concept

Colour

Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.

colour
reference
symbolic-code

Colour is the palette a film builds across production design, costume, lighting, stock and grading, and the meanings that palette carries: warmth, danger, nostalgia, sickness, class. Black and white is a colour decision too. It is the code students over-read fastest: red means danger, blue means cold, and the reading is finished before it has started. The better question is where a colour's meaning comes from. Sometimes from the culture, sometimes from a rule the film sets up in its opening scene, and sometimes, on the evidence of this site, from a laboratory, a censor or a budget, with the meaning arriving later.

Instinct or rule

Giannetti treats colour as something the audience absorbs rather than reads. "Color tends to be a subconscious element in film. It's strongly emotional in its appeal, expressive and atmospheric rather than intellectual." Viewers interpret lines but "accept color passively, permitting it to suggest moods rather than objects. Lines are associated with nouns; color with adjectives." Bruce Block, writing for people who have to design a film rather than describe one, denies that any colour has a mood of its own. "Each visual component can be assigned to an emotion, mood, idea, situation, or character", and the assignment is made in the visual exposition: "If presented consistently, the audience will learn that a green color communicates danger." For Giannetti the meaning is in the colour; for Block it is in the contract the film signs with its audience in its first minutes. Block explains why the same red can be romance in one film and warning in another; Giannetti explains why some contracts are easier to sign.

The books also split on realism. Boggs finds that black and white "often seems more true to life, more realistic, than color". Barsam and Monahan say that "color films may strike us as more realistic than black-and-white films". Bordwell and Thompson settle it historically: black and white "was then considered more realistic" in the 1940s, when colour was for fantasy and musicals, and "such rules of thumb as 'color for realism' have no universal validity; as always, it is a matter of context".

On the bench

Alice — the prologue is Block's rule and Giannetti's instinct at once. The sunset red of the painted sky is a quotation of Menzies and of a studio-era technology for painting emotion onto weather, Technicolor as the colour of promised futures. The film spent $85,000 of a $1.8 million budget on ninety seconds of it (The $85,000 backdrop) to establish a palette the smash cut to Socorro then abolishes.

Taxi Driver — the shoot-out is the warning against reading meaning first. The neon and steam of the night driving came from Michael Chapman pushing night-rated stock in development (Chapman pushed the night stock). The muted, coppery look of the massacre, routinely praised as a stylistic choice, was a red tint agreed to avoid an X rating (The red tint over the bloodbath). Two lab decisions, one by choice and one under duress, both now read as authorship.

The Craft — Nancy's turn is colour as class signalling in Block's sense: the trailer's sodium and brown, the storm on the beach, the cold blue-white of the new apartment, then institutional flatness. The palette moves with her, and it is the most legible thing in the film's design. And Psycho (1960) reminds you that black and white in 1960 was first a budget decision, shot with a television crew for around $800,000, before it was a palette.

Mean Streets (1973) puts a debt inside a meaning. Tony's bar is red because red means hell in Charlie's theology (Mean Streets — Tony's bar), and it is red because Scorsese took it from Michael Powell, who then wrote to say there was too much of it (Too much red).

What to look for

What is the film's base palette, and when does it break? Was the break taught earlier?
Which character owns which colour, and does anyone steal it?
Does colour shift with the story's temperature, or stay fixed while the story moves?
When the colour is unusual, find out whether anyone was allowed to choose it.

In the books

Color tends to be a subconscious element in film. It's strongly emotional in its appeal, expressive and atmospheric rather than intellectual.

— Giannetti, um 23

If presented consistently, the audience will learn that a green color communicates danger.

— Block, vs 260

Such rules of thumb as "color for realism" have no universal validity; as always, it is a matter of context, the function of color or black-and-white tonalities within a specific film.

— Film Art, fa 596

The overall effect of black and white can be paradoxical, for somehow it often seems more true to life, more realistic, than color

— Boggs, awf 218

Deepest on this in the library

Measured across the 72 books indexed in Reel — how much denser each one is on this concept than the library average. A place to read next, not a claim about quality.

4× Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) 71 passages · cite as sos
3.8× Mark Cousins — The Story of Looking 120 passages · cite as sol
2.5× Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media 61 passages · cite as vs
2.4× Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema 195 passages · cite as ohwc
2.2× Susan Hayward — Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts 91 passages · cite as ckc
1.9× Dixon & Foster — A Short History of Film 46 passages · cite as shf

Go on, then

concept Acting Performance as a symbolic code: who authors it, how the cut and the casting shape it, and why realism is the wrong yardstick.
concept Setting Where and when, and the argument over whether a place expresses its people or acts on its own account.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.