Pop Art was born in the 1950’s and became the dominant art movement of the 60’s, when Godard was making his film. One of the principals of Pop Art was to take a sample of elements present in consumer society, such as objects, pictures, advertising texts and comic strips and remove them from their natural context, isolating them, sometimes combining them and inviting them to be seen as works of art.
This is exactly what Goddard does in this sequence. He isolates the speech bubbles from comic strips, the words and phrases from Ferrania and Total advertising billboards, places grafitti over them (the burst of shots on the word ‘Liberty’), he puts his actors in front of bill hoardings where the adverts have been ripped off, rendering them as random, unpredictable collages of colour, much in the style of the artist Rotella. In the shot where Anna Karina is stretched out on the floor of the garage, Godard composes an arrangement of primary coloured objects around her, placing in the frame a red car jack and the blue lid of a paint pot to suggest the colours of the French flag in this ironically titled film, Made in USA.
Comment
Pop Art was born in the 1950’s and became the dominant art movement of the 60’s, when Godard was making his film. One of the principals of Pop Art was to take a sample of elements present in consumer society, such as objects, pictures, advertising texts and comic strips and remove them from their natural context, isolating them, sometimes combining them and inviting them to be seen as works of art.
This is exactly what Goddard does in this sequence. He isolates the speech bubbles from comic strips, the words and phrases from Ferrania and Total advertising billboards, places grafitti over them (the burst of shots on the word ‘Liberty’), he puts his actors in front of bill hoardings where the adverts have been ripped off, rendering them as random, unpredictable collages of colour, much in the style of the artist Rotella. In the shot where Anna Karina is stretched out on the floor of the garage, Godard composes an arrangement of primary coloured objects around her, placing in the frame a red car jack and the blue lid of a paint pot to suggest the colours of the French flag in this ironically titled film, Made in USA.