Le Mépris

Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt) opened in 1963. It is his most accessible major work and one of the foundation stones of European modernist cinema, and it entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022. Adapted from Alberto Moravia's 1954 novel Il disprezzo, it was made on the largest budget of Godard's career to that point, partly funded by the American producer Joseph E. Levine and the Italian Carlo Ponti, who pushed for, and lost, various battles with Godard over the final cut.

At the Cinecittà studios in Rome and on the Mediterranean coastline of Capri, a French screenwriter, 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's troubles and a parallel crisis between Paul and his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot, in the role that took her into art cinema).

Raoul Coutard, Godard's most consistent collaborator, shot it in CinemaScope, and the long sequence in the red-walled apartment at the film's centre is one of the most-discussed extended scenes in 1960s European cinema. Georges Delerue's score may be the most beautiful in the entire Godard filmography. Casting Bardot, then France's most-photographed star, in the central role made this one of the period's most successful meetings of commercial and auteur French cinema.