Tracking Color in Cinema and Art

Philosophy and Aesthetics

Edward Branigan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315317489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Color is one of cinema's most alluring formal systems, building on a range of artistic traditions that orchestrate visual cues to tell stories, stage ideas, and elicit feelings. But what if color is not—or not only—a formal system, but instead a linguistic effect, emerging from the slipstream of our talk and embodiment in a world? This book develops a compelling framework from which to understand the mobility of color in art and mind, where color impressions are seen through, and even governed by, patterns of ordinary language use, schemata, memories, and narrative.

Edward Branigan draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers who struggle valiantly with problems of color aesthetics, contemporary theories of film and narrative, and art-historical models of analysis. Examples of a variety of media, from American pop art to contemporary European cinema, illustrate a theory based on a spectator's present-time tracking of temporal patterns that are firmly entwined with language use and social intelligence.

Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview through Two Paintings: Dagwood

Abstract

A Lichtenstein painting offers a preview of the method of color analysis presented in this book. Close analysis shows that the painting is better seen as a triptych rather than the diptych indicated by its title. Furthermore, the “hidden” middle part of the painting is analogous to a crucial third and mediating part of the argument of the present book. The first two, explicit parts of Lichtenstein’s painting may be visually analogized to the “theory” (left side) and “practice” (right) of color aesthetics. The third part that facilitates an interaction between theory and practice in the painting and in the present book is a zone of remembered languages and general schemata (forms) that a perceiver summons to assemble and comprehend aesthetic displays of color.

How might one analyze the mediation of “remembered languages”? Chapter 2 will explore four strands of these languages: (1) norms of color usage; (2) language systems (semantic fields) that speak a felt consciousness of color; (3) mental processes that memorialize and reidentify (track) color, which area of study I refer to as “memory-chromatics”; and, finally, (4) the place of sensation and its supposed excess—spectacle—in the life of the mind. Which color language and associated set of metaphors is a person most comfortable with?

There is more to color than its sheen and conventional symbolism. What we choose to see in color is not strictly a personal decision but is shaped by culture, our plans and projects in society, and the way we become comfortable in talking about ourselves and our world. It is perhaps strange to think that language shapes a sensation like color, what we think we have seen, i.e., in hinking we see. Color is not so much about the exact sensation at a point in space, but rather about discovering and feeling patterns in space. Recognizing one or another pattern is not exclusively objective nor certain, but abstract and contingent; that is, one can point out the elements of a possible pattern, but the whole is not there—it comes together in memory.

Man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story… . Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings… . That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life.¹

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Process into Pattern

Think of a diptych: two parts connected, each telling a story out of which may emerge a third story. That’s the structure of the present book. What are these parts and the relationship between them that produces a third story? To preview the organization of this book, I will explore an analogy with Roy Lichtenstein’s Two Paintings: Dagwood (see Figure 1.1). Interestingly, the painting is slyly enigmatic, for in addition to the title’s invitation to view it as staging two scenes of interpretation, it may also be seen as a triptych, which suggests that within its placid surface is a third part which, I will argue, acts to blend the “two paintings” into a larger story about the nature of a viewer’s confrontation with the expressive. This book, too, will contain a third part that mediates between the theory and practice of color aesthetics.

Though suggestively fluid, the connections among Lichtenstein’s panels remain elusive. The left portion of the diptych appears at first to be disorganized while the center portion coalesces into mysterious designs. Do these two sections amount to merely chance, noise, or inert decoration; or else, a depiction of chance, noise, and inert decoration? Not quite. Not when one considers the overall linkages among the dispersed hues and lines. Lichtenstein’s process evolves into a pattern. What brings forth an interpretation of this painting is an event that will be prominent throughout this book: the coming into view of patterns that map our comprehension.²

Dagwood is situated within a severely flattened space where only a shoe suggests his second leg. (Are his feet off the floor or not? Do we see movement or not?) Dagwood is seemingly confined to his own frame, though his yellow belt and the yellow wall behind seem to flow toward a broad enclosing yellow band in the middle section and then toward five scattered yellow streaks and blotches at the left that paradoxically are both blocked by, and visible through, a white wash. One marvels as fresh colors emerge through additive and subtractive combinations at left. Experiments with green at left are apparently transformed into an orderly floor at right. One savors the subtle and minute, steady flow of lightness from the top toward a darker bottom at left and right.

Other connections and patterns among the parts can be found. For example, the diagonal lines of Dagwood’s shoes match the diagonals in the middle section. Certain curves of Dagwood’s body and clothes mirror curves in the middle and left sections. Seven slightly curved horizontal lines in the middle may repeat the lines of his hair! This raises a key question: when comparing the various lines of the middle section to the figure of Dagwood, must a viewer decide whether the middle is, or is not, a highly abstracted and fragmented version of Dagwood? That is, might the middle be seen instead as something in between decoration and figurative metaphor—as a sort of joint “shadow” cast by literal paint (left) and figurative design (right), something more than literal but less than a metaphor or symbol, something that foreshadows a figure but refuses to rise to the level of ambiguity or hybridity? If so, then this middle portion may exemplify an inchoate or nascent idea in the process of being formed into a new pattern at right.

I would like to suggest that this in-between potential of color and line in the middle section is an important stage in our thinking about film (and significance in general), i.e., one must be sensitive to what is incipient, to movements that are neither exclusively sensation (left) nor yet idea (right) but that prefigure what may come to be. Sensory data that is located in a middle, unrealized zone and only “nearly true” as figuration (as in Lichtenstein’s middle panel) is an important effect in many artworks. It is evidence that color can be seen as more than sensation or figuration, whether insipid or vivid.

Furthermore, I believe that this in-between effect can be revealed by attending closely to certain arrangements in film that escape both decoration and static symbol. Like the activity of a spectator’s memory, a film may entertain moods in the process of becoming something other than the indicative or assertive. To watch a film is to struggle within a film’s dense, artificial memory where only fragments become visible and audible. At certain times, impressions will be less precise and more tentative, amorphous, multiple, and in process.³

Theory: Drawing Lines, Taking Shape

Dagwood seems to be emerging from, or else falling back into, paint itself; or rather, the painted, pixelated Dagwood—the pixels are benday dots—is moving from/into the splashed paint at left. (Has he perhaps escaped the black frame line at the far right?) The painted brushstrokes, smears, smudges, spatters, and drips at left—which are represented as having been painted with different kinds of brushes—are painted to suggest the ground (or better, a ground) for the startled figure of Dagwood who is reacting to something not seen further off right, something that could have been rendered in a still different form(ing) of paint. Dynamism of color possibilities at left and middle featuring an intense yellow are juxtaposed to dynamism of quite another sort at right as the yellow becomes muted and a new color—red—emerges to characterize Dagwood’s energy. It is as if the yellow has transformed into red, or else can be seen as a prior form of the red. The hot red also offers a stark contrast with the cold blues of the left two-thirds of the painting. The red makes for an unusual contrast with a grayish yellow and two pinks (at left lower right) and with an incipient brown, which deep-down is a very strange color, or more accurately, an amalgam of colors, including red.⁴ Thus chance, noise, and decoration in all three panels become relative to a new context once a viewer begins to seek significance and discover sets of relationships, i.e., patterns, among lines and patches of paint.

A developing pattern of relations is much more than—and quite separate from—its discrete elements. A pattern is more than a linear relation among micro-constituents just as temperature, magnetism, and states of matter like solidity emerge from atomic particles or consciousness emerges from brain matter.⁵ Additionally, the temperature of a gas emerges from a collection of atoms that do not themselves have a temperature. Most striking is the fact that time and three-dimensional space are not themselves fundamental, but are an illusory effect emerging out of something remarkably different on the order of quantum entanglement of bits of information.

A pattern requires new concepts and theories to explain its potential for interactions. It interacts in novel ways with other such patterns at a meta-level because it represents a specific selection among the properties of elements existing on a lower level. A subset of these lower-level elements is being collected in the pattern in ways that are not dependent on simple, linear adjacency. What makes for “emergence”—i.e., new and significant properties appearing at a higher level—results from a reconfiguration of the causal possibilities of constituent parts on a sub-level. That is, a temporal or spatial mosaic is created at a new, higher scale that allows one to perceive new sorts of relationships, combinations, and interactions.⁶

Is it possible that elements can exist entirely isolated and void of all relationships, defying all attempts at being (re-)framed and (re-)related? Chance may play a role in the making of an artwork, but once folded into object-hood for a beholder, randomness disappears into higher-level crisscrossing patterns, however inconsistent, obscure, or partly realized. Most importantly, patterns have a history in one’s perception.

In this light, Lichtenstein’s painting moves from incipient theory and possibility at left and middle to a concrete realization of a scene at right. An important theme addressed by Lichtenstein’s diptych-as-triptych concerns the general conditions—both material and conceptual—that make for being, for the emergence through process of a figurative pattern. This is also a central issue for the present book whose focal point is the use of color in movements of narrative and figurative cinema. How should salient patterns be constructed and analyzed when looking? How will patterned color necessarily emerge out of a background seemingly composed of chance elements, noise, and decoration? Which backgrounds are relevant in producing specific patterns?

To have taken shape, a color patch must have a shape, must be delineated by a border separating it from whatever is adjacent and different. That is, a line will appear, no matter how blurry, implicit, or arbitrary, to frame the presence of color on a surface. This power of line is highlighted in the middle portion of Lichtenstein’s painting. For example, one can trace the mutation of diagonal lines from Dagwood’s clothes, hair, and background into the middle section and then into the curved white lines appearing within paint splotches at left, as if these curves were attempting to straighten themselves into diagonals. Compare also the three white curves within a black splotch (left panel middle) to Dagwood’s curved body in white shirt and black pants. The diptych thus becomes a triptych by representing in the middle section the disciplinary regime of line in the transition from color patches and the lines within brush strokes (at left) to figuration (right). Or, equally, it might be seen as the reverse trajectory: the existence of areas of color has created a strong sense of line (at middle) as one moves from predominant figuration (right) to seemingly disordered color patches (left).

A line defines and confines a spot of color. But a line must have a color to be seen and a spot of color has a mass that defines the line that borders. We will encounter theoretical accounts in this book that debate the priority to be accorded to either color or line with attendant consequences for aesthetic appreciation. Notice that the power of figurative line extends to the representation of invisible realities since the lines around Dagwood’s shoulder and head depict his feelings of startled alarm. I will argue that color, too, may make visible the invisible, e.g., a feeling or tone. Moreover, we will encounter theoretical and practical situations in which color itself vanishes from the screen into a spectator’s mental image of color that is the trace of thought (Chapters 5 and 6). This is analogous to the way that a theory appears to disappear into—gives way to—a person’s experience of an object when experience acquires concrete significance.

Like color and line on canvas, philosophy (theory) works to elucidate aspects of our world that are visible and invisible. Philosophy investigates the conditions under which something comes to exist, the possibilities of its forms, and how one marks varieties when form transforms into new form.⁷ To accomplish its goals, philosophy must draw lines to mark out and name various areas of phenomena by employing “concepts.”⁸ Like color and line, one may debate which comes first in thinking philosophically: the presence of a distinction—a line, a felt difference—or a general concept about finding and locating areas of such differences. Distinctions and concepts work to give shape to philosophical claims while networks of concepts provide philosophy with large-scale structures and patterns for its “picture” of the world. For the most part, I see no need to decide which comes first—distinctions or concepts, lines or colors—and will instead concentrate on outlining the myriad phenomena of cinema’s color as a diptych: a philosophy of color together with the experience of color as an aesthetic.

Triptych: Color, Cinema, Remembered Languages

This book is a diptych where theory and practice, principles of color design and figurative cinema, absorb each other. Is there a hidden part in the book analogous to Lichtenstein’s disciplinary “line” (in the painting’s middle section) that acts as a catalyst between theory and practice, color and cinema? The mediating process that, in effect, makes this book a triptych will be the activity of “language,” especially the remembered languages and insistent mental images a perceiver utilizes to draw lines and frame his or her viewing of screened color. The book will treat both philosophy and aesthetics as rooted in the many different ways we choose to talk about—and recount stories about—the features of a world that pique our interest and remain in mind. Such talk is not random but organized into procedures that are used to map and navigate a world by bringing forth relevant patterns. Narrative discourse is one of these fundamental procedures we use to create patterns in order to understand a world (as noted by Sartre in the epigraph). I will argue that color sensations do not emerge from a vacuum to become sensuous spots, but come already imbued with diverse sets of expectations, which, in turn, are tied to what might be called language-games and perception-games. In cinema, and in life as well, these games and routines intermingle with the stories we wish to recount about the actions we wish to pursue, the patterns we desire to find.

Thus I will claim that not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Color Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and Overview through Two Paintings: Dagwood
• 2 Living with Chromophilia
• 3 To Stand in Place or to Track?
• 4 What’s in White?
• 5 Making It Color-Full—Relations and Practices
• 6 Musical Hues: Color Harmonies
• 7 Track This in Place
• 8 Track That in Movement
• 9 Summary
• 10 Conclusion: How It Finally Matters
• Appendix: Wittgenstein/Context: Two Philosophy Lessons about Color and Sound
• Works Cited and Further Reading
• Name Index
• Subject Index