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Apparatus Theory: CONTEMPT (1963) – New 4K Restoration!

Runtime: 103 mins | Release Year: 1963 | Rating: NR | Genre(s): Drama, Romance
Production Country: Italy | Original Language: Italian

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New 4K Restoration! 

 

Apparatus Theory is a new bimonthly series focusing on films about filmmaking or the act of picking up a camera. The series is curated and hosted by Saffron Maeve. 

 

Adapted from Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris) takes up the collision between classical film sensibilities, Hollywood commerciality, and the French New Wave’s unbridled stamina through the dissolution of a relationship. 

 

When brusque American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Parlance) hires Paul (Michel Piccoli), a rising French playwright, to rework sequences of an adaptation of The Odyssey directed by Fritz Lang (playing himself), the writer does not anticipate the subsequent collapse of his marriage. Feeling increasingly used by Paul, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), his wife, begins to rapidly detach from him, a breakdown in communication which is reflected in the ongoing epic production. 

 

Contempt’s film-within-a-film framework sees marriage as a kind of film style to be tweaked and disassembled. Its layered sense of adaptation—Moravia’s book, Homer’s source text, Lang’s involvement, Godard’s own marriage to Anna Karina—creates an intermedial landscape for misunderstanding, delusion, and aesthetic friction to run amok. (SAFFRON MAEVE) 

 

Content flags: domestic violence, fatality involving some blood.

 

About the Curator

Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic, film programmer, and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. She is a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, and her writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Variety, Reverse Shot, Notebook, and more. She also curates CONTOURS, a series of films which thematize visual art, at Paradise Theatre, and has programmed at TIFF, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Cinematheque (BC), and Spectacle Theater. 

 

Part of the Apparatus Theory series!

Cast/Crew Info
Director: Jean-Luc Godard | Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Giorgia Moll, Linda Veras