THE FUNCTIONS OF COLOURby Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (1999)

IntroductionThe suppression of colour

The reproduction of colours: composition and representationColour and meaning

From colour to black-and-whiteColour and 'cultural heritage'The effects and uses of colour

The autonomous colour: events and thoughtsSourcesNotes

Introduction

This literature survey will discuss different texts that deal with the functions of colour in film. The literature on this subject mainly consists of a number of articles and chapters from different books that present a great number of different views and preferences. There are not many books that deal exclusively with colour film, and hardly any of them present any uniform view on the topic. One of them is La couleur en cinéma, edited by Jacques Aumont, consisting of a number of articles about a wide range of topics and films, contributed by different film theorists. (1) The second book, 'Disorderly Order', is mainly based on transcripts of a number of discussions held during a workshop about colours in silent film held at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.(2) Although these discussions involve more than fifty participants, all of them with different opinions, tastes and interests, this book still somehow offers the lengthiest discussion about a fairly limited and defined topic. This text will mainly deal will the functions of colour in a historical context, although I also am going to discuss more general or "a-historical" aesthetic theories. But these will usually be linked to film history, to film conventions, to technology and to broader ideological aspects. These different elements will not be treated individually, but be presented in relation to each other throughout the text.

In the book The Image, Jacques Aumont writes one short paragraph about colour and plastic values in terms of their expressiveness.(3)Since the expressive role of colour is stressed in most theories about both painting and 'abstract' cinema, "it is almost more surprising to have the report that a theory of colour is still almost totally lacking."(4) What usually exists, even in many of the texts in this survey, is a metaphorical discourse, with different systems of equivalencies - musical, physiological, symbolical and other metaphors. According to Aumont, "these

approaches are not without interest, but they cannot be called theories, not even embryonic ones."(5)

The literature that uses these metaphors and analogies, does always seem to define the role of colour in relation to something else, and although many of the texts in this survey emphasise the autonomy of colour, they still primarily discuss the different functions of colour in relation to elements like narrative, soundtrack, music and others, as well as the distinction between images in colour and images in black-and-white. This survey will be about these functions, it will not try to define or explain colour as such, as a category.

Much of the writing about colour and its relation to black-and-white is even motivated by preferences. Many theorists and critics attribute certain general characteristics to each of the two image systems, in relation to realism, artistic value etc., as part of their argumentation. William Johnson, among many others, criticises what he calls a "refuge in generalities, accepting or rejecting the color as a whole."(6) It is of course impossible to claim that black-and-white always is more realistic than colour or vice versa. If one at all can decide upon what is "realistic" and what is not, one rather has to consider a number of other aspects and elements within each individual work that play a much greater role than the question of the absence or presence of colour. However, these arguments and preferences inform a great deal of the discussions on colour in film, and they also illustrate to what extent these discussions are subjective, and dependent on what the different authors actually are searching for, what their tastes are, whether it is narrative, or visual expressiveness, whether it is "realism" or "abstraction" etc. The definitions of colour therefore are dependent on how the different writers choose to define film.

This subjectivity of course does not only inform the "pure" aesthetic discussions, but also the more historical approaches. One example of this is Edward Branigan's article "Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History", which is a historiography, discussing different methodologies in approaching the early history of colour cinematography.(7) The text is structured around the presentation of four different accounts of this history. First, "the adventure of colour" is focused on individuals, on different pioneers, and works in an anecdotal and biographical fashion, following a linear narrative, suggesting an evolutionary development.(8) Then follows "the technology of colour", which focuses on the different scientific discoveries, and the historically motivated connections between these and contemporary aesthetics, what artistic effects the discoveries actually were able to produce.(9) "The industrial exploitation of colour" discusses technology in an economic context, exploring financial implications.(10) Finally "the ideology of colour", presents a Marxist perspective inspired by theories of Jean-Louis Comolli.(11) Here the question is discussed in a social and economic context. Ideology informs the technological development, and in particular the way the technology is presented. The emphasis on film and photography as objective and scientifically accurate, in some respects superior to the human eye, is especially relevant in the

case of colour cinematography. Here the 'natural', scientific nature of the colours, the fact that they are produced exclusively by light, gives this colour process a totally different status than, for example, applied colour methods. But ideology is of course even revealed through the active use of colours in films, whether they are present or absent, through conventions and the development of 'colour codes'.

Most of the texts referenced here do acknowledge that the functions of colour in film history are the result of an interplay of factors, - that are technological/scientific, aesthetic, financial, ideological, - although the combination of all these factors inevitably produce contradictions and difficulties in finding any simple conclusions.

The suppression of colour

During the Amsterdam workshop there were discussions about a great number of topics in relation to colour in silent film. In addition to dealing with the different functions of colour - and the difficulty in organising these into any systematicity -, the many different colour techniques - both in terms of so-called "natural", photographically processed methods and applied colour methods -, the discussions also dealt with archival problems. One such problem is the fact that when the original coloured nitrate prints - some of which are unique originals - are preserved on acetate stock, the colours are somewhat altered. There are several different preservation techniques, all with different advantages and disadvantages. Another problem is whether one should try to reproduce the colours the way they appear on the nitrate now or if they should be reproduced according to how one believes they looked in the silent era, when the print was in circulation, before being, as Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk puts it, "subject to unrelenting changes occasioned first by the wear and tear of projection in the silent era and then by ageing and decay in the vaults of film archives."(12)

In the article "Le nitrate mécanique", Paolo Cherchi Usai emphasises the fact that the "aura" of the original nitrate copies is missing from modern duplicates, in fact, the original colours are lost forever.(13) This forces us to think about in what way we should appreciate the colours as they now appear on acetate prints. Until quite recently the applied colour elements in early film were neglected. From the sessions in Amsterdam there are examples of how influential film archivists like Henri Langlois and Jacques Ledoux were not particularly interested in non-photographic elements in silent film.(14) This also to a certain degree included musical accompaniment and intertitles. This was not only the result of the emphasis on the photographic aspects of film, but also of the auteurism that to such a great extent has influenced film theory as well as archival policies. The application of colour was very seldom based on decisions and choices made by the director. Besides, most films even circulated in both black and white and - more expensive -

coloured copies, so the colour never seemed to be an absolute necessity, just a simple addition, something that had an arbitrary function. Tom Gunning suggests that twenty years ago, scholars were more concerned with films as individual textual objects with "a kind of unique, aesthetic essence."(15) Now the attention to a greater extent is on film in performance, and this implies several variants, because of several different prints, different applied colours, a variety of different musical accompaniment, etc.

But colour is usually neglected in film theory even when dealing with colour films that are produced with so-called "natural" photographic processes, and therefore only exist in colour. In 1976, Branigan wrote: "Criticism of film to the present day has largely proceeded as if all films were made in black and white. Few theorists or filmmakers even comment on the use of color in a film much less consider the structural possibilities."(16) In a recent article on colour in film, Eva Jørholt refers to Branigan and claims that these observations are still valid.(17) This also seemed to be the case for example in film reviews in the twenties; colour was rarely mentioned, films were reviewed as if they had been black-and-white productions.(18) But this does not necessarily mean that colour was totally unimportant to contemporary audiences. A great deal of film criticism from that era was concerned with justifying and defining film as an art form, often by distinguishing it from other art forms, in particular the theatre, and in this respect, the question of colour was unimportant.

Still, one example of how the absence of colours in black-and-white film was noticed and commented by spectators, is the short text Maxim Gorky wrote after watching Lumière's films for the first time, claiming that they were not showing the real world, only its shadow.(19) This and similar reactions, that often are about missing the total illusion generated by colours and sound, are by some theorists, among them André Gaudreault, used as an explanation why colour was applied to black-and-white material during the silent era.(20)

But there were even quite early theories on film that saw the absence of colour as one of the specific aesthetic qualities of that particular art form, as something that distinguished cinema from other art forms, and - in particular - from real life itself. Rudolf Arnheim, who claimed that "[A]rt begins where mechanical representation leaves off", argued during the thirties against the use of colour film.(21) Black-and-white film was more artistic, because it offered a "welcome divergence from nature".(22) To a certain extent, Arnheim was thinking about black-and-white film in the way that most people at that time seemed to be thinking about colour, in most cases Technicolor, namely as something less realistic, something that was almost auto-reflexive in its emphasis on the colour in itself, represented through genres like the musical, the fantasy film etc., while black-and-white usually was looked upon as more "realistic".

The reproduction of colours: composition and representation

But even André Bazin, during the forties, considers colour film as the more realistic image system, despite both the conventions at the time and the fact that Technicolor's reproduction of colours hardly can be called "naturalistic". The more "total" illusion that colour, and even sound, entailed, was a perfection of the ontology of cinema, of its nature as an indexical imprint and direct reproduction of reality.(23)

But Arnheim's reluctance toward colour film was not only motivated by its extended "realism". He also stressed the compositional advantages of black-and-white, "which renders possible the making of significant and decorative pictures by means of light and shade."(24) He also stressed the fact that the beauty of nature is different from the beauty of art.(25) The colour combinations in nature are accidental and inharmonious, but in a visual representation of nature, for example a painting, the colours should be structured in accordance to a consistent form. Arnheim describes how there is a difference between the "practical" sense of seeing, where the colours primarily help distinguish single objects, and the aesthetic way of seeing where the relationships between the optic appearances of these objects are more important. Colour photography does not belong to art because of its lack of form, and it is neither a part of nature.

Film directors like Carl Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky also describe how difficult it is to achieve successful compositions when working with colour film. They too compare the medium to painting. Tarkovsky thinks the black-and-white image is closer to art's psychological, naturalistic and poetic truth, and that the use of colour for dramatic effect is a method that is more appropriate to a painter than to a filmmaker.(26) Dreyer, however, believed that the - in his opinion - almost total absence of good colour films was due to the fact that film directors to such little extent were familiar with creating colour constellations, and he actually suggested that painters, because of their experience and sensibility in relation to colour, should be more involved in the production of colour films. Dreyer thinks that the aspect that distinguishes colour in film from colour in painting, is movement, which causes the constellations of colours to change all the time.(27) Béla Balázs, however, thought that it was because of the movement and change of colour that colour film could represent something unique, something that could be distinguished from painting, something that could render colours as part of an event, instead of only as a static quality.(28) Gilles Deleuze divides what he characterises as the colour-image into three categories. The third one, "movement colour - which passes from one tone to the other," is quite compatible to the colour events Balázs is describing.(29) And even Deleuze discusses this colour category in relation to colour in painting: "it is only movement-colour which seems to belong to the cinema, the others already being entirely part of the powers of painting."(30)

In the article "Matière du sujet", Jean-Louis Schefer writes about the discussions regarding the role of colour in film and how this is used as a way to connect cinema to painting.(31) In his opinion, this discussion is simply another repetition of an ancient question in art history: What is most important - lines/drawings or colours? And Dreyer, for instance, does use this kind of terminology, these analogies, attributing lines to black-and-white film and surfaces to colour film.(32) According to Schefer, however, the answer to this question has always been that lines and colours never can be compared in terms of which is most important. His text, filled with metaphors and analogies, actually claims that painting is much closer to the black-and-white image. In black-and-white film everything is composed from the same substance (similar to paint), and is therefore connected within the same scale of lightness, there is a substantial bond between the characters and the landscape. With colour film this unity is broken or, as Schefer puts it, mutated. The projected world is split into different objects and bodies, substances and entities, and there is no longer any bond between the characters and the landscape. The dream-like, impressionistic environment of black-and-white is replaced by the real world.

The distinction between objects that colour produces, and the fact that they stem from nature are probably the main problems when it comes to composing film images in colour. Tarkovsky emphasises the director's inability to choose the exact colours he wants for his compositions as one of the main problems of colour film.(33) And Aumont actually links these difficulties in terms of control to a difference between painter and film director.(34) The painter has a direct, physical and immediate relation to colour and works without any intermediaries. The relation is totally personal; the painter has control over the choice of colours and how they should function in relation to each other. The director, however, is dependent on his staff and the technical equipment. Aumont even shows how there are great difficulties in controlling the contents of the images because any accurate reproduction of what is filmed is impossible.(35) The colour in the image is never the same as in the real world. Along with all the other elements in a film, it involves a new way of regarding the world. This does not mean that is completely unrealistic, but it is neither completely real, it is influenced by certain technical limitations. Trying to perfect the analogue reproduction is therefore a utopian idea. Besides, the search for accuracy is reductionistic and an obstacle in the way of the expressiveness of colour. But of course it is still as reductionistic to reject naturalism altogether and avoid any form of naturalness for the benefit of colours that are consciously different from nature.(36) According to Aumont, colour film is more natural, more realistic than black-and-white, but still this century has been marked by the following doxa: although colour is more natural, it is still less common.

Aumont claims that the concept of images in colour usually is attributed to paintings, while black-and-white images generally are linked to film and photography.(37) The chromatic histories of these two kinds of images are also opposites: painting began in colour and after several centuries it (in certain works)

turned black-and-white, while photography started in black-and-white and gradually gained colour. Therefore colour film, in terms of tradition, exists in a position between painting and photography. Even when it is indexical, a photography in colour is not always fully accepted as a true photograph.

To give one example: even though Roland Barthes accentuated the indexical aspect of photography, its status as trace, he still felt that "color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses)."(38) This point of view is of course opposite to the views of Arnheim and Bazin, who both emphasised how the addition of colour constituted a greater realism. What these two opposite points of view have in common, is however the fact that they both differ from what were the general views and conventions at the times these texts were written. Arnheim and Bazin wrote about the realism of colour film during the thirties and forties when colour normally was connected with fantasy and spectacle, while Barthes wrote about colour as artifice in 1980, when colour photography had been the absolute norm for the last 10-15 years, in both film and television. These are just a few examples of to what degree the discussions on colour film are based on very different opinions, caused by preferences, and by what the individual authors actually are searching for, motivated by what functions they attribute both to colour and, even more important, to film and photography. Besides, as Gunning points out, the "whole question about colour versus black-and-white in relation to realism is extremely vexed, because you can go through different periods of film history, and the relation switches around."(39)

The problems in the discussion about the 'naturalness' of the colours and the overall "realistic" effect of colour film of course have as great ideological as aesthetic implications. The fact that the reproduction of colours never is accurate, that even various colour film stocks actually render certain colours differently from each other, raises the question of what standards and what aims are informing the research and the decisions made in relation to the technical development of photographic colour film material. According to Brian Winston, "the research agenda for colour film (and more latterly colour television) was dominated by the need to reproduce Caucasian skin tones."(40) And still colour films "do not render black skin tones as easily as they do white."(41) Therefore a particular consciousness about the use of the right lighting and camera angles is vital when trying to render 'natural' black skin tones. Richard Dyer's book White has numerous examples of difficulties connected to this, one of the biggest problems seeming to be lighting a scene where both black and white persons are present at the same time.(42)

There are not only elements of racism in the decisions made in the technological development, or in how the term "flesh tones" always is associated with white skin. But there are even connections to a more general symbolism of colours, where white represents goodness and purity and black represents the opposites, and this symbolism has racial implications as well. Particularly revealing is, according to

Winston, that the ideal of 'pleasing flesh tones' did not imply attaining a reproduction that was as accurate as possible. In fact, the skin tones were made more 'pleasing' than they were in reality. The colour stocks that were considered successful in this respect actually reproduced white skin tones that were far paler than in reality. What was preferred, was therefore "a white shade of white."(43)

Colour and meaning

But generally, the topic of colour symbolism is very difficult to apply to most films. This is particularly the case for the use of tinting and toning. The problems in finding any clear systematicity regarding the functions of the different colour systems may of course be another reason why the colour-elements in silent films were suppressed for so many years. In many texts about tinting and toning there are attempts to define a number of colour codes, to apply certain identifiable associations to specific colours. According to Hertogs and de Klerk, "these 'associations' may well be more statistical than semantic."(44)

In his chapter on tinting and toning, Steve Neale writes: "The common practice was to tint each scene according to mood and to the specifics of the setting and action: a fire scene would be tinted red, a night scene blue, a sunlit scene yellow and so on."(45) There is particularly a problem with the concluding "and so on", suggesting, again according to Hertogs and de Klerk, "that other colours have equally straightforward meanings that the writer is unable - for reasons of space, in an introductory text, or whatever, to list in full. It would indeed be impossible to produce a comprehensive list, but not for such reasons."(46) David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson also write in their 'introductory text' on film history about certain colour codes and their narrative functions, but they are still far more cautious about establishing rigid systems, they are primarily giving a number of examples.(47) Still they have an example of a fire scene that is tinted pink, not red as in Neale's example. Along with blue, red is actually one of the two 'stereotypical' colours that serve as examples in Hertogs' and de Klerk's text, but here the standardised function for red is 'love'.(48) And Gunning even claims that yellow tinting usually is a code for artificial interior light, not a sunlit scene, as in Neale's example. (49) Not only are there great variations in terms of the actual practices, but even the attempts at constructing standardised codes in our time are full of contradictions.

Another problem with the chosen sentence in Neale's text may be how he does not specify the differences between "mood" and "specifics of setting and action". The three examples he is giving do all fall under the latter category; their associations are somehow linked to referential levels of meaning. Hertogs' and de Klerk's example of red "signifying" love falls under the "mood" category, where the colour is associated with more symbolic levels of meaning. Of course the applied colour could work on and play with several different levels of meaning at the same time,

and therefore the search for one particular association is very problematic. The fact that even non-fiction films were coloured causes additional problems to the attempts at establishing colour codes and systems. According to Gunning, "we very rarely understand what is happening because of the colour. We more often get the meaning of the colour from the narrative situation."(50)

This illustrates an important aspect of colour's function in film, quoting Edward Branigan: "To say that colour has no intrinsic meaning, however, is not to say it has no meaning."(51) This is even the basis of an article by Sergei Eisenstein, entitled "Colour and Meaning", where a great number of attempts to attribute specific meanings to specific colours are criticised.(52) He explains how the meanings and values of colours are dependent on the organic unity of each individual work, and he even claims that this is a prominent feature of art: "In art it is not the absolute relationships that are decisive, but those arbitrary relationships within a system of images dictated by the particular work of art."(53) This may even imply that the same colour - in two different films - can "assume absolutely contradictory meanings, dependent only upon the general system of imagery that has been decided upon for the particular film."(54)

From colour to black-and-white

Neale writes about how tinting and toning were used in almost every film during the 1920s, but that this practice, after the coming of sound, suddenly almost disappeared completely.(55) One of the explanations of this has been that the colour dyes interfered with the soundtrack. However, dyes modified for use in sound films were produced and applied to a number of films, during the 1930s and even the 1940s. So the opportunity to use tinting and toning was still there, but it was not very often exploited. Neale's explanation is rather that the coming of sound introduced a new kind of aesthetic realism, based on the synchronised, recorded sound, and this soundtrack of course had the same kind of status as trace as the photographic image. Even when the colour had a referential connection to what was taking place in the image, the addition of colour did not have any particular realistic effect, it always implied a metaphorical potential.

Hertogs even attributes a change in the monochrome images during the 1920s, related to narrativity in fiction films.(56) A lot of films were printed on pre-coloured stock, and therefore the range of available colours was much more limited than in the 1910s. This may be connected to the fact that film in general was more narrativised during the 1920s than in the 1910s, and conventions were to a certain degree constricted to the ideals of 'classic cinema' and its emphasis on narrative functions. And somehow the narrative information that tinting and toning could add became more and more superfluous.

Early in the 1920s black-and-white stock changed from orthochromatic material to panchromatic material. The perhaps most standardised colour code, blue for 'night', had a very clear narrative function of adding "darkness", motivated by the difficulties in filming scenes at night with orthochromatic stock. With panchromatic stock night scenes could be rendered 'photographically', because this stock to a much greater extent allowed filming with less light, and generally produced images with a greater range of contrast. Enno Patalas describes how this technical development coincided with a growing awareness of the photographic aspects of cinema.(57) In Germany during the 1920s there was a number of individual films that actually were released only in black-and-white versions, among them so-called Expressionist films by Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau.

Although the releases of these films somehow represent a departure from the norm of applying colours, Gilles Deleuze claims that "it is undoubtedly Expressionism which was the precursor of real colourism in the cinema."(58) This kind of colourism is photographically based, and in particular connected to the use of lighting in Expressionist films, and how these films play with light and darkness and the grey shades between these two entities, both on a visual and on a narrative, symbolic level. Deleuze links these images to Goethe's colour theory, where the two entities black and white, infinite darkness and infinite light, constitute the basis for understanding all colours. Every colour exists somewhere between light and darkness, and therefore in black-and-white film what originally was a specific colour in the outside world is equalled by a particular shade of grey. Arnheim describes the workings of the black-and-white image as a "reduction of colour values to a one-dimensional grey series (ranging from pure white to dead black)."(59) The black-and-white image does not show the specific colour in terms of hue or saturation, but it still conveys lightness, the position of the "reduced" colour within the grey series, its value in terms of light and shade. And panchromatic stock rendered these "colour reductions" with greater contrast and accuracy.

The virtual disappearance of non-photographic applied colours is therefore related to an aesthetics of realism, and an awareness of photographic and indexical aspects of film, due to technological developments like the change to panchromatic material and the coming of synchronised sound. The emphasis on both narrative functions and also on the decisions made by the individual directors, made the more arbitrary function of the applied colour seem less important.(60) This actually means that the explanations of why applied colours disappeared are almost exactly the same as the explanations of why, to a great extent, later archival policies in general have suppressed these same colours for such a long period. The disappearance of colours marks a shift in the way one was defining film, and the return of these colours in more current archival policies also marks a similar shift from - or at least an extension of - this definition.

The introduction of Technicolor in the late 1920s, the first 'natural' photographic colour system that really proved to be commercially successful, represents,

according to Neale, "the colour technology appropriate, so to speak, to the predominant aesthetic of sound cinema".(61) However, in practice, it took much longer time before Technicolor became 'naturalised' than was the case with synchronised sound. Sound cinema became a norm after a couple of years, while colour cinematography did not "eliminate" black-and-white until the late 1960s, almost four decades later. And in the 1930s and 1940s - and to a certain extent even during the 1950s - colour was primarily associated with spectacle and fantasy, and used for musicals, dream sequences etc. In the 1920s the use of Technicolor was limited to short sequences in otherwise black-and-white movies. Edward Buscombe claims that during the first decade of Technicolor, its ideological appeal was limited to two possibilities: signifying luxury and spectacle, or celebrating technology.(62) This of course had a lot to do with economic and technological factors. Colour was much more expensive and more technically complicated than black-and-white, and, as William Johnson points out, it altered the image in a way that is not easily defined.(63) It was neither an addition in the way sound was, nor was it a simple modification like for instance widescreen.

There has been very little, if any, research on this, but perhaps there even is a connection between the use of applied colour and the initial response to Technicolor. Tinting, toning and hand colouring very concretely gained the status of being external additions, and did not either have any particular realistic effect or narrative function. Seeing colour in film as a more historically general category, this status may in some way have influenced how Technicolor was used and perceived during its first decades.

Still, as Philippe Dubois points out in the article "Hybridations et métissages", the introduction of Technicolor marks an important shift in how colour functions rhetorically.(64) In the cinema of attractions, through tinting and toning, and hand and stencil colouring, the colour intervened in the black-and-white image. With Technicolor, colour in cinema changed its logic and became "full" (pleine), perfectly integrated within the photographic image, which gave it a more natural place within the diegesis of classic cinema.

Colour and 'cultural heritage'

Deleuze's description of the "precursory" black-and-white colourism in Expressionist cinema is of course also linked to how a certain way of thinking about film and its relation to colour directly influenced archival policies. As Deleuze's text exemplifies, the suppression of applied colour in silent film of course even influenced the writings and the thinking on these films, and on the relation between black-and-white in general. The status of black-and-white has alternated between realism and abstraction in the same way as the status of colour. According to Stanley Cavell, the abstraction of black-and-white presents an "imagination

confined to the shapes of theater."(65) His main example of the achromatic competition "with reality by opposing it" is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where the expression of madness and fantasy and the connection to theatre "is a function of its existence in black and white."(66) Originally, however, Caligari was released in colour, and in an article Inge Degenhart even shows how the use of tinting was planned by the director, and the mise-en-scène was carefully elaborated, so the combination of photographic image and tinting would produce a particular range of monochromic gradations.(67)

The common apprehension that colour was non-existent in cinema until the 1930s also has informed the discussion about computerised colourisations of black-and-white classics. As Michel Chion points out, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, colouring black-and-white material was not a new idea invented in the 1980s, it is of course a technique used throughout the history of photography.(68) There is obviously a great aesthetic difference between the application of colours on silent films, where this practice was a natural part of contemporary film industry, and the colourisation of films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that were intended to be shown exclusively in black-and-white.

But still these discussions convey a certain 'colour code' often attributed to black-and-white, that of signifying history. In an article, Hannu Salmi shows how the 'reality' attributed to photography, both in film and still pictures, the domination of black-and-white in documentary footage, the use of black-and-white flashback sequences in more recent films, etc., all add to the use of the black-and-white image as a narrative and stylistic element, signifying the past, the idea of history. (69) In fact, during the last two centuries, what has been considered as a 'true depiction of history' mainly has been in black-and-white. The associations between colour and attraction have in fact given colour a status as 'non-history'. One of the main arguments against computerised colourisations, apart from the aesthetic ones, has been how they distort and destroy our cultural heritage, our sense of history. As Charles R. Acland points out, there is confusion about what the films are representing: "the colorized classic simultaneously signals particular histories and transforms them."(70) In the mid-80s, these versions were extremely popular, and Acland's explanation of this popularity is not the colour itself, but the colourisation, the technological novelty of the refinished product. In his opinion, this implies that because the audiences actually recognised and found an attraction in this alteration, the colourisations did not change their sense of history. Instead, they actually were entertained by the playing and tampering with this history that the new technology offered.

The effects and uses of colour

But still, if applied colours neither have any clear reference to reality or any clear narrative function, why have they always been added? In what way were and are they appreciated by the audiences? Gunning outlines two primary roles of colour in film, on one hand as an essential part in creating a total illusion, a complete reproduction of the visual world, as it is in Bazin's view, but on the other hand, he writes, "color can also appear in cinema with little reference to reality, as a purely sensuous presence, an element which can even indicate a divergence from reality."(71) Here the colour becomes a value in itself, an autonomous entity. This idea of a pure sensual colour is of course equally relevant in relation to Technicolor or colour cinematography in general, as Buscombe illustrates with this conclusion: "Color, then, need not serve realism. It may simply provide pleasure."(72)

In his article, however, Gunning primarily relates it to the different kinds of applied colours found during the silent era. Although he stresses the non-realistic aspect of this colour as well as the problem with establishing colour codes with clear narrative functions, he does not only look upon this kind of colour as pure spectacle, he even stresses its metaphorical potential. This potential depends on colour's role as a "minority option"; although "the use of color in an era dominated by black and white does not necessarily function as a metaphor, its less familiar nature, like a turn of speech, endows it with a metaphoric potential."(73) Gunning writes about the relation between colour and black-and-white, and a certain resistance to colour, similar to Aumont's description of the opposite chromatic histories of painting and photography, and Salmi's description of colour as non-history. Gunning describes this resistance and development within a specific cultural and historical context, starting in the USA in the 1860s. According to him the "surge of color into previously monochrome territories constitute one of the key perceptual transformations of modernity."(74) This transformation took place in different media, "first the mechanical reproduction of images, then still photography, cinema and finally television."(75) As an example he compares the film The Wizard of Oz from 1939 with L. Frank Baum's book of the same title that it is based on, first published in 1900. The chromatic structure of showing reality and daily life in monochrome images and then switching to Technicolor for the dream sequences is in perfect accordance with film conventions at the time the film was made, and allowing the colour to have both spectacular and narrative functions. However this color scheme is also found in the text itself; Kansas is described in words that are quite similar to Gorky's description of the Lumière films, as a place where everything - the land, the grass, the house, the people - is grey.(76) And in the descriptions of Oz, the individual colours of course play a very important part. But this chromatic structure, the contrast between the absence and the presence of colour, is even shown in the design and the illustrations of the first edition from 1900: "The opening chapter set in Kansas is printed in dull sepia, while the chapter that deposits Dorothy in the Land of the Munchkins, is immediately emblazoned in green. Subsequent chapters change colors".(77) Gunning shows how colour originally was linked to mass culture and the working class. The colours were originally found in a culture of sensationalism and commerce, in media like

advertising, comics and film. These strong, saturated colours threatened and were dissociated from so-called elite conceptions of taste.

So Aumont's and other theorists' conception of colour film as close to painting, an art form with more of an "elite appeal", has perhaps more to do with a discussion about "pure" aesthetics than with financial and ideological aspects. But still these analogies to painting were used actively in order to make colour film more culturally accepted. Natalie Kalmus, who was the leading colour consultant of the Technicolor company in the 1930s and 1940s and who also wrote extensively about her work and ideologies, named a number of painters - Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya - as inspirations for the preparation of colour charts for the films she was working on, - a deliberate attempt at giving colour film a status as an art form. (78) In an article, Richard Neupert presents Kalmus' writings and her work. In order to use Technicolor in a production, one had to hire equipment and a number of personnel from the company, among this a colour consultant, planning the color schemes and compositions. Kalmus' solution to making colour more tasteful and less intruding, was what she called "color restraint". The colour chart was compared to a musical score, and colour's function was similar to that of music; it should amplify and serve the purposes of the narrative. This way of thinking about colour is usually presented as reductionistic in most recent texts about colour film, and already in 1935, Rudolf Arnheim, with reference to Kalmus, criticised "the present grotesque habit, [having] a color specialist subsequently put color into a scene already established as action in the shooting script and as bodily shapes and movements by the director."(79) Still, there obviously were Hollywood genres like the musical where both music and colour played more prominent parts, that worked against this ideal of restraint and realism. And even the association with painting, suggested by for instance Dreyer, and even Kalmus herself, called for different ways of thinking about colour, but according to Kalmus, it was necessary to "guide [...] realism into the realms of art," to "augment the mechanical process with the inspirational work of the artist."(80) In her writings about colour, Kalmus still seems to acknowledge the existence of the autonomous, pure sensual colour that Gunning writes about as dominant during the silent era. But in her opinion, it had to be restrained and controlled in order to serve a specific purpose.

Eisenstein, like Kalmus and many others, writes about the functions of colour as similar to that of music; colour is "good when it is necessary", as he writes in a letter to Lev Kuleshov in 1948.(81) But he does not only describe the use of colour in musical terms; he also connects it to the use of sound. But in Eisenstein's discussion, colour does not add to any realism, but to the idea of the sound film as an organism. Colour nuances are necessary as expressive elements in order to make the visual elements blend harmoniously with all the different nuances available on the soundtrack. When this ideal is attained, the result will be films that live up to the title of the article he wrote on the subject in 1940: "Not Coloured, But In Colour": "complete organic unity - the unity of picture and sound - will be achieved only when we have films in colour. Only then will we be able to find the subtlest

visual equivalent to the subtlest curve in melody. Only then complete visual orchestration will rise to the level of the wealth of orchestration in music."(82)

The autonomous colour: events and thoughts

What makes the coloured film material from the silent era interesting is, according to Jacques Aumont, particularly that "it helps us form ideas about colour in general and images in general, and about the cinematic image in particular."(83) He uses the term 'colour events', as a way of avoiding discussions about "things like intentions or coherence, systems or meanings," and instead discuss ideas about colour. Béla Balázs also, as I have shown, described the specifically cinematic movement of and change in colours as an 'event'. And a similar term, 'colour incident', was used in 1949 by Major A. Cornwell-Clyne in the article "What's Wrong With Colour?" and it seems to discuss the same kind of role for colour that Aumont stresses, but in this case, the colour incident is seen as a negative distraction: "The observer should never be conscious of colour at all until it means something."(84) Aumont's approach is of course the opposite of this, and it allows him even to discuss how colour can create an event independently of anyone's intentions, for example even in films that have been decaying or solarising. Among other examples, he talks about how hand-painting and stencilling produce autonomous colours that float freely in front of the colourless, filmed objects and distort the identification of these objects.(85) These experiments and discoveries in film (not only in early film, but also throughout film history), and exploring and thinking abut these colours generate what Aumont calls 'colour ideas'.

Gilles Deleuze's approach to colour is similar to Aumont's in stressing colour's autonomous power regardless of any form of representation. Deleuze finds the formula of colourism by quoting Godard - 'it's not blood, it's red', meaning that "the colour-image does not refer to a particular object, but absorbs all it can."(86) However, Deleuze regards the colour-image as representative of what he calls the affection-image and the 'any-space-whatever'. These categories have their origins in the close-up, a kind of image that isolates the face and thereby abstracts it from concrete causal relations, "they are expressed for themselves, outside spatio-temporal co-ordinates, with their own ideal singularities."(87) This pure affect is somewhat different from Aumont's notion of colour events, which treat colours more like autonomous dramatic elements. Still, the absorption of objects that Deleuze is describing has elements of action and event similar to Aumont's concept, and both emphasise the autonomy of colour, its independence from the drama. The greatest difference between Deleuze and Aumont is probably how they deal with the relation between colour and object. While Deleuze writes about absorption, Aumont seems to claim that colours and objects in a way exist independently. Although he is primarily addressing coloured black-and-white images from the silent era, the filmmaker Jürgen Reble even attributes this

distinction to colour photography: "In fact, when we use colour film stock to film some real surface, there's actually more illusion than with black-and-white stock, because a black-and-white image is much closer to the physical structure of what we see. So the idea that colour only is a quality of the film material is very interesting."(88)

Deleuze's ideas about colour and the affection-image in general are to a great extent inspired by C.S. Peirce. The pure affect is connected to Peirce's category 'Firstness'.(89) According to Eva Jørholt, 'Firstness' to a certain degree corresponds to Peirce's two categories 'icon' and 'quality', and refers to something that exists by virtue of itself without representing anything, to qualities that do not need to be "realised" in order to exist.(90) One of Peirce's own examples of Firstness is the colour red. The colour is perceived and understood as a quality independently of the object that possibly carries it.

In many cases, the question of colour in film is used as a primary example of elements and qualities in the medium that are difficult to conform to those theories that are mainly based on narrative functions. Jørholt's article, for instance, uses the thoughts on colour in Deleuze's Cinema-books as a main example for a more extended argument about these books and Deleuze's thinking in general. An article by Daniel Frampton, that emphasises how film can function as thinking rather than a narrative device, uses colour as a primary example of 'cinematic' thoughts and ideas that achieve a level of importance without necessarily representing anything in particular.(91)

And in the colour events and any-spaces-whatever of Aumont and Deleuze, there are connections between colours that exist independently of objects or action; the colours, in fact, construct a "story" of their own (and thereby causing the exact distraction feared by filmmakers and theorists during the first decades of Technicolor). These "stories" may be found in the applied colours of early films, in a genre like the musical, in the elaborate colour schemes in the banquet sequence of the second part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (where there even is an interplay between the cinematic colours and Sergei Prokofiev's musical score), in certain examples of so-called 'modernist' cinema, but still - as Jørholt points out - in a narrative film, colours are inevitably always carried by objects and characters that are involved in specific actions, and therefore the pure affect, the pure colour-image is very difficult to apply to most films.(92)

In Eisenstein's opinion, it is important that both levels are discussed. One can possibly never (and probably one should not) ignore the actual objects, but to acknowledge the autonomous, expressive qualities of colour, is essential if colour is to be given any artistic function: "Before we can learn to distinguish three oranges on a patch of lawn both as three objects in the grass and three orange patches against a green background, we dare not think of colour composition."(93)

Literature

Acland, Charles R., "Tampering with the Inventory: Colorization an Popular Histories", Wide Angle Vol 12, No. 2 (April 1990)

Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1958)

--, Film Essays and Criticism (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)

Aumont, Jacques, "La trace et la couleur", Cinémathèque 2, novembre 1992

--, The Image (London: British Film Institute, 1997)

Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952)

Barthes, Roland, Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 1993)

Bazin, André, What Is Cinema?: Volume 1 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1967)

Branigan, Edward, "The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle", Wide Angle Vol. 1, No. 3 1976

--,"Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History", Movies and Methods Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (London/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)

Buscombe, Edward, "Sound and Color", Movies and Methods Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (London/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)

Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1979)

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, "Le nitrate mécanique. L'imagination de la couleur comme science exacte(1830-1928)", La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995)

Chion, Michel, "Colorisations", La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995)

Dall'Asta, Monica; Pescatore, Guglielmo, "Colour in Motion", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr.1, 1994 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1995). URL

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

'Disorderly' Order': Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, eds. Daan Hertogs; Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996).URL, "Editors' Preface"

Dreyer, Carl, "Color and Color Films", The Movies as Medium, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970)

Dubois, Philippe, "Hybridations et métissages: Les mélanges du noir-et-blanc et de la couleur", La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995)

Dyer, Richard, White (London/New York: Routledge, 1997)

Eisenstein, Sergei, The Film Sense (London: Faber and Faber, 1968)

--, Notes of a Film Director (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970)

Frampton, Daniel, "Filmosophy: Colour", New Scholarship from BFI Research, eds. Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie (London: British Film Institute, 1996).URL

Gorky, Maxim, "Lumières kinematograf", Aura: Filmvetenskaplig tidskrift, Volym I Nummer 2/1995

Gunning, Tom, "Colorful Metaphors: the Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr.1, 1994 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1995).URL

Johnson, William, "Coming to Terms with Color", The Movies as Medium, ed. Lewis Jacobs(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970)

Kosmorama nr. 221, Summer 1998

--, "Filmens farver: En hvid plet på filmvidenskabens landkort", Kosmorama Nr. 222, Winter 1998.

Neale, Steve, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1985)

Neupert, Richard, "Technicolor and Hollywood: Exercising Color Restraint", Post Script, Volume 10, Number 1 Fall 1990

Salmi, Hannu, "Color, Spectacle and History in Epic Film", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr.1, 1994 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1995). URL

Schefer, Jean-Louis, "Matière du sujet", La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995)

Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989)

Thompson, Kristin; Bordwell, David, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994)

Winston, Brian, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1996)

Films

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919)

Vogelöd Castle/Schloß Vogeloed (F.W. Murnau, 1921)

The Battleship Potemkin/Bronenosets Potyomkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

Ivan the Terrible/Ivan Grozny (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944-46)

Notes

1. La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995).

2. 'Disorderly Order': Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, eds. Daan Hertogs, Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996).

3. Jacques Aumont, The Image (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 216.

4. ibid.

5. ibid.

6. William Johnson, "Coming to Terms with Color", The Movies as Medium, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 211.

7. Edward Branigan, "Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History", Movies and Methods Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (London/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 121-143.

8. ibid., 123ff.

9. ibid., 125ff.

10. ibid., 128ff.

11. ibid., 132ff.

12. "Editor's Preface", 'Disorderly Order', 7.).URL

13. Paolo Cherchi Usai, "Le nitrate mécanique. L'imagination de la couleur comme science exacte (1830-1928)", La couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Milan/Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 1995), 104f.

14. 'Disorderly Order', 18 (Eric de Kuyper), 52 (Jacques Aumont).

15. ibid.

16. Edward Branigan, "The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle", Wide Angle Vol. 1, No. 3 1976, 20.

17. Eva Jørholt, "Farver og film - En hvid plet på filmvidenskabens landkort"; Kosmorama 222 (not yet published).

18. Cf. discussion between Ennos Patalas, Frank Kessler and Nico de Klerk, Disorderly Order', 20ff.

19. Maxim Gorky, "Lumières kinematograf", Aura: Filmvetenskaplig tidskrift, Volym I Nummer 2/1995, 8ff.

20. Cf. André Gaudreault, Germaine Lacasse, Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, "À Montréal, des sujets hauts en couleur, dès 1897...", 24 Images No 78-79, September-October 1995, 79f.

21. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 55.

22. ibid, 62.

23. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?: Volume 1 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1967), 20f.

24. Arnheim, Film as Art, 62.

25. Rudolf Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 21f.

26. Andrei Tarkovsky , Sculpting in Time (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 138f.

27. Carl Dreyer, "Color and Color Films", The Movies as Medium, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 198ff.

28. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 242.

29. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118.

30. ibid.

31. Jean-Louis Schefer, "Matière du sujet", La couleur en cinéma, 13ff.

32. Dreyer, 198.

33. Tarkovsky, 139.

34. Jacques Aumont, "La trace et la couleur", Cinémathèque 2, novembre 1992, 11.

35. ibid., 7.

36. ibid., 13f.

37. ibid., 8f.

38. Roland Barthes, Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 1993), 81.

39. 'Disorderly Order', 47.

40. Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 39.

41. ibid., 41.

42. Richard Dyer, White (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 89ff.

43. Winston, 56.

44. 'Disorderly Order', 6.

45. Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1985), 117.

46. 'Disorderly Order', 6.

47. Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994), 47.

48. 'Disorderly Order', 5.

49. ibid., 63.

50. ibid., 40.

51. Branigan, "The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System", 21.

52. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 92-122.

53. ibid., 120.

54. ibid., 121.

55. Neale, 118f. No one seems to be quite sure about when hand and stencil colouring disappeared, but Hans-Michael Bock gives the example of how critics specifically mentioned the hand painted red flag in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin i 1925, and how this should suggest that "the tradition of hand painting must by this time have been forgotten, at least by reviewers." 'Disorderly Order', 45.

56. 'Disorderly Order', 23.

57. ibid., 46.

58. Deleuze, 52.

59. Arnheim, 62.

60. "I've been through Murnau's own annotated copies of his scenarios, hoping to find something on colour. All I could find was a point in the scenario forVogelöd Castle where he notes: 'dream sequences - leave them black-and-white'." Ennos Patalas in 'Disorderly Order', 46.

61. Neale, 119.

62. Edward Buscombe, "Sound and Color", Movies and Methods Volume II, 90f.

63. Johnson, 213.

64. Philippe Dubois, "Hybridations et métissages: Les mélanges du noir-et-blanc et de la couleur", La couleur en cinéma, 79.

65. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 82.

66. ibid.

67. Monica Dall'Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore, "Colour in Motion", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr. 1, 1995, reference to Inge Degenhart, "Presence and Absence of Colour in Films" in the same issue, pp. 273-281. URL

68. Michel Chion, "Colorisations", La couleur en cinéma, 63.

69. Hannu Salmi, "Color, Spectacle and History in Epic Film", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr.1, 1994 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1995). URL

70. Charles R. Acland, "Tampering with the Inventory: Colorization an Popular Histories", Wide Angle Vol 12, No. 2 (April 1990), 15.

71. Tom Gunning, "Colorful Metaphors: the Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema", Fotogenia. Storie e teorie del cinema, nr. 1, 1995, 249. ). URL As I have already shown, Arnheim uses the similar phrase "divergence from nature" when describing the advantages of the black-and-white image. Arnheim, 62.

72. Buscombe, 90.

73. Gunning, 250.

74. ibid.

75. ibid., 249.

76. ibid., 251.

77. ibid.

78. Richard Neupert, "Technicolor and Hollywood: Exercising Color Restraint", Post Script, Volume 10, Number 1 Fall 1990, 24f.

79. Rudolf Arnheim, 22.

80. Kalmus quoted in Neale, 150.

81. Sergei Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), 121.

82. ibid., 118.

83. 'Disorderly Order', 52.

84. Major A. Cornwell-Clyne quoted in Neale, 149.

85. 'Disorderly Order', 53ff.

86. Deleuze, 118.

87. ibid., 102.

88. 'Disorderly Order', 55.

89. Deleuze, 98ff.

90. Eva Jørholt, "Deleuze i farver", Kosmorama nr. 221, Summer 1998, 105.

91. Daniel Frampton, "Filmosophy: Colour", New Scholarship from BFI Research (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 87ff. ).URL

92. Jørholt, "Deleuze i farver", 108.

93. Eisenstein; Notes of a Film Director, 127.