POP ART IN MOVIES
Pop Art has started in UK, as a manifestation of a mass culture rather than an elite culture.
This short documentary explains the phenomenon
Stanley Kubrick - Clockwork Orange
Some pictures of Pop Art exhibitions, namely objects that have a sexual atribute immediately evoke that great picture of Stanley Kubrick «Clockwork Orange» and the settings of a dystopian futuristic society.
I watched the film in the 70’s. I remember I went alone to the cinema and during the intermission I was tempted to leave because the film was raising uneasy and uncomfortable feelings of disgust. I’ve watched it more recently and I suppose we have got so used to violence in movies that it doesn’t affect us as it did in those days.
However, the impact was such at the time accusing the film to promote violence that Kubrick had it removed from distribution during a decade.
An analysis of the picture is available in many articles and vídeos in the Internet, this is just one of them - http://www.shmoop.com/clockwork-orange/themes.html
The Pop Art ambience is very present in the movie’s settings, just watch the trailer
Jacques Tati - Playtime
Jacques Tati was a french director, ator and screenwriter. Recently I watched his old movies Playtime, Mon Oncle..., where he parodies the modern times, modern appliances, modern furniture, mostly the consumerist society. He played himself his famous character Monsieur Hulot.
I watched an interview of Tati in a setting where the façades of modern skyscrapers are moved around to his films.
«They include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure-cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.» (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tati)
Pedro Almodovar pictures
Searching for Pop Art expression in other countries I found some articles on spanish film director Pedro Almodôvar. In fact I had never established this relationship because, Pop Art (for me) highlights a superficial consummer society and Almodovar's pictures are deeper social critique analysis of «taboo» issues in conservative catholic societies.
But I reckon that there is a «kitsch» element in both expressions of Pop Art and Almodovar's aesthetics. The «kitsch is the copy of cultural and artistic objects produced massively for the consumption of the general public. An equivalent spanish term «cursi» stands for the imitation of bourgeois tastes and behaviours aiming at social equality. This «cursi» concept is presente in Almodovar's pictures.
After Franco's dictatorship a pop art movement raised in Spain, known as La Movida and Almodovar is one of the icons.
That kitsch element is expressed in the colourful settings and characters, loud and extroverted, religious iconography, old furniture and decors