Melodrama and Its Aura: Godard's 'Contempt'

Abstract

As an allegory of its own making—and of filmmaking in general—Godard’s Contempt (1963) has been the subject of countless interpretations. For all the attention it has received, however, there is one crucial aspect of the film that awaits consideration: melodrama, in the sense of a spoken text alternating with, or being recited against, music. Godard uses George Delerue’s original soundtrack in an openly demonstrative mode, as if to prove Bernard Herrmann’s oft-quoted statement that music lifts “mere dialogue into the realm of poetry.” But the transformation undergone by the dialogue is sometimes so egregious as to seem artificial. Moreover, the timing of the music cues is gratuitous enough to make one wonder whether the director is employing music in a self-consciously capricious fashion. Finally, the lack of conventional transitions in the soundtrack – sound overlaps, audio dissolves – foregounds the editing process itself. As a result, while on the one hand music and words combine as a single gestalt—a form of exalted speech—on the other they also emerge as two separate tracks, reflecting different stages of the filmmaking process. By soliciting mutually exclusive modes of perception, the film not only defamiliarizes us with underscoring as a cinematic practice but also restores a primordial sense of what melodrama is beyond cinema, beyond musical theatre. Nostalgia for an older era of movie making, evidence of which fills the movie from beginning to end, is thus subsumed within nostalgia for ancient, irretrievable forms of poetic delivery.