28 Feb Frames from the iconic film “Contempt” in a unique photographic technique, will be presented to the Belgrade audience
The Belgrade Irish Festival (BIF) and the “Monolog” gallery will exclusively present the exhibition “Godard Bardo” as part of this year’s BIF. The exhibition will showcase 13 frames from the iconic Jean-Luc Godard film Contempt (French: Le Mépris), starring the legendary Brigitte Bardot. The exhibition will open on Thursday, March 6th at 7:00 PM and will run for the next month.
The exhibition is curated by Irish visual artist Jean Curran, one of the few photographers in the world who uses the nearly extinct “dye-transfer” photographic technique. This technique involves manual photo processing and a special process of applying color directly to photographic paper. The result is authentic, visually striking photographs dominated by rich, saturated colors, offering a new way to portray the film’s frames. All the prints presented by Curran are based on the original film negatives from Contempt, with permission from French StudioCanal, which holds the distribution and restoration rights of the film and plays a significant role in preserving the legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) is one of the most influential films of all time. Its importance in the history of cinema lies in the fact that Godard, unlike his early black-and-white films, used Technicolor and CinemaScope format for the first time here. It is considered that this work, with its striking visual impact and wide-angle composition, redefined the visual language of film. The film’s director of photography, Raoul Coutard, used vibrant colors—especially red, blue, and white—to create a symbolic depth within the film.
The Godard Bardo exhibition is arriving in Belgrade directly from Dublin, where it was first presented to the public at the The Horse gallery. The public will be able to see it at the Belgrade gallery Monolog (Kralja Petra 26) until April 5, 2025.
Exclusively for this exhibition, the great Brigitte Bardot allowed Jean Curran to process frames from Contempt that feature her in nude scenes, using this technique.
The exhibition’s curator, Jean Curran, and the curator who set up the exhibition in Dublin, Nicholas O’Neill, will be guests of the Belgrade Irish Festival. On Saturday, March 8th at 11:00 AM, a talk with the artist and the curator will be held at the Monolog gallery. As part of BIF, and with the support of the French Institute for Culture, the film Contempt will be screened on March 13th at 8:30 PM at the Yugoslav Film Archive (Uzun Mirkova 1).
Jean Curran began her career as a photojournalist in Ireland and Africa. After special training in the dye-transfer technique, she dedicated herself to this form of artistic expression in photography with the aim of recontextualizing early color films and presenting their iconic frames in a new light. Prior to Contempt, she explored Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, and through a series of 20 prints called Project Vertigo, she presented the film in her own way.
Jean-Luc Godard passed away in September 2022 at the age of 91, through assisted suicide in Switzerland, where this is legally allowed. Brigitte Bardot, the muse of the French New Wave and a 20th-century sex symbol, is now 94 and remains dedicated to animal rights activism, which has been her primary focus in recent decades.
© All rights reserved, Jean Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot, StudioCanal.