Le Mépris

Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt) opened in 1963 and is widely considered Godard's most accessible major work and one of the foundational pieces of European modernist cinema. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022. Adapted from Alberto Moravia's 1954 novel Il disprezzo, the film was made on the largest budget of Godard's career to that point — partly funded by American producers Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti, who would push for and lose various battles with Godard over the final cut.

At Cinecittà studios in Rome and on the Greek-and-Mediterranean coastline of Capri, a French screenwriter named Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is hired by an aggressive American producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the screenplay of a German director's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. The German director is Fritz Lang, playing himself, and the film follows both the production crisis around the adaptation and the parallel crisis between Paul and his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot, in a star-launching art-cinema register).

The film is shot in CinemaScope by Raoul Coutard (Godard's most consistent collaborator), with the long red-walled apartment-set sequence in the central act widely cited as one of the most-discussed extended scenes in 1960s European cinema. Georges Delerue's score is among the most beautiful in the entire Godard filmography. The casting of Bardot — France's most-photographed star at the time — in the central art-cinema role produced one of the most successful collaborations between commercial and auteur French cinema of the period.