Le Mépris and its story of cinema: a fabric of quotations

Abstract

This essay suggests that the first part of Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) is about cinema, its histories and its contemporary crises. Together, the three sequences form a triptych in which the old that Godard loved, especially Hollywood, is enunciated through the new he believed in. Le Mépris is determined by the context of the end of classical cinema and the emergence of new forms of revolutionary narrative. The unifying thread that ties these oblique references together is the world of cinéphilia, Godard’s formative years as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinéma and the films and directors he had written about and loved during the 1950s. The sequences of this triptych form a series of palimpsests, bringing something from past into the present, which then inscribes the present onto the past. In a similar but different manner, ghostly rather than textual, the actors too have meaning layered into their present fictional roles. Only occasionally explicitly reaching the surface of the film, this story is concealed in signs, images and allusions. An example for that is the analysis in this essay of the posters outside the screening room, which overlap an extra layer of time and meaning on the film, enabling the viewer to review the history of cinema. The interaction of these layers, which are simultaneously put together and which depend on one another is what is truly contradictory, modernist and emotional in Le Mépris.