What’s your favorite col­or? A sim­ple ques­tion, sure — the very first one many of us learn to ask — but one to con­sid­er seri­ous­ly if you see a future for your­self in film­mak­ing. Ear­li­er this year, we fea­tured video stud­ies on the use of the col­or red by Wes Ander­son and Stan­ley Kubrick. Yasu­jiro Ozu, as Jonathan Crow points out in that post, “made the jump to col­or movies very reluc­tant­ly late in his career and prompt­ly became obsessed with the col­or red,” and a teaket­tle of that col­or even became his visu­al sig­na­ture. No less an auteur than Krzysztof Kieślows­ki made not just a pic­ture called Red, but anoth­er called Blue and anoth­er called White, which togeth­er form the acclaimed “Three Col­ors” tril­o­gy.

Jean-Luc Godard, nev­er one to be out­done, has also made vivid use through­out his career of not just red but white and blue as well. The video above, “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge — A Godard Super­cut,” com­piles three min­utes of such col­or­ful moments from the Godard fil­mog­ra­phy, draw­ing from his works A Woman Is a Woman, Con­tempt, Pier­rot le Fou, and Made in U.S.A., all of which did much to define 1960s world cin­e­ma, cap­tur­ing with their vivid col­ors per­for­mances by Godar­d­ian icons Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do and Anna Kari­na.

“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” comes from Cin­e­ma Sem Lei, the source of anoth­er aes­thet­i­cal­ly dri­ven video essay we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on how Ger­man Expres­sion­ism influ­enced Tim Bur­ton. This one makes less of an argu­ment than that one did, but tru­ly obses­sive cinephiles may still find them­selves able to con­struct one. An obvi­ous start­ing point: we con­sid­er few film­mak­ers as French as Godard, and which coun­try’s flag has these very col­ors? Well, besides those of Amer­i­ca, Aus­tralia, Cam­bo­dia, Chile, Cuba, Ice­land, North Korea, Lux­em­bourg, Schleswig-Hol­stein, Thai­land, and so on. And in inter­views, Godard has dis­tanced him­self from pure French­ness, pre­fer­ring the des­ig­na­tion “Fran­co-Swiss.” But still, you can start think­ing there. Or you can just enjoy the images.

Relat­ed Content:

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

Wes Ander­son Likes the Col­or Red (and Yel­low)

Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of Han­nah Arendt’s “On the Nature of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick (1971)

Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opéra­tion béton(1955) — a Con­struc­tion Doc­u­men­tary

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A gen­er­a­tion grew up watch­ing and re-watch­ing Jim Hen­son’s Labyrinth. Now, their fond mem­o­ries of that musi­cal fantasy—featuring not just Hen­son’s sig­na­ture pup­pets but live actors like Jen­nifer Con­nel­ly and David Bowie—have got them try­ing to turn their own chil­dren on to the movie’s won­ders. Some now regard Labyrinth as a goofy, flam­boy­ant nov­el­ty suit­able for no oth­er audi­ence but chil­dren, but that gives short shrift to the con­sid­er­able craft that went into it. To get a sense of that, we need only take a look at Jim Hen­son’s Red Book.

Hen­son kept the Red Book, a kind of diary writ­ten one line at a time, until 1988, not long after Labyrinth’s release, and it cap­tures intrigu­ing details of the film’s pro­duc­tion. On its site, the Jim Hen­son Com­pa­ny has sup­ple­ment­ed the Red Book’s entries with oth­er mate­ri­als, such as the mak­ing-of clip above, which shows what went into the scene where “Bowie’s char­ac­ter Jareth taunts Sarah (Jen­nifer Con­nel­ly) as she tries to get to her broth­er Toby (Toby Froud) in an elab­o­rate set inspired by the art of Dutch artist and illus­tra­tor M.C. Esch­er.”

Hen­son and his team want­ed to bring into three dimen­sions “Escher’s images of seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble archi­tec­ture where stairs seemed to lead both up and down at the same time. The inabil­i­ty of the view­er to rec­og­nize what is and is not real was a theme the per­me­at­ed some of Jim’s exper­i­men­tal works in the 1960s and was explored at length in the film.” You can watch the still-con­vinc­ing final prod­uct, in which Bowie sings the song “With­in  You” while step­ping and leap­ing from one per­spec­tive-defy­ing plat­form or stair­way to anoth­er, just above. Spe­cial cred­it for pulling all this off goes to the film’s pro­duc­tion design­er Elliot Scott. But from which mem­ber of the team should we demand an expla­na­tion for, by far, the most bizarre visu­al aspect of Labyrinth — David Bowie’s hair?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recre­ate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

Watch The Sur­re­al 1960s Films and Com­mer­cials of Jim Hen­son

Jim Henson’s Orig­i­nal, Spunky Pitch for The Mup­pet Show

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Every­one remem­bers their first kung-fu movie — or every­one remem­bers their first wave of kung-fu movies, any­way. For some, they came late at night on the less-explored fre­quen­cies of the tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing spec­trum; for oth­ers, they came on sparse­ly attend­ed dou­ble- and triple-bills at the local dis­count the­ater. They looked fad­ed and mud­dy, but some­how still vivid; they felt cheap­ly pro­duced, yet full of life and ener­gy; and as for how they sound­ed, time has turned their both hol­low and the­atri­cal Eng­lish-lan­guage dub­bing into an art form with con­nois­seurs of its own. They came from far­away lands, which ren­dered them exot­ic, but we expe­ri­enced them almost as dreams, prod­ucts of anoth­er real­i­ty alto­geth­er. And some of them you can expe­ri­ence again as pub­lic domain films.

We still call them “kung fu movies” even though, hav­ing grown old­er and wis­er — or at least more cul­tur­al­ly aware — we now know their heroes did­n’t always defeat their ene­mies with the Chi­nese mar­tial arts cov­ered by that umbrel­la term. But the label applies well enough to 1977’s Leg­end of Shaolin, the Hong Kong-made epic at the top of the post set in the 13th-cen­tu­ry Yuan Dynasty and deal­ing with that most kung-fu of all themes, revenge. But such his­tor­i­cal “kung fu” pic­tures could also come from coun­tries like Japan, an exam­ple of which you can thrill to just above: 1983’s Leg­end of the Eight Samu­rai fea­tures Son­ny Chi­ba, liv­ing embod­i­ment of the 1970s mar­tial-arts film, under the direc­tion of the pro­lif­ic and respect­ed provo­ca­teur Kin­ji Fukasaku, best known today as the mak­er of the con­tro­ver­sial Bat­tle Royale.

Next in this pub­lic-domain mar­tial-arts marathon, we have anoth­er Hong Kong movie, Guy with the Secret Kung Fu from 1981, whose title alone strikes me as rec­om­men­da­tion enough. And for our final selec­tion, we move to a more con­tem­po­rary set­ting with 1987’s Four Rob­bers, where­in the tit­u­lar quartet—pursued by both the police and a malev­o­lent crime syn­di­cate that at first wants to recruit them and lat­er wants revenge against them—have to flee from Hong Kong to Thai­land with­out gam­bling away the fruits of their labor or com­pro­mis­ing their prin­ci­ples. This movie, and many oth­ers of its kind, give the lie to the notion that there’s no hon­or among thieves. Most all of the wan­der­ers, samu­rai, rebels, aris­to­crats, cops, and rob­bers you see in them have one kind of hon­or or anoth­er — but when they come into con­flict, it tends to take some old-fash­ioned kung-fu fight­ing to set­tle things. You can find these films added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More, which includes more 23 Free Kung Fu and Mar­tial Arts Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

700 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Rad­i­cal French Phi­los­o­phy Meets Kung-Fu Cin­e­ma in Can Dialec­tics Break Bricks? (1973)

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

The 5 Best Noir Films in the Pub­lic Domain: From Fritz Lang’s Scar­let Street to Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hik­er

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.