In Godard’s color films of the 1960s we
see repeated use of the same three primary colors: red, blue and yellow. Note:
Perhaps yellow can be considered more of an accent color in this scheme, as
Godard uses red and blue much more frequently.
In three films in
particular – Contempt, Pierrot Le Fou, and
La Chinoise – we see identical bold hues
of red, yellow, and blue used over and over again. The color scheme gives
Godard’s color films of the 60s an unmistakable look. Bold, vibrant colors
pulse through the screen: the red book in La Chinoise, the red furniture
in Contempt, Jean Paul Belmondo’s
blue face in Pierrot le Fou. It’s
beautiful. Beautiful and highly stylized (i.e. incongruent to the real world.)
Why does Godard choose to populate his screen with such pretty, unnatural
colors?
Godard’s reds, blues, and yellows
remind me of the beautiful, bold colors in many Warhol works of the early 60s.
In the three car crash paintings below, Warhol imposes gorgeous, unnatural
colors on repulsive, difficult images. The raw prints themselves, in the way
it’s placed outside of their conventional use, alienate the viewer. These
paintings are unwelcoming: instead of inviting us to “live inside the
painting,” to inhabit an attractive fantasy world – the images repulse us. All
the while these horrific images maintain an artificial, surface level beauty
with gorgeous shades of red and purple imposed onto them.
We see the same device used in Godard’s
films. Style and color coats scenes that repulse and alienate the viewer. The
dynamic of highly stylized visuals with unnatural and/or repulsive actions
resonates with our experience in a consumer culture- stimulating visually, but operates
in a way that’s repulsive and alienating.
Mike O'Malley
Okay, but you seem to be overlooking an important historical-technological fact about film stocks and color processing: once upon a time there was Technicolor and three-strip color processing. Film color in the fifties and sixties looks different from film color from the seventies and onwards – and, of course, color in digital cinema is another story altogether. And while the color in some of your examples does indeed look repulsive it also looks (digitally) manipulated. There is nothing repulsive about the actual colors one views in PIERROT LE FOU when one sees it on a big screen or properly projected.
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