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Godard's Color
Film/Video
Several of Jean-Luc Godard's early films, including Contempt (1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965, both above), combine broad lateral compositions in CinemaScope with bold eruptions of primary colors that simultaneously collapse and dynamize space. Both sequences incorporate Surrealist disruptions of ordinary perceptual logic, but the extract from Contempt is more striking for its sense of paradox. It is the first of many explorations of Dantean and Odyssean imagery and metaphors in Godard's work, but it remains an open question whether the painted eyes and planes of color are entirely parodic or a way of returning to origins by other means (many ancient statues we now see as stark ivory were originally polychromed in ways contemporary audiences would find gaudy). The emphasis here is on translation not only across languages, but also across time. Like the sequence from First Name Carmen (1983, left), the sequence is also startling for its unabashed Romanticism.
The clip from the video Scénario du film 'Passion' (1982, below) fuses together the Romantic motifs, aspirations, and yearnings embodied by the superimposition of a painting, Tintoretto’s The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne (1578), and a silhouette of Godard with hands outstretched like a demiurge. There are a series of overlapping associations that resonate with Godard’s position and practice: the tactility of Tintoretto’s painting style and his sensuous depiction of bodies; his status as both the end of a line of Venetian painting and someone who made innovative use of the artistic resources and technologies of his age to push his aesthetic further; as well as his plastic facility and complex relationship to tradition.
Godard suggests in the video that the painting resonates with the subject of his own film Passion – one man and two women and the idea of a sacred trinity.
Élie Faure had discussed Tintoretto as a proto-cinematic figure due to his symphonic movement, emphasis on flux, and whirlwinds of color in the Renaissance Art section of his multivolume History of Art, a key reference point for Godard’s Cathedral-like four-and-a-half hour epic, Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998).
The Seach for an Ending
In Praise of Love (2001) sets luminous black-and white-footage of Paris in the first half against the heavily oversaturated video palette of the second ends with a jerky and pixelated homage to the Lumières.
Godard had been using video to eulogize a lost celluloid paradise since the 1970s, but, in retrospect, this richly complex and deeply moving film also seems to have been pointing, with characteristic ambiguity, towards cinema’s capacity for perpetual renewal, dialectically incorporating within itself both poles of a debate that has shaped the past quarter-century.
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Film Music
