Cinema and Colour

The Saturated Image

Paul Coates

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844573141
• eBook ISBN: 9781838714987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image is a major new critical study of the use of colour in cinema. Using the dialectic of colour and monochrome as a starting point, Paul Coates explores the symbolic meanings that colour bears in different cultures, and engages with a range of critical approaches to filmic colour, building on the work of such theorists as Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim and Stanley Cavell. Coates also provides close analyses of films by directors such as Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Hitchcock, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Sirk, Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Von Trier and Zhang Yimou. Coates' focus is on films that deliberately exploit the rich multiplicity of cultural meanings and associations ascribed to colour, including All That Heaven Allows, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, The Double Life of Véronique, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Red Desert, Schindler's List, Silent Light, Solaris, The Three Colours Trilogy and The Wizard of Oz.

B : MONOCHROME AND THE PRIMARIES

3 Colour and/as Monochrome

THE DIALECTIC OF COLOUR AND BLACK AND WHITE

The terms ‘colour’ and ‘black and white’ enact a dialectic of simultaneous opposition and prickly supplementation, as white and black may also be seen as ‘colours’ and their supposed ‘opposition’ to colour be a trick of language, ideology or history. In the cinema, of course, monochrome was for many decades the norm against which colour film defined itself, be it as the luxurious sign of technological wonder and/or fantasy, or as an adjunct of the realistic reproduction of a world we assume is coloured. Disparities between often crudely supersaturated screen colours and the actual subtlety of real ones could either be pilloried as kitsch or – less frequently – excused as art’s inevitable tribute to convention. Whether white and black should be seen as colours or as the prelude and epilogue to colour is a moot point, despite their absence from the spectrum, or the fact that the colours of objects become visible only when their illumination rises above the basic level that reveals only their shapes. After all, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay have argued that the first ‘colour’ names to manifest themselves in any language are those for black and white, with that for red coming next.¹ When Eisenstein speaks of black and white as ‘colours’, he may seem to be guilty of special pleading.² And yet a long tradition exists of seeing black and white not as extra-territorial to colour, but as each containing potentially one half of the range of the spectrum. Thus Margaret Visser notes, summarising recent scholarship, ‘red used to be really the only colour. Before the discovery of the spectrum in the seventeenth century, all other colours tended to be considered variations of either black (brown, blue, green, violet) or white (yellow, beige, cream and other very pale tints). Our colour range was therefore black–red–white.’³ Michel Pastoreau argues that the present moment is one at which ‘[b]lack has reclaimed the status it possessed for centuries, even for millennia – that of a color in its own right’.⁴ For him, the effects upon the definition of ‘colour’ of the Newtonian discovery of the spectrum are now past. The ‘new’ language games now playable with the word are, for him, really recrudescent ones. Setting black and white against colour may also be a late-nineteenth-century reflex, for which black and white represent unnecessary limitations on the wealth of colour rendered available by colonialism and industrial chemistry. If the revolt against black and white often charges them with oppressiveness, repressiveness or blandness, such libertarian rhetoric is also a capitalist protest against restrictions on trade, that is, limits on the process of alienation. The revolt is surely related also to the perception of black and white as absolutes, and hence as pillars of a religious ethos becoming subject to questioning. The rapid expansion of Nietzsche’s influence suggests he was not the only fin-de-siècle intellectual to wish to go beyond the Good and Evil they had symbolised, but rather watered a seed dormant elsewhere.

The dialectic of colour and monochrome assumes various forms, some of which will be considered later in this book. Libertarian in mode, the fin-de-siècle resurgence of colour is one of expressivity: in particular, the blocked expressivity of the feminine in a society of monotonous, monochrome repetition, the nineteenth century run by tribes of ‘men in black’. Ironically, of course, those men themselves made such expressivity possible through the new industrial dyeing techniques they developed. Insofar as colour stands out, it signifies any individualistic self-assertion. Thus Hawthorne probably need not have used red, let alone the hyper-visible red stigmatised as scarlet, as the key colour of his best-known work: any strong colour might have done. Strong colours further the modernist dispute with realism, casting the latter as a repression conceived as monochromatic, and either advocate its supplementation with a liberating colour – the optimistic early phase of modernism known as impressionism – or demonstrate the effects of that repression, as in the later, more pessimistic expressionism, whose scream is the loudness of a colour unable to find a proper place in the world. Is this one reason why Munch’s famous Scream exists in so many versions, the multiplicity indicating the essential homelessness of colour, whose plurality of possible contexts can add up to a lack of context?

If filmic colour is defined in part through a dialectical relationship with monochrome, it is high time to sketch some of the key forms of this dialectic.

First comes the above-mentioned relationship with realism, and the contradictoriness of its signifiers. In Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things) (1982) Wim Wenders identifies realism with black and white, though without mounting any protest against this form, as it is in fact the (at the time) anomalous one of his own film. If realism is as ‘gritty’ as stereotype dictates, it will indeed gravitate towards monochromaticism, though a Lukács might deem this indicative of a degeneration into naturalism. Ironically, though, at a certain stage in film history monochrome assumes a nostalgic glamour whose use in rock videos can compromise songs defined as committed to institutionalised protest. Monochrome is thus contradictory, its sharp contrasts paradoxically breathing both the melodrama of realist protest against social oppositions and the sharp outlines of a fashion whose bearers cut through the world with the smoothness of the commercial, the couturier’s scissors.

Inasmuch as realism vaunts both its sobriety and its (concomitant) commitment, the probability rises that film-makers who have reflected upon the connotations of colour use and seek the impact of political protest would utilise monochrome, in part or in whole, to indicate identification with deprivation and the virtue stereotypically attached to a ‘poor cinema’. Thus motivated, a once-frequent founding parti pris for black and white may override one element of the political that would favour colour film: after all, the political sphere is one of the primary areas in which colour is continually present, both verbally and visually, designating allegiances in ways that are often felt not to be arbitrary. The red usually taken as denoting passion appears logically to signify revolutionary anger, the belief that making history necessarily involves the bloodshed sometimes euphemistically yellowed into a ‘making of omelettes’. Meanwhile, for the conservative, calm blue designates the untroubled naturalness of the social order, a valued restraint. Simultaneously, bluebloods demonstrate how far cultivation has raised them above a nature where blood is normally red. Owning such blood, they think it bound never to flow, but always to be preserved as a set of blue canals coursing the surface of the skin, while their opponents may become all the more determined to shed it precisely to show it as red as any commoner’s. Where colour is made to signify politically, even colour harmonies become dissonant through their subordination to the hidden melodramatic logic usually described as one of ‘black and white’. It is thus appropriate that Lars Von Trier’s most explicitly political work, Europa (1991) – which is also ‘melodramatic’ in almost all of the senses of that often-elastic word, and whose subject is contestation at the heart of the body politic – should take black and white as its main tonality, while also allowing colour to bleed into it at points (at one, quite literally, as blood oozes from slit wrists).

Von Trier’s film (of which more below) is particularly interesting in its overlaps with another form of film that activates the colour/monochrome dialectic at the levels structuralist film theory calls histoire and discours, in story and in its formal enunciation, to demonstrate the reality of realms usually deemed fantastic. Since the most significant examples of this mode lie in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (particularly Solyaris (Solaris) (1972) and Offret Sacrificate (The Sacrifice) (1986)), Von Trier’s indebtedness to the Russian is hardly surprising. If Tarkovsky’s first colour film is both cast in the science-fiction genre and yet tolerates the apparent ancientness of passages in black and white, Stanley Cavell, who deems colour indicative of futurity, might well have seen the director’s misgivings about the morality of humanity’s cosmic probings as an unsurprising rider of the inserted monochrome moments. It is worth noting that the colours pervading the earth whose natural forms and rhythms Tarkovsky reveres are shown as already withdrawn from it in the city traversed, pre-launch, by the former cosmonaut Berton.

Where colour film is the norm, and a combination of realism and spectacle the default position of mainstream narrative, the norm for representation of a past defined as different becomes not monochrome but a muted colour. Such muting is overdetermined, capable also of signifying such forms of Otherness as the rural (the past of so many modern city-dwellers) or another country (in its fully overdetermined form, ‘the country as another country’). It functions thus in Capote (2005) and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) (2006). In the former, it represents both the rural and the past; in the latter, the past and another country. Thus, the design team for Capote eliminated blues and reds from the film’s palette. Similarly, Von Donnersmarck created a sense of ‘East Germanness’ by removing these two colours from the locales where The Lives of Others was shot. Spectatorial comments lauding the unusual realism of the resultant image of East Germany surely illustrate the intersection of this muted colour scheme, perceived as realistic, with the projected stereotype of Eastern-bloc greyness. The film also fused this idea of uniformity with one of the pervasiveness of the typical muted (camouflaged) hues of uniforms. It is as if the audience believed – not without reason – that a society under heavy surveillance could only be a militarised environment. The German Democratic Republic itself becomes a fusion of colour and monochrome whose ‘seeping sepiasation’ of reality may have sought to anaesthetise the populace, neutering the oppositions that could have engendered change.

The Lives of Others: predominantly grey GDR

Finally, it is worth mentioning a category of possible particular interest to the above-mentioned Tarkovsky, with his fascination by the transcendent and the invisible: what might be called ‘invisible colour’, as its application to the image behind the scene and behind the seen materially yet invisibly alters its impact. Thus Tonino Delli Colli, the cinematographer on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), described the effect of shooting it through an orange filter: the whites popped out and the blacks became more intense.

THEORISING COLOUR, BLACK AND WHITE AND THE REAL

Some of the most useful theoretical reflections on the relationship between colour and monochrome may be found in the writings of Stanley Cavell, Anne Hollander and Aldous Huxley. Inasmuch as the theories of Cavell and Hollander overlap in several respects, I will consider their work first. Huxley’s, although earlier, may then be taken as in part a corrective, or alternative, to theirs.

The ruminations on colour and its relationship to monochrome found in Cavell’s The World Viewed are often penetrating, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A: Theory and History
• B: Monochrome and the Primaries
• C: Tour/Détour D’amérique
• D: Between Monochrome and Colour: Suffering and the Unrepresentable
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright