravia. This reading is proposed by the German director Reingold in Il disprezzo; it is initiated by Prokosch and stubbornly and unconvincedly elaborated by Paul in Contempt. The intellectually smug Reingold insists on modernising The Odyssey, by which he means dissecting it, examining its internal mechanism, and putting it together again, as he says, ‘according to our modern requirements’. These requirements are, unsurprisingly, psychological or, more specifically, psychoanalytic: ‘we shall’, Reingold promises, or warns, Riccardo, ‘explore the mind of Ulysses – or rather, his subconscious’.⁶ The dissection and exploration lead to an interpretation echoed by Paul in his conversation with Lang in Capri. Reingold summarises his findings for Riccardo:

Point one: Penelope despises Ulysses for not having reacted like a man, like a husband, and like a king, to the indiscreet behaviour of the Suitors … Point two: her contempt causes the departure of Ulysses to the Trojan War … Point three: Ulysses, knowing that he is awaited at home by a woman who despises him, delays his return as long as he can … Point four: in order to regain Penelope’s esteem and love, Ulysses slays the Suitors … d’you understand, Molteni?⁷

Godard gives to Lang Riccardo’s refutation of this psychologising rewriting of The Odyssey, a refutation that implicitly appeals to the theory of epic objectivity developed by Hegel in the section of the Aesthetics devoted to poetry. Lang’s argument repeats almost word for word this impassioned response on the part of Riccardo to Reingold’s reading of Homer:

The beauty of the Odyssey consists precisely in the belief in reality as it is and as it presents itself objectively … in this same form, in fact, which allows of no analysis or dissection and which is exactly what it is: take it or leave it … In other words … the world of Homer is a real world … Homer belonged to a civilisation which had developed in accordance with, not in antagonism to, nature … That is why Homer believed in the reality of the perceptible world and saw it in a direct way, as he represented it, and that is why we too should accept it as it is, believing in it as Homer believed in it, literally, without going out of our way to look for hidden meanings.⁸

Godard obviously sympathises with Lang, but, as we shall see, his film is also ironic about any secure view of the past; it implicitly puts into question the assumption that the past is fini...