Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image)

Abstract

The photographic image——conceived as .at, reproducible, and mobile——is integral to Fredric Jameson's influential description of the postmodern as marking an evacuation of historical thinking. This essay argues that Jean-Luc Godard's early work, and his 1963 film Le Méé;pris (Contempt) in particular, represents a sustained attempt to use images to promote a type of historical thinking for which Jameson's definition of the postmodern, however relevant to Godard, cannot account.

Pure Cinema? Blanchot, Godard, Le Mépris

“…18 Nicholas Paige notes that in Cahiers du cinéma during the 1950s and early 1960s, the terms 'classic' and 'modern' were 'continually if unsystematically invoked in order to map out the relation between present cinematic production and everything from Greek tragedy and Hollywood to Pierre Boulez and abstract expressionism.' 19 But the opposition is placed in the foreground in Le Mépris. Marc Cerisuelo describes Le Mépris as 'the only truly modern film in the sense that it stages the difference between classic and modern.'…”