Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1963 film Contempt—his most commercially successful feature—is best known for its leading lady, Brigitte Bardot, the main event in an all-star cast that included Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, and the legendary director Fritz Lang. It also has the pedigree of its source material: a novel by Alberto Moravia; the sun, sand, and sea of the dazzling Isle of Capri; the modernist Casa Malaparte as its indelible final location; and Godard himself, the foremost exponent of the New Wave, here deconstructing a marriage, a myth, the act of selling out, and cinema itself. As if all that weren’t enough, the lavish production of Contempt served as the springboard for a pair of short black-and-white films, both capturing the Zeitgeist of that glamorous moment. READ ON