Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard 1963) and Its Story of Cinema: A ‘Fabric of Quotations’

In Le Mépris the cinema has a central presence on various different levels. The making of a film has brought the central characters together and the dramatic processes of film-making are often shown on screen, as a backdrop to the human drama. But woven into this overt presence is another story about the cinema: its histories and its contemporary crises. Only occasionally explicitly reaching the surface of the film, this story is concealed in signs, images and allusions.