Contempt · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Half an hour of this film is a single argument in an apartment, and the argument is already over before it starts. Paul and Camille move through the rooms of their half-furnished Rome flat — bath, hallway, the bedroom, back to the kitchen — and Godard refuses to cut away from any of it. He lets the bad conversation run at the length of a real bad conversation: the doublings-back, the wounded silences, the traffic rising from the street below to fill the spaces where something should be said and isn't. Nothing is decided here, because the thing that mattered was decided somewhere off-screen, in a moment we never see. Camille has stopped loving Paul. That is the whole event, and it has no scene.

This is what Gilles Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image. In classical cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act resolves the situation, and the cuts carry us along that chain. Paul cannot do this. He can argue, apologize, follow her from room to room, but none of it reaches the fact of her contempt, because contempt is not a problem to be solved — it is, as the film stages it, a verdict already passed. Bardot plays it as exactly that: not a dramatic outburst but a categorical withdrawal, communicated in micro-adjustments of attention, a turning-away. Deleuze would call her here a seer (a voyant) rather than an agent — someone who watches and endures rather than acts. And the apartment sequence is built almost entirely from what he named pure optical and sound situations: stretches where looking and listening are all that's available, where the everyday is simply held, with no exit through action. The proper name for those held stretches is temps mort — dead time. Most films cut dead time out. Godard makes it the load-bearing wall.

It helps to see where he learned this. The method is Antonioni's: La Notte, two years earlier, had already tracked a marriage dissolving in real time through the rooms of a party, the camera observing the distance between two people instead of amplifying it. Godard takes that and adds a frame built for the opposite purpose. He shot Contempt in CinemaScope — the wide 2.35:1 format invented for cavalry and spectacle — and used it, after Nicholas Ray's domestic melodramas, to put a husband and wife at opposite horizontal edges of the same image, an ocean of empty screen between them in a shared room. The format that was supposed to fill the eye becomes an instrument for measuring separation.

But the marriage is only half of it, and the other half is why this film keeps mattering to people who make films. Inside the story, a film is being made: Fritz Lang, playing himself, is directing a version of the Odyssey, and refusing to betray it, while the American producer Prokosch wants spectacle and Bardot's body. Cinema is filming itself filming. This is Deleuze's crystal-image — the point where the image and its own reflection become hard to tell apart, where a film holds a mirror up to its own making. Contempt announces it in the first shot, before a word of plot: Coutard's camera glides along a track and then turns, slowly, until its lens is pointed straight at us. The machine looks back. (Vertov had done it in 1929, the cameraman and the apparatus made visible; Godard cites the gesture and makes it a greeting.) From that moment the image asks to be read rather than simply watched — what Deleuze called a lectosign, the picture that has lost its automatic, sensory-motor obviousness and become a thing to decipher. The colored gels over the opening love-scene do the same work: Bardot's nudity passed through red, white and blue until it reads as the French flag, a painted surface, an argument about the very demand (the producer's, Joseph Levine's) that put it there.

The crystal, here, is also rotting — and Deleuze had a finer word for that too: crystal-decomposition, an ordered, aristocratic world decaying from within. Lang is that world. Seventy-three years old, carrying Weimar, exile from the Nazis, the long Hollywood decline, he occupies the frame as a historical fact — Deleuze would read his stillness as a gest, a posture that exposes a whole social relation without acting it out. He stands for a classical cinema of artistic conscience, and the film watches it being out-priced by Prokosch throwing film cans across a screening room. Sunset Boulevard had taught Godard this move — cast the living industry as itself, let DeMille or Lang carry biography into the fiction. The difference is that Godard makes the decomposition the subject. The death of the marriage and the death of a certain idea of cinema are the same wound, scored by Delerue's swooping string theme, which returns and returns over beauty and grief alike until it feels less like accompaniment than mourning that has detached from any single cause.

What did this do to film? It proved that a movie could think about its own conditions — money, the gaze, the contract with a star — without leaving the story, and that the slow accumulation of dead time could carry more devastation than any plot turn. It descends from Rossellini's Journey to Italy, where an Italian landscape and its ruins do the work an interior monologue used to do; the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Villa Malaparte registers Camille's withdrawal the way archaeology registered Katherine's in 1954. And it seeds everything reflexive that follows. Watch it again for the apartment, the part where nothing happens. That is the part that is happening.