January 2016

When Hitler traveled to Rome to meet Mussolini in 1938, Elsa Morante was standing by her window with a pot of boiling oil on the stove. The duo's parade route was going to pass just below her apartment, and she planned to throw the…

Jhe title of Jean-Luc Godard's first color film is not wrong. Contempt (Contempt in French) was the only thing that was not missing when the filmmaker decamped to Cinecitta studios in Rome to shoot a film of a novel by Alberto Moravia (for…

I first saw Contempt many years ago in an impression so washed out everything was pale pink; it was like contemplating an artifact from an immeasurable past. Watching the film now, with its Mediterranean reds and blues rediscovered in…