“Include me out” – Odysseus on the Margins of European Genre Cinema: Le Mépris, Ulisse, L’Odissea

Christian Pischel

The Diagram

Homer’s Odyssey is considered one of the founding documents of Euro- pean literature. As we know, the text intertwines the motifs of the odys- sey or epic voyage, the intended homecoming, which is constantly being delayed and prevented by temptations and perils, and a structurally analogous narrative. Just as Odysseus traverses the world several times in search of Ithaca, the epic poem unites several temporal levels, narrative voices, and points of view until his return home, where the narrative does not end but culminates in the renewed and condensed mirroring of the entire process, the texture in all its to and fro and back and forth: Athena extends the night so that the reunited couple may tell each other the story of their twenty-year separation. Theresia Birkenhauer writes:1 The Odyssey is as artfully told as the narration is emphatically addressed in the epic. The hero’s labyrinthine parcours through uncanny spaces finds expression in the equally varied forms of discours, of narrative. In what follows, the epic quality of the material will serve as a backdrop against which I will explore three cinematic adaptations of the Odyssey. The films are the major Italo-American co-production Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954) directed by Mario Camerini, which is remembered today mainly because it starred Kirk Douglas, Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) by Jean-Luc Godard, and a lesser-known eight-part television miniseries from 1968 entitled L’Odissea directed by Franco Rossi. Based on the dates alone and read against the cycles of film history, these films are strikingly grouped around a distinct period in the history of European cinema. These three productions mark the era of the epic and sword-and-sandal (peplum) film, which, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, attracted international attention for the second time in Italian film history. While in the 1910s the

1 Theresia Birkenhauer, “Episches Erzählen – ein Erfahrungsraum,” program for Isabel Mundry, Ein Atemzug – die Odyssee, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2005/2006 Season. 196 christian pischel genre had already become a dominant product on the international mar- ket in the form of hugely elaborate and costly feature films, it returned as a low-budget mass product after Pietro Francisci’s 1958 Le Fatiche di Ercole (Hercules) unexpectedly became one of the highest grossing films of the year. Cheaply produced successors followed certain patterns, series, and variations, whose shared characteristics Richard Dyer tersely described as follows:2 Peplum films are adventure films centred on heroes drawn from classical (including Biblical) antiquity played by US bodybuilders. The concept of the male hero and the casting alone already reveal a signif- icant difference between the Homeric epic and the aforementioned film versions. If we examine the historical formation of the genre and insert the adaptations of the Odyssey, what emerges is the diagram of a repeated, reciprocal mismatch. Ulisse, despite its international cast and high budget, did not unleash the wave, but preceded it by several years. Le Mépris, made at the peak of the genre, expresses itself in strongly self-reflexive changes of level, which place the genre, antiquity, and also gender tensions in quotation marks to the point of alienation. And for television L’Odissea shifts to a serial format, at a time when, as the film historian Pierre Sorlin has shown, the Italo-Western had long since supplanted the epic film.3 “Include me out” appears to be Odysseus’s position on the genre. The present essay seeks to describe these films in the constellation between the Homeric epic on the one hand and genre film on the other, and to use these reciprocal relationships to reveal the significant margin- ality of the Odyssey adaptations within genre film. All of the examples are grouped around the genre, but each of them deviates from it in its own way, and this deviation unfolds, as we will see, as a reflection on the rela- tionship between narrative, gender tensions, and subjectivity. Thus each film will be queried as to its specific model of the epic and correlating concept of the subject. As we will see, the reason the films miss the mark lies in the mismatch between genre cinema’s hyperbolic masculine acting subject and the ambivalent subjectivity of the Homeric figure of Odys- seus. This cannot be explained solely on the level of narrative, however, in a purely representative reading of the hero, for example, but emerges only in the question of the concept of the epic that each film projects.

2 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London, 1997), p. 165. 3 Pierre Sorlin, “Die Genrefilm der 1960er Jahre. Kolossalfilm und Western,” in Das goldene Zeitalter des italienischen Films. 1960er Jahre, ed. Thomas Koebner and Irmbert Schenk (Munich, 2008) 371–90.