Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image

by Paul Coates

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844573141
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/15/2010
Edition description:	2010
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

PAUL COATES is a Paul Coates, Professor in the Film Studies Department of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of The Story of the Lost Reflection (1985), The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (1991) and Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (2003).

Table of Contents

A Theory and History

1 Introduction: Theorising Colour and Ambivalence 3

Liberation and ambivalence: Giotto's joy, Munch's depression 3

Between colour symbolism and colour psychology 4

Some roots of ambivalence? 7

Another source of ambivalence: between primaries 8

'Colour suture' and complementarity 9

Colour and/as kitsch 11

Negative dialectics: the colour circle in permanent revolution 12

Natalie Kalmus and contradiction 14

Wholes and holes 16

Colour and chaos 17

White and black and ideologies of race and gender 18

2 The Moment of Colour: Colour, Modernism and Abstraction 22

The moment of colour: the fin de siècle 22

Ut pictura kinesis? French CanCan coloured by Bazin 27

Colour, modernism, postmodernism and abstraction 30

Abstraction plus or minus eros 31

Modernism and political modernism 33

Two or Three Things I Know About Her: modernity and modernism 35

Political primaries: La Chinoise 39

B Monochrome and the Primaries

3 Colour and/as Monochrome 45

The dialectic of colour and black and white 45

Theorising colour, black and white and the real 48

Black and white, colour and Siegfried Kracauer 51

Colour and stardom 52

The graphic, the truthful and the revolutionary 53

Solaris, colour and monochrome 54

'Life, like a many-coloured dome of glass': Stellet licht 59

Chromophobia?: Black Narcissus 62

Monochrome and 'Stunde Null': Europa 63

4 On the Dialectics of Filmic Colours (in general) and Red (in particular) 69

Introduction: in the shadow of Eisenstein 69

The red and the black: Three Colours: Red 70

Red and white: Red Desert 74

Red, black, white: Cries and Whispers 77

Red and The Double Life of Véonique 82

Speculative conclusion 84

5 Declensions Along One Side of the Colour Circle: From Yellow to Green to Blue 87

Speculations on yellow and ideology 87

Masculine/feminine: The Curse of the Golden Flower 89

Midas and the sailor: Immortal Story 91

The colour of Marnie 91

Vertigo and yellow 93

Guillermo del Toro and the dialectics of yellow and green 94

Grief and green: Solaris, Elvira Madigan 95

Natural Camouflage: Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair 97

Green unseen: the poetics of absence in The Flight of the Red Balloon 98

From yellow to green (via black): The Double Life of Véronique 101

From yellow to blue: Three Colours: Blue 104

The desert and the beach: Deleuze, Antonioni, Zhang Ke Jia 108

The painter's primaries and totality: Le Mépris Le Mépris 2: the triumph of blue 113

Blue angel, blue devil: Coya in Bordeaux 115

Trapped in blue: La Religieuse 116

C Tour/Détour D'Amérique

6 Melos, Drama, Melodrama: From Demy to Sirk to Antonioni

Introduction 123

Singin' - and dancin'? - in the rain: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Singin' in the Rain 124

Coupling and uncoupling colours: Une femme est une femme 127

Totally? Tenderly? Tragically?: An American in Paris, Le Mépris and Moulin Rouge (with a postscript on The Golden Coach) 129

A note on melodrama and modernism 132

Melodrama, realism and All That Heaven Allows 132

Modernist melodrama? The Oberwald Mystery 136

7 Colour and/as Fantasy: The Rainbow and the Jewel 139

Introduction 139

The Wizard of Oz: colour and the accidents of transformation 140

Colour, indeterminacy and fantasy in Vertigo 142

'The colour of hope', or a fragment of the rainbow: Le Rayon Vert 147

Postscript: sketch for a theology of colour: the rainbow as the broken body of light 150

D Between Monochrome and Colour: Suffering and the Unrepresentable

8 Colour and Suffering 155

A matter of life and death 155

Discoloured reality: Amateur Photographer 155

'The past is not past': Night and Fog 158

Race reflected (and not reflected) in colour 160

The colour of bodily suffering 160

Colour and abject identity: Cyclo and Three Colours: Blue 162

Schindler's List candles in the dark 165

A monochrome palette: The Hourglass Sanatorium 167

Postscript 169

Acknowledgements 173

Index 174