Colour
Palette as meaning: what the frame's colours claim before the story does.
- colour
- reference
- symbolic-code
Colour design across production design, costume, lighting and grading — and the meanings a palette smuggles in: warmth, danger, nostalgia, sickness. Includes the choice not to use colour: black and white is a colour decision.
What to look for
What is the film's base palette, and what breaks it? Which character owns which colour? Does colour shift with the story's temperature?
Canonical cases
The saturated Old-Hollywood sunset red of Alice — the prologue — colour as quotation, painting childhood memory in the palette of the movies that taught Alice to dream (see The $85,000 backdrop). On the other flank, Psycho (1960): black and white in 1960 was already a period choice — cheaper, yes (Commerce), but also the palette of tabloid crime, and it kept the blood abstract for the censors (The Production Code and Psycho).
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art; Scorsese on Scorsese on the prologue's colour homage.