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Volume 3, No 2/3, 20081

Tis is colors own version of the 50s RedScare, where prints over time were liable toturn pink [Fig 01]. Eastman Kodaks cover-up of its color lms instability an evasionthat continued well into the 1970s has, justiably, been labeled a disgrace.3 But as well see, Eastman Color had much more tooffer than corrosion.

I want to argue that this stress on the ersatzimpermanence of early Eastman Color hascreated an important distortion, leavingthe impression that when Eastman Color

Instead of a single monolithic concept of color,a healthy number of rival frameworks emergedto accommodate a signicantly enlargedvariety of color lms.

Tis will not be a technical analysis but Ineed to start with a technical note. When

we think of echnicolor we use the term todescribe a famous kind of color lm requiringa unique camera that used not one but threestrips of lm negative. echnicolor, however,

was not just a kind of camera. It was also adye transfer printing process. And becausethe word echnicolor has been applied toboth the camera and the printing process,

we have had no end of confusion as to whatconstitutes a echnicolor movie. Long afterit stopped providing three-strip cameras,echnicolor continued to offer its services asa lab to process and print a wide variety of

color lms made from negatives manufacturedby its competitors and successors notablyEastman, Ansco, Agfa, Ferraniacolor, Gaevert,and eventually Sovcolor and Fuji lmstocks that all used ordinary cameras. WhileEastman and its competitors provided cameranegatives, echnicolor after 1954 limited itselfto the highly lucrative business of processingand making dye transfer prints. In that sameyear, echnicolor abandoned its distinctivephotographic system based on its uniquethree-strip camera.4 But lm companies, eagerto capitalize on the prestige of the echnicolorname, did their best to blur the distinctionbetween lms shot with echnicolor camerasand those simply processed by echnicolor.Tey continued to advertise echnicolor printsas though they were echnicolor lms.

HitchcocksRear Window is a usefulcase in point. Te credits read, Color byechnicolor. But in fact Rear Window wasshot entirely on the new Eastman 5247negative with ordinary 35mm cameras.5

And why did Hitchcock chose to shootRearWindow in Eastman Color when he could

just as easily have shot in real echnicolor,the way he hadRope and Under Capricorn veyears earlier? Te answer lies in the way thatEastman Color had improved on the morefamous system in ways essential to Hitchcocksrequirements.

Journal of the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia

Volume 3, No 2/3, 2008

CRYING IN COLOR:HOW HOLLYWOOD COPED

WHEN TECHNICOLOR DIEDRussell Merritt Accounts of Hollywood color usually leave off with the ascension of3-strip echnicolor in 1932 and its near-monopoly over commercial featurecolor production that lasted for the next twenty years. 1 Te 1950s in thesehistories is mourned as the decade when echnicolor was abandoned infavor of Eastman Color, yet another example of Hollywoods decline. In thisfallen age of shoddy, the original Eastman Color process is remembered asechnicolors cheap, unstable successor, notorious for its instability whichbecame the mark of cut-rate quality. 2

Fig 01: Faded Prince Valiant.

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replaced echnicolor the use of color itself went into a qualitative decline. Far fromproviding the epilog for color, I will claim,the 1950s in fact became the decade whencolor movies suddenly matured. It wasthe decade in which the studios and byextension, their directors, cinematographers,and art directors gained control of the colorprocess, enabling lmmakers to experimentas they seldom could during the echnicolordays. Directors debated how color was tobe used in a decade that was becomingincreasingly self-conscious about color.


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CRYING IN COLOUR: HOW HOLLYWOOD COPED WHEN TECHNICOLOUR DIED

NFSA JOURNAL Volume 3, No 2/3, 2008 3

arranged in such a way as to enhance theillusion of three-dimensional space.

Even echnicolors goal of accuratelyreproduced color was subject to aestheticevaluation. Herbert Kalmus acid test was

accuracy in the copying of esh tones,the most difficult combination of hues tocapture.16 But as echnicolor was quickto learn, there is no single esh tone, andthe eye could readily adjust to inaccuratereproduction, depending on the colorcontext. Proper esh tones were, like othercolor elements, subject to echnicolorsevolving color code, and by the mid-1940sthe esh tones echnicolor preferred were

warm and darkish, which could better playoff heavily saturated color surroundings

without being swallowed up by them. Oneresult, wisecracked Otis Ferguson, was a castthat often looked like a boatload of tennisplayers from the Canal Zone.17 Another,less obvious by-product was the emergingpopularity of on-screen red-colored hair.

As a glamour accent, red hair was a naturalcounterbalance to the creamy, achromaticideal of echnicolor skin. It was the one haircolor that had been made invisible in black-and-white, and, even better, it accentuatedthe vividness of echnicolors reds. By themid-1940s, aming redheads, preferablysuntanned, were much in demand. Tis wasthe era of Rita Hayworth, Rhonda Fleming,

Danny Kaye, Maureen OHara, Red Skelton,Lucille Ball, Virginia Mayo, and [when theoccasion called for her to tint] Deborah Kerr[Fig 08]. In Life With Father , the unspokendrollery is that the entire Clarence Dayfamily is red-haired, including the foursons and their parents, Irene Dunne, and

William Powell.

Te preoccupation with esh tones, whichseveral color theorists have argued amountedto an ideology, leads to fascinators. JamesPeterson and others have even argued thatthe deeply saturated look of echnicolor

was a consequence of overcompensating forkeying on white esh.18

But more than creating an aestheticenvironment for human esh, echnicolorscodes were used to organize space. We cannow consider how the rules played out inpractice.

In this scene fromTe Robe (Fox, 1953), theframe is conceived as a grid, with vivid colorstrips used to stabilize the composition. Tered textures have also been thematized, theEmperors royal purple robe is no longerpurple. Instead, Caligula wears lustrous redsatin in order to play off the coarse red fabricof Jesus robe. [Fig 9]

trained, remained rmly in place duringthose last years of three-strip. And theirenforcement is an important reason thatechnicolor lms sport such a well-dened,easily identiable look.12

For Herbert Kalmus, the engineer, the mostimportant rule was the need for accuracyin reproduction. But for Natalie Kalmus,the trained art student, echnicolor wasto be built on time-honored principles ofcolor harmony, balance, and contrast. Colorcinematographers and designers, Kalmusargued, were obliged to study which huesbelong with one another. Tey were to avoidforegrounding colors adjacent to each otheron her color wheel because, she argued, thecombinations are characterless, too neareach other to make a signicant impression.When one color is placed in front of orbeside another, she wrote, there must beenough difference in their hues to separateone from the other photographically. Sherecommends the judicious use of neutralsas a foil for vivid color in order to lendpower and interest to the touches of color ina scene.13 In the tradition of the GermanRomantics and, more recently, of New York graphic designers like Josef Muller-Brockmann and Gyorgy Kepes, color was to be structured as a set of polarities.Tis became echnicolors own version ofHollywoods 180 rule: a scheme of triads

based on three equidistant colors on the wheel, where hues should be either next toone another or roughly 30 apart.14

echnicolor also developed rm rules aboutthe use of analogous and complementarycolors, rules governing relationships between warm and cool colors, between saturatedprimaries and de-saturated neutrals, and rulesgoverning monochromatic and neutral colorschemes. Strong colors must be treated asaccents, never overwhelming the composition.[Fig 07]

Tese demo pictures published in a 1950photography manual provide a classicillustration of echnicolor thinking. 15 Whats wrong with the color combinationat the bottom is that the yellow backgrounddrowns the subject in the foreground. Inthe top image, the neutral grey not onlyserves as a foil to the red dress and eshtones, it gives depth to the composition.Furthermore, red on yellow is considereda discordant combination because bothcolors are considered strong: yellow beingthe brightest and most luminous of colors;red being the most aggressive. Tis is the

language of the typographer and graphicdesigner, where the two-dimensionalqualities of the image as a graphic design are

Fig 07: Kodak Color Data Book.

Fig 08: Te Lady with the Fire Hair.

Fig 09: Te Robe.

Fig 10: King Solomons Mines.


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NFSA JOURNAL Volume 3, No 2/3, 20084

In King Solomons Mines (MGM, 1950) Watusi warriors red and blue check skirts have beenturned into decorator accents, structured notunlike the entertainers costumes inGentlemenPrefer Blondes (Fox, 1952) or the stylized stagecurtains in Scaramouche (MGM, 1952).[Fig 10; Fig 11; Fig 12]Balance is as important as the principleof playing isolated pure colors againsttransitional background neutrals. Multiplemirrors, for instance, seldom if ever work tocreate baroque, noir-style regressions, as theydo in Citizen Kane or Lady from Shanghai

where repeated images track back diagonallyto innity. Instead, as in How to Marry a

Millionaire (Fox, 1953), they provide a meansfor reinforcing planimetric grids by generatinga series of strong vertical stripes along a atplane. [Fig 13]

Another popular tactic was to create balanceand rhymes by inverting color combinationsin costumes designed for couples. InKnightsof the Round able (MGM, 1953), forinstance, Arthur and Lancelot divide the

frame, Lancelots tunic reversing the colorsof Arthurs. [Fig 14]

Alfred Junge, the costume designer, creates asimilar inversion when Arthur and his QueenGuinevere appear. Particularly in historical

epics and musicals, the design inversions weremeant to reinforce links between sweethearts,partners, and teammates. [Fig 15]

Te variation of the color strip is the coloraccent, what George Hoyingen-Huene, thedesigner for A Star is Born, called pinpricksof strong primary and secondary colors.19 [Fig 16] Te pinprick gives the compositionan especially contrived appearance regardlessof the genre. [Fig 17; Fig 18] Brightly paintedlips become a natural focal point. [Fig 19] InLili (MGM, 1953) shot glasses on a caf tableprovide the stabs of color, but practically any

small colored object could serve. [Fig 20] InScaramouche , even blood gets turned into adecorator highlight. [Fig 21]

Te color pinprick was the aspect ofechnicolor that particularly intrigued

Fig 18: Te Benny Goodman Story. Fig 21: Scaramouche.

Fig 11: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Fig 12: Scaramouche.

Fig 13: How to Marry a Millionaire.

Fig 14: Knights of the Round able.

Fig 15: Knights of the Round able.

Fig 16: Annie Get Your Gun .

Fig 17: King Solomons Mines.

Fig 19: Te Red Shoes.

Fig 20: Lili.


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domestic competitor, Ansco lm, securedan exclusive contract with MGM, and withthe release ofTe Wild North in March1952 actually beat Eastman to the gate inexhibiting the rst Hollywood monopackfeature.22 But by the end of 1954, after thelast stragglers had nally returned theirechnicolor cameras, Ansco was out of themovie business, and through the rest of thedecade Eastman provided the color negativeto all the major studios and virtually all theindependents.

Few comparable revolutions have gone soutterly unnoticed. Although studios were[secretly] signing contracts for EastmanColor lm as early as winter 1949 [in secretso as not to jeopardize their relationship

with echnicolor], the rst features wouldnot be released for another two-and-a-half years. Eastman was using the time toinstall equipment in studio labs and trainstudio technicians at Warner Brothers, Fox,and Columbia the rst studios to adoptEastman color on how to process and printthe new negative.23 esting took the form ofseminars and lming short subjects, released

without ceremony. And when the Eastmansystem was nally introduced into the featuremarket in April 1952 as a low budget

Warner Brothers western calledTe Lion andthe Horse Eastmans name was nowhere tobe found.

Pursuant to the settlement of its 1948anti-trust suit with the Justice Department,Eastman originally did no processing of itsown lm, and permitted the studios andlabs to re-label the process as they saw t.So, Te Lion and the Horse was released in

WarnerColor, just as Fox subsequentlyreleased color lms in Deluxe, Columbia inColumbia Color, and M-G-M, after it gaveup on Ansco, in MetroColor.24 But all thismeant was that studios and independent labs

were developing Eastman lm themselvesrather than sending it out to Eastman or

echnicolor for processing. When the prints from Eastman negative weremade by echnicolor [as with Warners AStar is Born and virtually all the Paramountsshot in VistaVision], only echnicolors nameappeared as the color source in the openingcredits, in lm trailers, and sometimes ontheatre marquees. Audiences rarely sawEastmans name except on low budgetproductions when Eastmans lab nallyagreed to print lms that the smaller studioscould not afford to develop themselves.

Yet, if it sailed in under the radar, theEastman revolution was real and its effectsfar reaching. Within two years of its debut,Hollywood crossed its color Rubicon andthe dye was cast. By 1954, virtually all

upon those color lter codes long after they were no longer technically required. [Fig 32]

Tese, then, were some of the grand clichsof classic echnicolor and they continuedto exercise a powerful hold over Hollywood

even after the era of 3-strip color ended.It was a highly disciplined color system,made possible by skilled craft departmentsequipped to coordinate their activities inorder to ensure a readily identiable look.Te system crossed generic boundaries, astructural part of echnicolors transcendentlook. Te structural formulas were appliedequally to war pictures, musicals, noir lmsabout criminal insanity, comedies, socialallegories, westerns, horror lms, nostalgic

Americana, and adventure pictures set infar-off lands.

Scott Higgins has forcefully counter-arguedfor the versatility of the echnicolor aestheticas it grew from the Tirties. In his closeexamination of ve seminal echnicolorlms, he stresses the rapid multiplication ofstylistic precedents established in such lmsas rail of the Lonesome Pine , Te Adventuresof Robin Hood , and Written on the Wind toillustrate the exibility of Kalmus colortheory.21 For Higgins, Kalmus stricturesoperate as a set of broad guide lines ratherthan strict rules. But the atmosphere ofexploration that Higgins nds in the 1930sis difficult to locate by the early 1950s.Te aesthetic strategies sharply narrow asechnicolors production career comes to anend. Te rapid growth of stylistic precedentsthat accumulate in 3-strips formative yearsresult not in greater range in design, but, as

we have seen, in an increasingly entrenchedset of color rules. Innovative echnicolorlms continue to be made. But, particularlyafter the war, such innovation is perceived asa self-conscious reaction against an ingrainedsystem, not part of the system itself. Tefamous iconoclastic works such as FordsSheWore A Yellow Ribbon and Te Quiet Man ,

Hustons Moulin Rouge , and Sirks MagnicentObsession were either produced abroad wherelmmakers were given more latitude inexperimenting with echnicolor, or at homein open deance of echnicolor policy.

At the start of the 50s, however, powerfulnew alternatives to the echnicoloraesthetic emerge that revitalize the debate,as studios and directors take direct controlof the color processes.

Tis became possible because of the adventof Eastman Color single-strip negativeand printing lm stock. With practicallyno fanfare, but with meticulous planningand extraordinary discretion, Eastmancommandeered the manufacture of colormotion picture lm negative. Its single

Fig 32: Quo Vadis .

Fig 33: shallow focus in Scaramouche.

Fig 34: deep focus in Written on the Wind .

Fig 35: deep focus in Written on the Wind .

Fig 36: matte in Scaramouche.


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those vivid accents and the large blocks ofsolids. Brilliant ruby reds echnicolorssignature become virtually taboo. In theirplace, contemporary lms even musicals tended to be dominated by pale colorschemes, either neutrals such as taupe, gray,or beige; pastels; or lightened primaries likepeach, glacier blues, pinks, and chartreuse.[Fig 40]

As illustrated in this scene fromEast of Eden, when there were accents, the pinpricks wereseldom bold or brilliant. At best they mightbe pastels; but more often they were diluteddirty colors pale yellows, oranges, and

white picture, or in a radio show. But in therich glare of echnicolor, all its rental-librarycharacteristics are doubly jarring.27 Coloritself is the issue for Agee; it never occursto him that echnicolor coding might bethe problem. Color itself is wrong for socialrealism and acute personal drama.But in the 50s, not only did color come to themodern world. Domestic melodrama thequintessential black-and-white genre of the40s became the new cutting edge for colorexperimentation. Although the sudden surgein color westerns at the start of the decademeant that, numerically, Eastman Color

westerns far outnumbered so-called womenpictures in color, by the time the studioshit their stride in developing their owncolor aesthetic, the new lords of color werethe melodramatists: Sirk, Minnelli, JohnHuston, Otto Preminger, George Cukor,and Fritz Lang directors who quicklycreated signature styles, while dramaticallybroadening the range of color applications tonarrative.28 At the same time younger urks[Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray in particular]collaborated with their cinematographersto create color experiments of their own.Minnelli is an especially interesting casebecause he had been the leading director ofechnicolor musicals in the 40s, and then

with Ansco and Eastman Color created abrand new color style for his 50s melodramas

notably Lust for Life , ea and Sympathy ,and above all in his masterpieceSome CameRunning .29

Te echnicolor codes did not suddenlyevaporate. Particularly in the earlytransitional years, expensive CinemaScopeand VistaVision spectacles faithfully followedthe echnicolor formulas, making their colordesigns all but indistinguishable from theKalmus model [the widescreen illustrationsI have used fromTe Robe , Knights ofthe Round able , and How o Marry a

Millionaire , all shot on Eastman Color or

Ansco, are classic examples of echnicolorpractice being used verbatim during thenew regime].30 But, by the mid-1950s,conspicuous shifts appear.

Color plots become noticeably moreExpressionistic, while color associations arenow built not just with the fantastical, but

with the drab, the commonplace, or simplynon-heroic. What are the most appropriatecolors for ordinary, non-glamorous people?How do you represent colorless or harshenvironments in color oil elds, factories,brothels, steel mills without making them

pretty, picturesque, or contrived? [Fig 37;Fig 38; Fig 39]

Te color palettes themselves becomenoticeably less saturated, dispensing with

Hollywood color lms were shot in EastmanColor negative. And as far as Eastman wasconcerned, studios could do with their stock whatever they wanted.

For the studios, the most conspicuous

advantages were practical: color moviessuddenly became signicantly cheaperto produce and easier to make. Te mostconspicuous advantage of Eastman Color was that it eliminated the need for thebulky echnicolor camera. As a singlestrip of lm, it could t into any 35mmcamera and did not even require Eastmanprocessing. Eastman also had a considerablyhigher rating than echnicolor by 1955,somewhere around 50, more than half-againthe speed of the most up-to-date echnicolorlm [and by the end of the decade a whopping 125 and 160 ratings for its twohigh speed stocks].25 Deep focus in color hadat last become possible. We may compare, forinstance, the maximum focal length possiblein echnicolor from Scaramouche whereCharles Rosher has only ve or six feet toplay with, and the focal length Russell Mettycan achieve a year or two later inWritten onthe Wind (Universal, 1957) so that Sirk canstage in depth. Te shot in the Sirk lm starts with Robert Stack coming out of a distanthallway door and ends with him sitting a fewfeet from the camera. And because of therecovered depth of eld, lmmakers could

free themselves of contrived process shots,necessary in echnicolor when lmmakers wanted to simulate depth of eld. [Fig 33;Fig 34; Fig 35; Fig 36]

Te implications of this shift, all butunnoticed amidst the hoopla about widescreen, were enormous. Precisely because ithad been so expensive, color had previouslybeen reserved for special categories oflms: musicals, historical romances, andswashbucklers genres that accounted forless than 10% of Hollywoods output.26 Teother staples family melodrama, westerns,

comedies, crime lms, sci-, and war lms had almost always stayed in black and white. Te rule of thumb: reality was meantfor black-and-white; color indicated fantasy.Unless the locale was exotic say HongKong, Korea, Ireland, or Niagara Falls any lm set in the contemporary world wasalso shot in black and white. It was in factone function of echnicolor to make evenimpoverished settings, like Floridas scrubcountry in Te Yearling , appear romanticand unreal. James Agees review ofLeaveHer to Heaven, the rst of only two noirlms ever shot in echnicolor, is revealing. Agee thought the color a mistake, makingthe narrative look supercial. He wrote,Te storys central idea might be plausibleenough in a dramatically lighted black and

Fig 37: drab colour in River No Return .

Fig 38: drab colour in Te High andTe Mighty .

Fig 39: drab colour in Giant .

Fig 40: East of Eden.


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Fig 41: Te Searchers .

Fig 42: Color reaction graph fromPopular Mechanics.

Fig 43: Selling Color to People (1956)

duress, its unsurprising that the leadingdirectors would suddenly want to search forcolors melodramatic possibilities.

Te idea that colors have emotional valuesthat an ar tist may manipulate is a very oldone that extends at least to Goethe, theGerman Romantics, and the Teosophists.Kalmus herself intertwined colors emotionalpower with its symbolic associations [i.e.,Yellow and gold symbolize wisdom, light,fruition but also deceit, jealousy, [and]inconstancy in its darker shades, particularly

when tinged with green. Magenta is verydistinctly materialistic. It is showy, arrogant,and vain.]33

But by the start of the 1950s thepsychological claims for color had growneven more extravagant. Among psychologiststhemselves there was [and remains] commonagreement that color has neither an absoluteperceptual base nor an absolute emotionalmeaning.34 But professional skepticismnotwithstanding, fascination with colorpsychology reached across a broad rangeof technical, and popular journals. It canbe argued, in fact, that the 50s became thelast decade in which the public shared a

widespread interest in color theory, colortherapy and color ideology. In the sciences,the medical profession acted directly onmany such claims. For the rst time, color

was installed in hospital rooms to speedrecovery: red chambers for depressives, yellowfor hysterical paralytics, blue for the violent.35 Doctors experimented with prescribinggreen or blue eyeglasses for patients sufferingcertain nervous disorders. [Fig 42]

Hospital clinics replaced white with bluishgreen surgical smocks and theatre wallson the grounds that it helped improve theconcentration of doctors. In the medicine

browns, or mottled green. Its tempting tosee Goya, Corot, and Murillo, the masters ofmuted color schemes, as the new color gods.[Fig 41]

Intertwined with the dirtier palettes wereother experiments to deglamorize color. Asearly as 1956, Oswald Morris was using hand-held color cameras to explore the atmosphericpossibilities of high-speed color lm for the whale hunts and typhoon sequences in MobyDick .31 And towards the end of the decade,cinematographers like Floyd Crosby andHaskell Wexler, shooting exploitation moviesfor Roger Corman and Russ Meyer, wereusing those grainier stocks for the full lengthof their low-budget features.

But particularly noticeable are the new claimsbeing made for color. Kalmus statements inher writing and in her practice at echnicolorderive entirely from a decorators perspective,arguments for harmonies, restraint, andbalance. Color design for her is a cinematicelement that must please the eye. Te newthinking is that color, particularly as it isapplied to family and social melodrama,must be re-conceptualized. Te consistentnote struck in interviews with Sirk,Preminger, George Cukor, and overseas with Renoir and Max Ophls, is thatcolor must be expressive. Tese directorsgrow interested in deliberately discordant orarbitrary color combinations, taking colorsout of familiar contexts in order to drawattention to them.

Sirk in particular, had great ambitions forcolor in melodrama. When properly applied,he claimed, color had therapeutic, healingpower. It could be used to manipulate theemotions as effectively as music helpgenerate tears, soothe, and exhilarate.32 Andin a genre often synonymous with emotional

cabinet, pills and capsules were colorcoded to improve identication. Childrensmedicine was being colored to help createemotional associations with candy.

Working along similar lines, school boards

experimented with yellow chalk on greenblackboards, while in factories engineers were painting colors onto moving machineparts to diminish fatigue and improveindustrial safety.36

And where science and psychology led,could business enterprise not follow, seeingin color a hidden persuader with mysteriouspsychic power? A new profession emerged: thecolor engineer who could be hired to showdepartment stores, magazine publishers, retailmanufacturers, the appliance industry, andsupermarkets how to increase sales.37 [Fig 43]

Detroit hired color designers too, on thesame theory that color made cars morealluring and more sensuous. By the mid-50sthe all-black car was all but dead, accordingto Business Week , with sales down from 25%in 1950 to less than 5% in 1955. Te countryhad entered the era of the two-tone, cherryred, and angel white.38 [Fig 44]

Perhaps inevitably, color entered the realmof clinical psychology where, it was claimed,personalities could be categorized accordingto color preferences. Tis notion had alreadypenetrated the popular press by the end ofthe First World War, but by the 1950s hadbeen incorporated into various psychologytests.39 [Fig 45]


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Fig 44: Fitting Personality to Color. Popular Mechanics, Feb 1950.

Fig 45: Color preferences of blondes versus brunettes.Faber Birren, Selling Color to People (1956)

Fig 46: Te Caine Mutiny . Fig 47: Te Caine Mutiny .

Fig 48: Written on the Wind .

Fig 49: Written on the Wind .

Fig 50: Casanovas Big Night .

Fig 51: Casanovas Big Night .

It was in this atmosphere that lm directors,assuming that color would soon be aspervasive as it was inevitable, cast about fornew color applications in their lms.

In Ivan the erribles color sequences,

Eisenstein had already experimented withExpressionist colors to hint at inner states ofmind, drawing directly on Disneys early colorexperiments in his Silly Symphonies series.40 In the 50s Hollywood started creating colormood swings of its own. When CaptainQueeg panics during a typhoon inTe Caine

Mutiny (Columbia, 1954), red/blue colorshifts indicate danger/fear. [Fig 46; Fig 47]

When playboy Robert Stack tells LaurenBacall about the psychic damage his sisterhas caused him inWritten on the Wind ;the light on his face turns reddish.[Fig 48; Fig 49]

By the mid-50s, Expressionist color effects were common enough that they becamesubject to parody. Norman McLeodacknowledged the conventions cartoon originsin a Bob Hope comedy calledCasanovas BigNight (Paramount, 1954), turning the fakeCasanovas face red and then purple as he isbeing strangled. [Fig 50; Fig 51]


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In Bell, Book, and Candle (Columbia, 1958) we learn that Kim Novak is a witch when with the help of color lters her face turnsfrost blue. [Figs 52; Fig 53]

But it is John Huston who develops this

line the furthest in Moulin Rouge (Romulus,1952) when oulouse-Lautrec returns tohis garret with the idea of killing himself.Te scene calls for the painter to climb outof his depression without uttering a wordas he wanders around his room, turns on agas lamp, and then sits in a chair waiting todie. He gazes up at an unnished painting(La Goulu) and, distracted from his suicideattempt, reaches for his paints to color in thenal details. [Fig 54; Fig 58]

Te gas lamp, a source of articial light thathe opens to poison himself, is connected to

the clinically unhealthy color combinationsof harsh blues, greens, and pinks. But asoulouse-Lautrec starts to contemplate hispainting, unnatural lter combinations give way to the brighter, sanative palette of theartists own work [bright yellows, vibrantreds, pure greens] which in turn seemsto draw out the natural light of the sun.Morning sunlight falls on his paints and hiseasel, nally ooding his garret with natural,refreshing light.

In Lola Montes , Ophls works out asimilar scheme of clinically jarring color

combinations in the phantasmagorical circussequences to capture Lolas response to hercommercial objectication.

But this strain of expressive color was onlyone of several directions in which 50s color went. By the end of the decade, using colorsto set the tone of a scene had become acommonplace. Huston and Oswald Morrisfamously muted the colors in Moby Dick bysuperimposing a black and white negativeover a desaturated color master to create asomber scheme devoid of reds and yellows.41 Te effect highlighting steel greys and mud

browns was meant to externalize A habsmonomania by extending the bleak tone tothe severity of nineteenth century whalinglife.[Fig 59]

Fig 58: sun in Moulin Rouge.

Fig 55: suicide blue in Moulin Rouge.

Fig 54: gaslight in Moulin Rouge.

Fig 56: La Goulu in Moulin Rouge.

Fig 57: pink in Moulin Rouge.

Fig 59: Moby Dick .

Fig 53: Bell, Book, and Candle .

Fig 52: Bell, Book, and Candle .


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But directors were also foregrounding colorsthat did not provide clues to, or mirror, thepsychological states of the character, or evenreinforce in any obvious way the tone of ascene. William Wellmans rack of the Cat provides the extreme example. Althoughshot in color, rack of the Cat was processedentirely without hue and saturation exceptfor the pinprick of Robert Mitchums red

woolen coat. Te effect is to suggest anobscure allegory, putting into the spotlightan otherwise non-signifying garment wornby a supporting character, the protagonistsbrutish older brother. [Fig 60]. Although stilloperating within the context of a narrativelm, Wellmans red color spot challenges

what Edward Branigan has ca lled thetyranny of the center of the frame achievinga certain formal independence highly

unusual in Hollywood lms competingfor attention with the narrative focal pointby wandering off to the margins. Te redbecomes a non-narrative element thatneither enhances Barthes reality effectnor makes any obvious psychological point.Self-conscious and mannered,rack of theCat is the closest Hollywood gets, as best Ican determine, in opening the gap betweencolor and object.42

Meanwhile, Elia Kazan and hiscinematographer ed McCord devised ahighly unorthodox color plot for Kazans

rst color lm,East of Eden, built aroundprinciples of what may be called psycho-chromatics, the arresting idea that somecolors, like human behavior, containopposing and conicting impulses,depending upon context. For Kazan, theOedipal director par excellence , green becamethe master color, an integral part of thepsychological texture of the lm. [Fig 61]

Green is sometimes considered the greatneutral, the color of repose, of pacism. Butit is also connected with envy. It combinesassociations of growth, with immaturity

the refusal to grow up. [Fig 62]In our culture it is also the color of moneyand luck. But above all for Kazan, it containsthe associations with both rebirth freshness and decay, sickness [green around thegills], weakness. And the nal scene is keyedto absorb all those contradictions. Whereasthe color plots of echnicolor musicals andswashbucklers tended to culminate in festivekaleidoscopic pageantry,East of Eden endsin monochrome in a room, seen only atthe end of the lm, dominated by luminousgreen walls, unevenly lit and crossed with

achromatic, graded shadows for an eerie,

Fig 60: rack of the Cat .




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iridescent effect. Raymond Massey, JamesDeans father, is dying, disillusioned andalone, while Dean, as his son Cal, tries hisbest to tend to him. [Fig 63]

Kazan called the green room deaths

version of [the old mans] valley, the color ofvegetation turned into sea-green sickness.43 But the room is also the nacreous site of Calsreconciliation with his father, and Abrasreconciliation with Cal.

With East of Eden we enter a phase of colordevelopment in Hollywood lm wherecolors can be indexical, iconic, or simply tiedto their symbolic function in a particularculture. But I want to end on perhaps themost interesting colorist of all: Douglas Sirk

who, along with his cinematographer, RussellMetty, created an utterly transgressive color

system. Te melodramatic style that hasmade him the favorite of directors rangingfrom Fassbinder and John Waters to Quentinarantino and Pedro Almodovar is groundedin his quirky relationship to his material.In a famous sequence from All Tat Heaven

Allows (Universal, 1955) widow Jane Wymanis in her bedroom getting ready for a dinnerdate with a middle-age admirer when her twocollege age kids drop in to visit. [Fig 64]

Te dialogue and blocking suggest a satiricscene saturated in irony. Wymans daughterKay [Gloria albot] plops herself down

on her mothers queen size bed, solemnlylecturing her mother on Freud and the sexualanxieties that accompany aging, only to bestartled when mom appears, prepared for adate, bare-shouldered in red. Kay recovers,mindful that modern society no longer buries

widows with their dead husbands as theydid in ancient Egypt. Mother, older and

wiser, murmurs her doubts about the modern worlds acceptance of liberated widows.

But how to connect Russell Mettys stylizedblocks of color and all that odd back lighting


Fig 64: All Tat Heaven Allows .

Fig 65: All Tat Heaven Allows .


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to the conversation? Te blue swatches feelentirely cut off from the referenced world,operating entirely within the framework of what Karla Oeler has called genre pastiche.44 Te scene starts with a close-up of a mirror,the most traditional trope for artisticmimesis. But as Oeler has argued in a muchdifferent context, genre pastiche does notbelieve in direct mimesis, and here the mirrorintroduces a scene dened by layer upon layerof self-reexivity. [Fig 65]

Te colors operate to create a self-containedCamp universe where, to use Sontagslanguage, everything is now bracketed offin quotation marks. Te room becomes theroom; the self-important daughter thedaughter. Most remarkably, light itself especially the blue ltered light that streamsfrom the window when Jane Wyman opensthe shutters is light only in an approximatesense an approximation of sunlight and anapproximation of reading light.

It would be one thing if this were black and white lm and the back lighting that caststhe two women into shadows and silhouettescreated simply a sinister, noirish atmosphere,appropriate to the talk about tombs andsuffocating social pressure. But the color addsa perversely playful aspect to the display. Teunnatural blue, red, and gold lters turningthis 50s home and garden suburban bedroominto something bizarre, vibrant, and strange.

I have yet to discuss Minnelli, who in his1950s lms represents, along with Sirk,the outer limits of what Hollywood coulddo with liberating color from narrativerestraints, setting the stage for the brilliantinternational colorists of the 60s Godard, Antonioni, Resnais, and Ozu. But perhapsthe essay has already provided a glimpseof what remains to be done in assessingHollywoods own color revolution.

Highly respected lm scholarRussell MerrittPhD is Adjunct Professor of Film Studies atthe University of California, Berkeley (USA),and a welcome friend and repeat visitorto the National Film and Sound Archive.

A prolic author, presenter and enthusiasticteacher, his interests are many and variedincluding the cinema of D.W. Griffith; nationalcinemas (France, Germany, Japan); lmstyles and genre; and animation with specialconcentration on the works of Disney.


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anywhere near 600 pounds but it surely tipped thescales at 300 pounds or more. Lead was a commoncomponent of camera blimps. Huston and Jackshot most of The African Queen with an unblimpecamera and the dialog was looped in London.

The great advances in lighting equipment, in dye11 transfer processing, and in Technicolor lm speedsexposure latitudes that made possible new techniqin photographing color in the late 1930s are descriin Higgins, 8089 and 176180; and summarized iEdward Branigan, Color and Cinema: Problems iWriting of History, Film Reader, vol. 4 (1979), 27But by the mid-40s, the Technicolor system still heffective speed of around 12 ASA compared to EaKodaks Plus X and Super XX negatives 80 ASA ASA. With a system that required so much light, itimpossible to close the lens aperture enough to exthe depth of eld. Even by the early 50s, Technicol

ASA did not rise above 24. Adrian Cornwell-ClynCinematography, 132, cited in Higgins, 177; BarryFilm Style and Technology (London: Starword, 19257. Interview with Richard Dayton, YCM LaboraLos Angeles, 28 March 2005.

For Natalie Kalmus background and her importan12 Technicolor theory and early practice, Higgins, 39

Natalie Kalmus, Color Consciousness,13 The Journal ofthe Society of Motion Picture Engineers [hereafterSMPE Journal] (August 1935) 146, 142; revised as Colourin Behind the Screen, ed. Stephen Watts (London:Barker, 1938), 122, 118. For Herbert Kalmus and t

cardinal importance attached to accurate reproducH.T. Kalmus, Technicolor Adventures in CinemaSMPE Journal (December, 1938), 576, 579.

Edward Branigan, The Articulation of Color in a 14System, Wide Angle 1/3 (1976), 25.Kodak Color Data Book E-74 [15 Color as Seen andPhotographed] (Rochester, NY, 1950), p. 56.

H.T. Kalmus,16 op. cit., 576, 579. Cf. article by Technicolorschief lab technician in the 1930s, Winton Hoch, TecCinematography, Journal of the Society of Motion PictuEngineers (August, 1942), 9798; and an article by Technicolors vice president and technical advisor, JThe Technicolor Process of Three-Color CinematoSMPE Journal (August, 1935), 134.

Ferguson, New Wine and Old Bottles,17 The New Republic(26 June 1935); reprinted in The Film Criticism of OtisFerguson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 81.

James Peterson, Fireworks: The Spread of Spect18in the Fifties Film, unpubl. seminar paper CA958(American Films of the 1950s), University of WiscMadison, 17 May 1982.

Haver,19 A Star is Born, 155.

Branigan, The Articulation of Color, op. cit, for 20important positioning of Godards Deux ou trois cque je sais delle [Two or Three Things I Know AbHer] within Hollywoods color conventions. NicholPaige, Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing

Fire, lmed JulySept 1954 with Jane Russell and JeffChandler.

My statistics derive from an amended list of Technicolorlms compiled in Haines, Technicolor Movies, pp. 3747which in turn derives from Fred Bastens lmography in

Glorious Technicolor (Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1980),169187. The dif culty with these lists is that they donot distinguish between lms shot in 3-strip and thosesimply processed by Technicolor. Nor do they distinguishHollywood product from foreign-made movies, norHollywood productions made abroad [which relied on Technicolor technicians in London and Rome] from thosemade at home. In my statistics, I have siphoned off thenon-three strip productions and foreign lms.

I have drawn production dates from theAmericanFilm Institute Catalog, 19511960, Chadwyck-Healey/American Film Institute, 20032008.

In this case, the Technicolor credit is doubly misleading.5 Although Rear Window was processed by Technicolor,Eastman Color lm was used not only as the negative,but also for the prints. The Technicolor lab, still learninghow to cope with the new Eastman monopack negative,discovered that Eastmans own print lm producedsharper results than Technicolors dye transfer process.So, while the lab took a crash course to improve its ownsystem, it quietly used Eastman print lm for featuressuch as Rear Window, A Star is Born, andHow to Marrya Millionaire. Robert Gitt, interview with author, Paci cFilm Archive, Berkeley, CA 20 Feb 2005.

Paramounts advertizing also created the illusion thatRear Window was shot wide-screen. But cinematographerRobert Burks con rms that the lm was shot standardaperture with standard lenses. Arthur Gavin, RearWindow, American Cinematographer (February, 1954),7678, 97. Following the practice Paramount started withShane, the aperture plate was masked to simulate wide-screen in some [mostly rst-run] theatres.

MacQueen, Film Technology, 2728.6

For the technical challenges of shooting7 Rear Window,Robert Burks, quoted in Gavin, Rear Window, AC(February, 1954), 78.

Warner Brothers experience shooting8 A Star is Born in1954 provides the classic example of the incompatibilitybetween three-strip Technicolor with CinemaScope. Afterseveral weeks of shooting, Cukor was obliged to abandonthe Technicolor cameras and start over with EastmanColor lm. Ron Haver,A Star is Born (New York: AlfredKnopf, 1988), 134136.

Gorham Kindem, Hollywoods Conversion to Color: the9 Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors, Journalof the University Film Association, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring,1979), 35.

Martin Hart, e-mail to author, 20 Sept 2005: My best10estimate of the weight of the unblimped Technicolorcamera would be about 120 pounds with a full loadof lm. I dont think the blimped camera weighed

The literature on Technicolor is large; for a ne scholarly1introduction to Technicolors development in the1930s that includes an extensive bibliography, ScottHiggins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: ColorDesign in the 1930s, University of Texas Press, 2007.For a popularized technical history, Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies, Jefferson, N.C., 1993. Martin Hartsremarkable website, The American WideScreen Museum[http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/] contains muchexpert, detailed information about Technicolor, EastmanColor, and their rivals, and is especially valuable for thewealth of graphic illustration. Scot t MacQueens, Film Technology: Special Report, The Perfect Vision 3/10(Spring, 1991), 2438, is the single article I know thatchallenges the orthodoxy about Technicolor and EastmanColor. With the technical expertise of a lm restorationprofessional, MacQueen cuts through the usual cant witha fresh, provocative comparison.

In his intellectual history of color reproduction,2Neil Harris sees an analogous decline. For him, the early1950s are stigmatized not by Eastman Color but by colortelevision whose anticipated rise was accompanied byan intellectually impoverished level of discourse, limitedto technical and commercial issues. Harris contrasts thiswith the lively multi-layered debates that accompaniedthe rise of Technicolor in the 1920s and 1930s. Harris,Color and Media: Some Comparisons and Speculations,Prospects 11 (1987) 728; reprinted in Harris, CulturalExcursions (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 318336.

For Eastmans problems with color instability and the3

corporate cover-up, Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower, ThePermanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditionaland Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, andMotion Pictures (Preservation Publishing Co., Grinnell,Iowa, 1993), 305328.

Technicolors biggest year was 1952, when no fewer4than 85 Hollywood features used the 3-strip camera.It meant that in the following year audiences wereooded with Technicolor releases including The BandWagon, Shane,5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Gentlemen PreferBlondes, The Caine Mutiny, andMagni cent Obsession. The studios released almost one hundred Technicolorfeatures in 1953 [95 by my count, including three shotoverseas] and distributed another 23 foreign lms shotin Technicolor.

But the tide quickly ebbed. In their rush to wide-screen in1953, the biggest studios switched away from the 3-stripprocess, leaving the cameras to Columbia, Universal,and RKO for budget product. In early 1954 Paramountmade Technicolors nal Grade-A picture, The Bridgesat Toko-Ri, but by then prestige Technicolor productionshad become an anomaly. Paramount itself had alreadybegun using VistaVision for its other color releases, awidescreen process that depended upon Eastman Color.

Three-strip was phased out on a schedule of low-costwesterns, sci- , and musicals. The last American Technicolor features were Seminole Uprising,ManWithout a Star, Shotgun, and, nally, UniversalsFox


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Related articles include Color in Industry,Fortune,vol. 43 (June, 1951) 122128. A.A. Goldsmith, PuColor To Work, Photography, 34 (May 1954), 6265.Mary Davis Gillies, Our Color-Happy World, M (Oct 1954), 3843. Getting Final Word on Color,color and carpets], Business Week, 14 December 1957,124129.

Faber Birren,37 Selling Color to People (University Boo1956), 164. Reading Minds Thru Color Design, (March, 1953), p. 132. Shirts to Match Blue MonPink Fridays, Science News Letter, 70 (8 Sept 19152.

All-black Car is a Dying Breed,38 Business Week (18 June1955), 130. This was especially good news for teenbecause police departments were the among the laholdouts against the color revolution, making theiespecially easy to identify in rear view mirrors. TeGreenwich Connecticut, where I spent my adolescwere unusually blessed. There the cops used blackwhite Edsels for their unmarked cars.

For popularized accounts of these studies: Clifford39B. Hicks, Your Color Type and How to Live WithPopular Mechanics, Vol. 93 (February, 1950), 971What Color Suits You Best,House and Garden, vol. 108(September, 1955), 7887. Faber Birren works thisin Creative Color (Reinhold Publishing, 1961), 21f

For earlier writings on color psychology: EmotioDue to Colors, Literary Digest 85 (April 25, 192525, a discussion by Matthew Luckiesh, then directthe Lighting Research Lab of General Electric. MPeople Do Things by Wall Colors, Everybodys 34(March, 1916): 39899.

For a recent article making the similar assumptionKim Anderson, The Power of Color, (TC)2 Bi-Weekly Technology Communicator (June 2005)http://www.techexchange.com/thelibrary/powerofcolor.

Eisenstein himself compared Vladimirs famous b40blush inIvan the Terrible Part II to Flower the Skunkturning red in Bambi; the debt is analyzed in Anne Savage Junctures (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 194195. The conventions origins can be found in Disneys ThreeLittle Pigs, Lullaby Land, The Flying Mouse and other SillySymphonies. Cf. Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman, TheSilly Symphonies (Gemona, Italy: Cineteca del Friuli Pre2007), passim.Derek Hill, 41 Moby Dick Sets New Style in ColorPhotography: On Oswald Morris CinematographyAC,37/9 (Sept, 1956), 534 ff.

Branigan, The Articulation of Color, 2829 show42Godard transforms this strategy into a full-blown rsystem.My analysis of Track of the Cat derives from Branigansstudy.

Kazan to Michel Ciment in Ciment,43 Kazan on Kazan (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 123Karla Oeler,44 A Grammar of Murder University of ChicagoPress, forthcoming.

of the color western in the early 1950s was particularlydramatic. By my count, a total of twenty westerns lmedin color were released from 1940 to 1949, none duringAmericas war years. At the end of the decade, thenumber shot up from three in 1949 to 11 in 1950, then to23 in 1951, 21 in 1952 , 21 in 1953, and 20 in 1954. Inshort, as many color westerns were shot each year in theearly 1950s as were shot in the entire preceding decade.

For Minnelli and Technicolor, Scott Higgins, Color at29the Center: Minnellis Technicolor Style in Meet Me inSt. Louis [1944], Style (Fall, 1998). For Minnelli andhis color 1950s melodrama, Minnelli with Hector Acre, IRemember It Well (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974),288290.

Minnelli, in fact, resisted Eastman color for30 Lust forLife because in its rst years the Eastman color styleso closely resembled Technicolors that Minnelliassumed Eastman could not reproduce subdued tones.Its palette, he claimed, came straight from the candybox, a brilliant mixture of blues, reds, and yellows[I Remember, 28889]. So he used Ansco Color alongwith the single color consultant with no Technicolorbackground, Anscos Charles Hagedon.

Derek Hill, 31 Moby Dick Sets New Style in ColorPhotography: On Oswald Morris Cinematography,AC,37/9 (Sept, 1956), 534 ff. Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons(New York: Avon Books, 1989), 423424.

Michael Stern, Interview,32 Bright Lights 6 (Winter,197778), 33; Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames,Entretien avec Douglas Sirk,Cahiers du Cinema 189(April 1967), 23, 25. Cf. Mike Prokosh, Imitation ofLife,Douglas Sirk, eds. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday(Lancashire, England: Edinburgh Film Festival 72/ NFT/ John Players & Sons, 1972), 90.

Kalmus,33 op cit., 144. For a history of color psychologyin modern painting, John Cage,Color and Meaning: Art,Science, and Symbolism. Berkeley, Calif: University ofCalifornia Press, 1999.

For scienti c accounts of how the brain processes different34frequencies of light in order to interpret color, Jacob Beck,The Perception of Surface Color,Scienti c American (August, 1975), 6475. Hans Wallach, The Perceptionof Neutral Colors,Scienti c American (January, 1963),107116. Semir Zeki,Inner Vision: An Exploration of Artand the Brain, Oxford University Press, 2000.Harris, Color and Media,35 op. cit., 336.

The attention paid to color in industry was widely36reported. As early as 1941,Readers Digest reprintedMeet the Color Engineer, (June, 1941), 13435,describing the work of Faber Birren, a color specialistliving in New York. By the 1950s, Birrens career hadtaken off, publishing books that encouraged innovationsin color management in the factory, the restaurant, thehospital, and the schoolroom. He also described how

color could be an effective marketing tool in self-servicestores such as supermarkets, automobile dealerships,and liquor stores, where customers often made impulsedecisions.

Postmodern Image),Representations 88 (Fall 2004),125 contains a nuanced analysis of GodardsLe mpris[Contempt] and Technicolor.

The relationship between Technicolor and the emergingart house cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s is

especially complex. One way of formulating it is to seeEuropean directors particularly Godard and Resnais unmasking the formal contrivances lurking behind thenarrativized conventions of Technicolor and adaptingthem to their own purposes. But between Technicolorand the New Wave, as we will see, lies a decade ofAmerican lms that chart their own individualized, evenexperimental, course in exploring color.

Higgins, 4647 and 208213. See also Higgins Color21at the Center: Minnellis Technicolor Style in Meet Mein St. Louis [1944], Style (Fall, 1998), 65356, wherehe makes a similar argument, presenting a picture ofdiverse color styles co-existing within the borders of anoverarching set of aesthetic principles.

For Ansco Color Film and MGM,22 AmericanCinematographer (February, 1950), p. 42; ArthurRowan, The Wild North Introduces MGMs New AnscoColor Process, AC (March, 1952), 106107, 122124.Also Robert A. Mitchell, The New Ansco Color Film andProcess, AC (April, 1953), 166, 177183.

New Eastman Color Film Tested by Hollywood and23Film Labs, American Cinematographer (March 1950),95, 102. Thomas Brady, Big Color Rush On, New York Times (17 June 1951), X 5. New Color Deal,AmericanCinematographer (May, 1952), 206, 215216, andFrederick Foster, Eastman Negative-Positive Color Filmsfor Motion Pictures,AC (July 1953), 322323, 348349. Time Magazine (2 June 1952), Production and releasedates are provided by The American Film InstituteCatalog, 18931972.

Barry Salt [Film Style, p. 310] claims that The Swordof Monte Cristo, lmed fall 1950, was in fact the rstEastman Color lm, secretly shot and printed on EastmanColor positive and negative, but given a SuperCinecolorlabel. I have not been able to con rm this.

Likewise, budget color lms could be processed as24 TruColor, CineColor, or Path Color, depending upon thelab that was used. For an example of a technical journaltreating Eastman Color as a studio creation, EdwinDuPar, WarnerColor Newest of Color Process,AC(September, 1952), 384385, 402404.

Barry Salt, 310. Leigh Allen, New Technicolor Lighting25System Tested by Top-Flight Cinematographers,International Projectionist (January, 1951), 2021.Interview with Scott MacQueen, 28 March 2005.

Derived from amended lists in Basten,26 op. cit and Haines,op. cit and in The American Film Institute Catalog. Seefootnote 3.

James Agee,27 Time Magazine 7 January 1946, reprintedin Agee on Film (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1958),360.

Eastman Color western and melodrama counts derive28from The American Film Institute Catalog, ibid. The rise


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NFSA JournalJournal of the National Filmand Sound Archive of Australia

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Cf. Sirk to Stern in Bright Lights, op. cit.: Throughoutmy pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.Often the window will be here and the light from there.With color, too, I did this, to attain a lighting that isalmost Surrealistic. As Brecht has said, never forget thatthis is not reality. The distancation must be there Youhave to shoot it through a dialectic.

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