In our 50th episode we take a bit of a roundabout look at the Odyssey on film. We discuss some of the creative challenges and opportunities faced by filmmakers who choose to take on this epic poem that inspired Classical Greece, but predated it by many centuries.
Of course, its influence casts a very long shadow over Western art and culture down the ages, and its origins – most likely in oral, semi-improvised song/storytelling – have intrigued academics and historians for centuries.
As the focus of our discussion is the creative interpretation of the filmmaker, we look in a bit more detail at one film, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Odyssey-themed Le Mépris (Contempt), starring Michel Piccoli, Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Fritz Lang.
Our guests are Maren Thom and Alex Dale, writers and commentators on film, TV and theatre, and presenters of the podcast Performance Anxiety.
We’ve been thinking about how to approach this episode for a while. I had read author and Classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2017 memoir, An Odyssey.
Mendelsohn explores some of the themes in the Odyssey through the prism of a term spent teaching it to a class of young undergraduates, along with his 81-year-old father. Mendelsohn Senior is a seemingly hard-nosed, Brooklyn-raised Maths professor who sees in Odysseus not a hero but a ‘sissy’ who cries too much and is rescued by the Gods whenever he gets into bother.
The experience reveals much, changes and deepens the relationship between father and son, who have never quite seen eye-to-eye. An Odyssey, then, is partly a study of relationships – father-son, teacher-student, intergenerational etc. And Mendelsohn uses this as a very subtle pretext to explore similar themes in the Odyssey itself. In short, there’s much more to the epic poem than nymphs and one-eyed monsters.
Over the Christmas holidays I got around to reading the Odyssey itself for the first time. Daniel Mendelsohn’s own translation was published in 2025. I read mainly that, but took the opportunity to dip in and out of different translations on the way, from Penguin Classics, to Emily Wilson’s alleged ‘feminist’ take, to Alexander Pope’s early C18th classic, which Mendelsohn describes as the best translation of anything, ever.
I barely scratched the surface of the book, but reading it threw up some possibilities for podcasts – the idea of the journey in art and literature, translation as a creative endeavour perhaps, ancient tradition of oral/improvised storytelling.
And then of course there’s film, which is why I thought immediately of the wonderful Performance Anxiety podcast, and sought the help of Alex Dale and Maren Thom.
So we agreed a show based on simply comparing films wouldn’t be the best approach, and I was scratching my head to find films that might give us something to work with. I carried on reading, carried on thinking, then I stumbled upon Le Mépris, Godard’s film that, per chance, seemed to address both my original question and theirs (which we talk about in the podcast).
Godard’s film is centred on an ambitious young playwright who is invited, or perhaps enticed to become involved in a production of the Odyssey (to be shot on the island of Capri) by the film’s brash American producer, who wants a blockbuster and thinks the current director, Fritz Lang (playing himself), is making some incomprehensible European arthouse cinema.
But that’s the starting point for the film, which then becomes about the playwright’s relationship with his beautiful and enigmatic wife, played by Brigitte Bardot.
We thought that Le Mépris might provide us with an ideal opportunity to talk about the creative process of the filmmaker, and ask if maybe Godard was trying to find ways to express truths – symbolic or moral etc. – from the Odyssey that maybe a more straightforward telling might not.
Finally, we discuss some of the themes in Maren’s recent article about pre-release criticisms of Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey, and look forward to the release of the film (we recorded this episode before the film’s release).
Links
Performance Anxiety podcast
Can Nolan’s Odyssey survive the culture war?
An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn
Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard
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