dominant pop art movement, making constant disjunctive references to various elements of mass culture. Like much pop art, the film uses visuals drawn from cartoons and employs an intentionally garish visual aesthetic based on bright primary colors. The aesthetics of Godard's previous films had been based around intellectual modernism, such as in Une femme mariee (1964) and sometimes film-noir conventions, for instance in Breathless (1960). Richard Brody writes for the Criterion Collection that Godard's political anger at the escalation of the Vietnam War and waning inspiration from Obsession's original noir-like storyline led him to achieve "new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention" on the film. As in many pop art works, such as those of Roy Lichtenstein, Pierrot le fou prominently utilizes text, often pre-existing, to comment on its own story and ideas, isolating and highlighting the extradiegetic information that is normally semiconsciously absorbed. For instance, just before their first major confrontation with the OAS, Ferdinand and Marianne walk past a sign with a warning about a harbor-front drop that reads "danger de mort" (danger of death), foreshadowing their deaths. Godard often uses commercial text in the film and recontextualizes it, such as the word "total," appearing at a gas station, taking on the extra significance of the term "sum total," which is uttered by Ferdinand soon after. Artistry Richard Brody draws a parallel between Ferdinand's "vast, cosmic, quasi-metaphysical artistic dreams" and Godard's "own search for another kind of cinematic art, one that goes beyond the visual presentation of objects and characters to a higher relation of musical ideas." He points to the film's first scene, in which Ferdinand sits in his bathtub and reads a passage from the art critic Élie Faure on Diego Velázquez. After the film's release, Godard claimed in making the film, he was attempting "to convey the sense of what Balthazar Claës was doing in The Unknown Masterpiece," referencing a novella by Balzac, who is referenced in the film's opening and closing scenes. The Unknown Masterpiece is about a French painter who has been working alone for years on a portrait of a woman that he believes will usher in new era of art. When his two friends believe it to be a mess, he kills himself. Brody finds a similarity between The Unknown Masterpiece, Pierrot le fou, and Godard's personal life in the "self-portrait of the artist on the verge of pushing a philosophical