lark144
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2012
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- Real Name
- mark gross
After my second screening which I was dragged to kicking and screaming, with that utterly stunning print that looked like Renoir come to life, what initially attracted me to Le Mepris was the way it looked and because of that, I watched it over and over as I had never seen anything like that in a cinema before and grew to consider it Godard's greatest, as all those other elements, which I initially considered off putting, over time, came together. I've never read the novel. Maybe I should at this point. Godard, in the press conference at Cannes, said the novel was one of those superficial tomes you read on long train voyages, but I believe he was being ironic. People these days criticize Godard for putting the specifics of his mercurial relationship with Anna Karina into the film, but those "quotations" and "improvisations" on Godard's part in Le Mepris have a completely different feeling than in Breathless or Pierrot Le Fou. There, they open the films up, create a sense of playfulness and contemporaneity that becomes the films' raison d'etre superseding the narrative, whereas in Le Mepris, because of the classical unity which I'm assuming comes from the novel, those quotations and borrowings from life add to the overwhelming sense of tragedy. Of course, the essential reference, regardless of what was going on in Godard's domestic life at the time, for that pivotal scene is Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, with its own sense of domestic strife mediated by antiquity and the glances of the ancient Gods. So, on a very profound level, Le Mepris is Godard's essay, in image and sound, on Rossellini's film, its lasting influence on him and the other directors of the New Wave, and how those images seep into every day life and change it, how cinema isn't just something we watch in isolation, but more like a river, the air we breathe, the Gods we submit to, a force for change as well as meditation.Saw this for the first time, on the initial blu-ray nearly 15 years ago and didn't warm to it. However, as is the case for me seeing remastered classics in gorgeous, restored 4K UHD versions, I now find it mesmerising. I was just going to sample the disc, but ended up watching the whole film.
So glad 4K UHD didn't peter out after Smurfs 2.