What exactly is Le Mépris?
Sophie Belot (University of Sheffield)
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This paper proposes to reconsider Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) through a phenomenological analysis of emotion (as articulated by Merleau-Ponty). Many studies have underlined the film’s simple narrative intertwined with complex intertextual references. These studies have also privileged the latter to the detriment of the former. Le Mépris is the story of a woman who starts despising her husband, perceiving him as compromising himself (or his ‘manliness’) by working for an American production. Without overlooking the complex textual relations, this study will restore to the film (and cinema) its original simplicity, by focusing on the perception of lived emotion. I will claim that contempt, as a position characterised by an intentional avoidance of the other, informs the film’s reflexive form based on what fails (avoids) representation, that is to say the lived body. This behaviour is epitomised by the husband struggling to perceive (and understand) his wife’s changing attitude towards him. In this sense, Godard challenges classical cinema’s reliance on emotion for spectatorial experience of the film’s narrative and suggests a new cinematographic structural form for emotion. More specifically for this film, Godard emphasises the significance of a phenomenological position to unravel the complexity underpinned by images of contempt/Contempt. A close reading of key scenes will aim to show that Le Mépris is fundamentally about cinema (in its phenomenological sense), as implied by the question in the title referring to André Bazin’s volume, What is cinema?, which informs Godard’s cinematographic body. In other words, for Godard, cinema is a (self-)reflexive space, as in films such as Le Mépris, which focuses on a reflection of emotion as an intentional (re)presentation of being in the world.
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