A Modern Age Failure

There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement on Homer’s Odyssey. An American producer has asked the film’s screenwriter protagonist to help rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey helmed by the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself, beautifully). The writer comes to meet Lang in the studio and watches a few rushes for the proposed film. All we really see is a series of close-ups of actual Hellenic statues, painted over in sharp colors, while Georges Delerue’s famous score swells and the camera tracks around the figures. It’s an extraordinarily moving sequence; I could cry anytime I see it. Just before the producer interrupts, we get to see what Lang (or rather Godard’s Lang) has done with the story: something slightly alienating and abstract, but not enough to let us pretend we can somehow cinematically leap over the gulf between our own era and that ancient Bronze one. In other words, to make an honest film of something as old as The Odyssey would probably entail filming the grandeur of static, ancient figures, worn by time. The myth may be alive and well among us, but the world it came from is a ruin we can’t quite understand.