Color in <i>Contempt</i>

Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le mépris (Contempt, 1963) adapts Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (Contempt, 1954) to tell the story of an unraveling marriage set against the narrative backdrop of a producer, scriptwriter, and director (Fritz Lang playing Fritz Lang) struggling to make a Technicolor movie of Homer’s Odyssey. In Lang’s mise en abyme, human actors made-up in vivid colors play Odysseus, Penelope, a centaur, and a Siren, while painted plaster casts of ancient statues perform as the Olympian gods and Homer. These painted statues intervene in long-standing debates about paint on sculpture and invoke the instability of commercial color film technologies to take aim at the fixed tradition of a monochrome classical past and the gendered, racialized associations that past had so often been designed to conjure.