Use of colour

Most of how Godard treated Bardot in the film was subversive to her image. She never had any sexy outfits, and the one nude shot was really obligatory more than anything. She actually behaves in a more-or-less prudish fashion.

I don't personally feel that Contempt was really an allegory for Godard's own life. The circumstances between Paul and Camille provided an oppurtunity to analyze I guess just the disintegration of a marriage. I see a lot of Antonioni in this film's handling of relationships at least.

I am probably regurgitating a lot of the essay that accompanied the Criterion disc. You can read it at the criterion website. It's pretty long, but I found it to be incredibly revealing.

the wig is very much meant to evoke his wife karina at the time. he is being very critical of his treatment towards her, he views himself as overly macho and unsympathetic.

from jonathan rosenbaum's 'chicago reader' review:

"1. Michelangelo Antonioni. Paul and Camille's exhaustive as well as exhausting scene in their significantly unfinished and mainly white-walled flat is in many ways the sequel to an almost equally protracted scene between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, though that was essentially a long seduction and this is a chronicle of growing disaffection. Unquestionably Antonioni, whom Godard interviewed at length in 1964, is the ruling influence on this scene--on its casual detachment from both characters, novelistic psychological ambiguities, protracted sense of duration, and remarkable feeling for the ebb and flow of a troubled relationship. Back in 1964, when I was blind to the Antonioni influence, I was turned off by Paul's macho insensitivity and what I perceived as Godard's uncritical identification with it; today I'm more inclined to read the same sequence as a profound self-critique.

Much as Antonioni was charting aspects of his relationship with Monica Vitti in all his films of this period (L'avventura, La notte, Eclipse, Red Desert), Godard was examining his relationship with Anna Karina in most of the films that immediately preceded and followed Contempt (Le petit soldat, A Woman Is a Woman, and Vivre sa vie beforehand, and Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, and Made in U.S.A. afterward). In Contempt Godard has Bardot put on a Karina-like black wig at two separate points during the quarrel between Paul and Camille. (Antonioni has a similar wig-changing scene in L'avventura.) It's unfortunate that Kauffmann--who was one of Antonioni's earliest and most passionate American defenders--regarded Godard's masterful protracted sequence in Contempt as bankrupt. To me it's the emotional and thematic core of the film, in part because it registers with much of the same personal urgency as Antonioni's films with and about Vitti. (The same urgency, incidentally, can be found in Roberto Rossellini's films of the 50s with Ingrid Bergman, especially Viaggio in Italia.)"


can be viewed here:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/0997/09057.html

for Krustallos


what do you mean with four languages spoken in the movie?

Very intersting theory.

Wow, thanks for spoiling the movie, *beep*

In the 'nude' scene, the first frame is filtered with a red tint I believe, then goes to white, then to blue. The red represents the passion of their relationship and as the movie progresses, the relationship turns cold (blue).

When Ms. Vanini puts on a red shirt, you see Paul fall for her and attempt to flirt with her. He slaps her buttocks.

I could be completely wrong but red usually helps Paul (the red car kills Camille and Jack Palance by crashing

I think it's more that red is the centre of drama. When they are arguing in their apartment Camille is wearing a red towel and their sofa is also red, and of course the scenes you mentioned involving red are also dramatic. I think Camille wearing the yellow bath robe after Paul allows her to go with Jerry a second time marks her falling out of love with him completely, as yellow is nearer to blue, blue signifying complete indifference. Or perhaps it is because the female extras as well as the secretary also wear the yellow robe, so it could signify their separateness and death of intimacy.

Did you notice how the lighting switches from red to neutral in the nude scene immediately after Camille asks "do you prefer my breasts or nipples?" and Paul answers "I don't know"? His indecision resulting from the fact that he would rather avoid conflict than assert his will could be why he "isn't a man" in Camille's eyes.