by Monica Dall'Asta and Guglielmo Pescatore
In 1895 when the audience of the Grand Cafe was shaken by the image of an immaterial engine in motion, the scene that had such an immense impact on them was in black and white. Cinema began its career as a vision of achromatic light and shade in motion, terrifying in that it stems from a mechanism of reproduction. It is only later that colour arrives on the scene, as an added element superimposed to the prodigious capacity to "fix" motion in images. As Tom Gunning notes in the opening article of this issue, (1) the history of the mechanic reproduction of images seems to be marked by a "resistance" towards colour: lithographic printing, photography, cinema as well as television began in black and white and only later was colour used. The matter could be put as follows: at the moment of its most electrictrifying novelty, when it appears as the ultimate "discovery" in which modernity momentarily crystallises, all new technology of vision is restricted to black and white. The shock of the new, and of every new form of reproducibility, is a shock in black and white every time it occurs, We are therefore inevitably stimulated to consider the relationship of colour, when it is finally subjugated by the various technologies, with modernity and modern sensibility.
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The articles in this issue offer various starting points for reflection on the matter. As a result of the considerable attention paid by American researchers to the study of consumer society and the respective role of cinema, (2) American criticism prompts us to look at the beginning of colour in silent films in the field of the history of "commercial aesthetics," or rather of advertising, marketing or more generally of culture as production (for example the press and popular publishing). |
According to Richard Abel, (3) the need for colour, which came about very early in the cinema, mirrors and at the same time enhances a more general socio-cultural tendency; this is shown by a clear development in the supply and demand of colour in the images of commodities and in the market of images. At the beginning of the century, commodities from those displayed in shop windows and advertisements to art reproductions and editorial products begin to don increasingly loud colours to attract attention. This "colourisation" of commodities began well before cinema came about, in that "prehistoric" period of modernity examined by Benjamin in his study of Parisian passages. Indeed in the passages: "the most artificial colours are possible; red or green combs don't shock anyone. Snowwhite's stepmother had a similar one, and when it didn't have the desired effect, the beautiful apple came to her help, half red and half green like cheap combs." (4)
The supply of colour in the images of commodities is a decisive element in establishing the marketplace as a "fairyland," just as it was revealed for admiration in the universal expositions of the mid-nineteenth century. To Theophile Gautier the 1867 exhibition building appears as "un monument éléve dans un autre planète, Jupiter au Saturne, d'après un gout que nous ne connaissons pas et des colorations auxquelles nos yeux ne sont pas habitués." Indeed, "le grand gouffre azure avec sa bordure couleur de sang produit un effet vertigineux et désoriente les idées qu'on avait sur 1'architecture." (5) Moreover a plethora of images and advertisements lining the walls in the cities with their colours loom up from the mass of commodities. "Many buildings today seem to be decorated a la Harlequin; the effect is of a construction of large pieces of green, yellow... and pink paper." (6) The passages are also studded with affiches: "He saw on a sheet what at first sight seemed to show Siegfried bathing in the dra-gon's blood: woodland-green solitude, the hero's purple cloak, naked flesh, a stretch of water - it was the highly intricate caress of three bodies, worthy of the picture on the cover of a cheap magazine. Such is the chromatic language of the posters strewn along the passages. If we were to learn that inside them the portraits of famous cancan ballerinas like Rigolette and Frichette had appeared, we would have to imagine them coloured in such a way." (7)
This chromatic language of the commodities is not far removed from the market of images. One can see here and there dark openings in the passages leading in front or even in the middle to surprising artificial landscapes, panoramas or diaramas of brilliant colours. Arriving in one of these landscapes, "was like entering an aquarium. It lay against the joint-riddled wall of the large dark room, like a film behind the glass of the illuminated water. The play of the colours of the fauna of the deeps could not be brighter." (8) The image of the aquarium, an artificial world shot through with strange iridescence, pervades the whole of Benjamin's description of pre-history of modernity. It is the most emblematic image of what Benjamin describes as the nineteenth century's dream, the torpor of a century which basks in the phantasmagoric idea of progress and in the illusion of a fairy-tale future. This scene dominated by colours which, as Gautier notes, are still unfamiliar to contemporary eyes, is the triumph of an aesthetics of the "cute" which Abel invites us to see entirely as a "commercial aesthetic" composed of childish characteristics; feminine traits also abound in as far as femininity is ideologically limited to the domain of dolls, toys and make-up. For this commercial aesthetics of the "cute," colour becomes a sort of narcotic, a kind of additional sensory comfort (9) lavished on the image, a chromatic covering for a vision in which one can immerse oneself as in the interieurs overflowing with upholstery and peluche, in the same way as the objects are sunken into a multitude of coloured containers, cases and wrappers which are meant to be no more than comfortable protection. (10)
| The beginnings of colour in cinema take part in all this. The Méliès or Pathé coloured films, which are very often féeries, miniature mise-en-scenes of children's fairy-tales promoted for adults' entertainment, (11) look like toys: toy-towns for children and miniature models at last in motion. Méliès' films are frequently shown as miniature models of worlds, self-sufficient microcosms, fantastic, astral, infernal or underwater worlds. (12) |  |
In a film like La Syrène (1904), for example, Benjamin's metaphoric aquarium materialises in a vision composed of impossible colours: it is the magnified miniature model of a world toned down by underwater deeps, a world inhabited by enormous jelly-fish and star-fish, a gigantic phosphorescent aquarium which lights up the darkness of the film theatre. Applying Benjamin's metaphor of the aquarium-window to this film opens up a new way of studying colour in early cinema. (13) This is because it is above all colour which makes this film seem an unconscious representation of the world of commodities, a self-sufficient and parallel world, an artificial environment in which commodities nest like underwater fauna, observing passers-by from behind a sheet of glass and radiating unnatural colours in the artificial light of the passages. Indeed it is worth noting that colour has always been associated with sumptuousness and wealth throughout history. In certain periods of history, some coloured substances were even allotted the role of money. (14) The explosion of colour witnessed in the nineteenth century (and of which stencil colouring is a cinematic expression) is therefore inextricably linked to the development of that sense of available wealth, never-ending luxury, always within reach, which characterises consumer society. And it is precisely this "consumerist," childish and comforting quality of nineteenth century colour which Epstein seems to have meant regarding stencil colouring when he wrote that in front of a Pathécolor he could not help checking the corner of the shot for "Bonnes fêtes" written in gold letters. (15)
The phantasmagoric nature of stencil-coloured films brings to mind the phantasmagoria of the marketplace; however colour in early cinema evinces a commodity-like character also in another, undoubtedly more direct aspect. Colour is an additional quality superimposed to the reproductive capacity which is at the base of cinematic vision. Therefore, as Gunning notes, colour constitutes an immediate added value to the film-commodity. In short, colour films cost more and appear on the marketplace as "specialities," thereby justifying their increase in price. They contribute to the diversity and complexity of the film market, enlivening it with variety.
"Tinted and toned films are always a pleasant relief from the ordinary thing which in this case is black and white.... [These films] appeal to men, and women and children like them especially. To put it commercially rather than aesthetically, or rather to speak in cents and dollars... any quality color production will definitely be welcomed by exhibitors, as it obviously spells excellent sales." (16)
Colour, conveying variety into the film market, inevitably brings to mind the matter of novelty. "Novelty is as essential to the image as it is to the plot." Because indeed, "too much uniformity tends to kill the public's interest in cinema". (17) But what is this novelty that colour, as an alluring covering, confers on the cinematographic image? It is the novelty of the old nineteenth century modernity - which for the first time meets commodities as phantasmagoria in the universal expositions and which is still surprised by the multi-coloured affiches and miniature worlds portraited in the panoramas. Or, in other words, it is the new as evernew, the new as simple recurrent "effect" produced by the market.
Then the Lumière train arrives on the scene. Compared to this embellished aquarium-world of artificial shades, the aim of which however is to convey an auratic effect of "antiquity," the sensory impact of this black and white vision can be rather associated to the kind of perception deployed by the architecture in glass and iron - a real architecture of light based on an aesthetics of transparency which evolved in the nineteenth century, and prevailed in the twentieth. Rather than the aqua-rium-windows of the passages, the Lumière train meets with the architecture of these buildings, with the game of chiaroscural effects, with "the free air space, uranian so to speak, which throws a new light on the surfeit of upholstery in the interiors of that time." (18) In the same way as "the upholstery, with its fabrics, puts up resistance to the glass and iron structure", (19) creating a shell in which to be "hermetically wrapped" like "in a spider's web," (20) so the early hand or stencil colouring (for example that decorating the stifling interiors of Pathé's films d'art) tone down the pure shock of light in motion, remaining nostalgically linked to the unreal torpor of the nineteenth century. However, "the twentieth century with its porosity, transparency and propensity for light and open air puts an end to the old idea of life," (21) just as it breaks off from panoramas, dioramas and all the other visual toys.
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Rather than colour taking over, regarding early cinema one should then speak of a slow mastering of black and white. It is not incidential that cinema uncluttered itself of this nineteenth century colour precisely when American cinema began to emerge on international level - the cinema in the country where the process of modernisation is most advanced. While at the beginning of the century colour fulfilled a promotional role, around 1910, the new American producers were to begin to advertise the fact that "in their films the colors appeared as shades of black and white." (22) |
From the prehistory of modernity, or from modernity as a pure market product, a modernist sensibility was now on the increase. This consciousness of modernity which was not yet avant-gardist in America, and was never to be so, did however already clearly partake of industrial modernism. For this sensibility black-and-white is the colour of cinema. Even though he uses the following words in an interview aiming to promote the new Handschiegl colour process (which was however to be short-lived), (23) DeMille seems rather to favour a pure black-and-white: "We have reached the conclusion that color photography - in the sense of an absolutely faithful reproduction of all the colors of nature (24) - cannot be used across the board in cinema because it would be too great a strain on the viewer's eyes, and the variety of colors would distract the audience from the plot." (25)
Cinema in its most essential sensory state, that is when its expressive powers are enhanced without introducing disturbing elements, is black and white cinema, Appearing on the American market towards 1910, this aesthetics of black and white returns in the shape of poetics in certain areas of avant-gardism (on this subject see Chiel Kattenbelt's article (26)) and especially in certain Expressionist films. The documentation currently available does not as yet allow even a partially reliable interpretation of the complicated relationship of Expressionist cinema with colour and black and white. Since recent philological practice has repeatedly brought back to light colour copies of classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem or Nosferatu, a stir of worms has been caused in this field, radically calling into question the traditional point of view which saw black and white cinema par excellence in Expressionism. The article by Inge Degenhart (27) shows us rather how in German Expressionism the choice of black and white goes hand in hand with the more usual practice of tinting and toning, in a relationship of dialectic exchange and confrontation. With this in mind it is interesting to analyse two films, antithetical regarding the use of colour. On the one hand, The Cabinet of Dr, Caligari not only makes use of tinting as the author precisely planned, but it also subjects the profilmic colour to a complex photographic process which was to remain exemplary for subsequent methods of shooting in black and white. The sets are coloured with the aim of obtaining, in the black and white copy, elaborate gradations of grey which are then transformed by tinting into a vast range of monochromic gradations. (28) The aim is to produce, through monochromic shadings, an effect of relief and depth which goes beyond the intrinsic limits of the film image. On the other hand, From Morn till Midnight, advertised as "the first black and white film," assumes the absence of colour as a "zero degree" of the cinema which any chromatic covering would certainly spoil from outside. In other words, the choice of black and white is in keeping with the explicit resolve to "tear away" the essence of cinema from the chromatic lining superimposed on the image as a residue of a pre-cinematic culture. Given the link between colour and relief, cinema in its most essential state was to enhance the two-dimentional quality of the strongly contrasted black and white image. With Doctor Mabuse a few years later, Lang also was to go for black and white, rejecting the "colouristic" trend of Expressionism. This aesthetic, in which black and white occurs as the "pure" form of the cinematic image, appears as a symmetric and contrary strategy to that of abstract cinema analysed by Guy Fihman, (29) where the need to break with the colour-covering is satisfied through the attempt to invent colour in motion, or a coloured motion inspired by music.
It is well known that the aesthetics of black and white which developed, though somewhat erratically, from German Expressionism has an important offspring in the American film noir. However, beyond this inheritance, the insistence of monochrome in film noir is so alive in the memory of viewers that it merits detailed consideration. As Leonardo Gandini observes in his article, (30) the film noir is the genre which holds out longest against the introduction of Technicolor, as if its very existence depended on the possibility of black and white. This "necessity" of black and white is certainly linked to the city settings of this genre, in other words to the need to render "the dominant grey of the modern city" and the sense of anonymity with which it is associated. According to Manlio Brusatin, "the body of the modern city assumes shades within the range of grey, not only for the process of clouding and soiling of the materials, today accelerated by dust, industrial pollution and traffic, but also through the widespread use of almost colourless building materials like asphalt and cement.... The lack of colour in city buildings in daylight is perfectly reproducible in black and white photography and contrasts with its night-time effect, constructed with the polychromy of flashing signs and ephemeral decoration." (31)
However, in the "asphalt jungle," the multi-coloured maelstrom of signs and advertisements has a diametrically opposed effect to that produced in the nineteenth century cities by the gaily coloured "commercial aesthetics" of the marketplace. "These colours lacking tone (red, yellow, blue) which are called fundamental but which no painter would use," these aggressive hues which substitute the more delicate gradations of nineteenth century taste in posters and signs, end up fading into a "generalised grey"; "they disappear just as they appear as visual stimuli of interchangeable signals and signs." (32) However, this generalised grey is not "completely inert" - as "the urban eye... of the twentieth century" is able to distinguish "over 100 different shades of grey." (33) The black and white of classical Hollywood cinema, which finds its chosen ground in the film noir, expresses modernity as an infinitely sensitive grey, capable of assuming the most varied qualities of transparency, opacity and brightness. In the film noir black and white seem to express a sort of involuntary consciousness of modernity. What its complex chiaroscural effects place in the foreground is no longer, as in the early stencil-coloured films, modernity as a phantasmagoria of commodities but as a world of alienated things, an anonymous world inhabited by alien things and people. Luxury and opulence no longer flaunt the colours of the toys but shine in blinding flashes in the facets of a jewel, in the mirrors and in the chrome plating of night bars or in the dyed platinium blonde hair of unknown beauties. Expelled from this world in grey, colour is replaced by the play of unexpected glittering lights which expresses, in the film noir and in musical and sophisticated comedy, the intense erotic power of estranged things and people. The taste for shining and reflecting surfaces, which really almost seems to substitute colour, appears for instance in the strange grey magic of the day-for-night effect, where the varnish of the cars reflects the rays of a non-existant sun. (34)
| Compared to the shining disturbing vision of "modernity in grey" which the film noir has passed on to us, the pastel colours of the early stencil-coloured films reveal their quality of mawkish decoration in full. It can then be seen why, despite the diffusion of nineteenth century "chromo-civilisation," it is so rare for a historical film set at that time and up till the first half of the twentieth century to be in colour. This is examined in Hannu Salmi's article. (35) |  |
A separate comment is needed regarding tinting and toning. These techniques lend themselves to meaning effects which go well beyond a mere decorative function. It is not a matter here of embellishing the image but of conferring on it meanings which it would otherwise in itself not have. The matter of tinting as "help in the creation of a dramatic atmosphere" is addressed in an article of 1929, which albeit late may offer a few starting points for consideration. (36) The text contains a short guide, similar to others published during the period of silent cinema, to what in a modern expression could be defined as diegetic information conveyed by colour. This information often derives from a synaesthetic process, as in the case of colours associated with different temperatures. However, the meaning of the colours is not constant and depends on the context in which they appear. The shade called Purplehaze ("a violet or lavender and slightly pastel blue") may produce, for example, "a pronounced cold effect" when used for "a scene containing expanses of snow, glaciers and snow-capped mountains." Used for "a desert sunset scene," the same colour suggests rather "a sensation of distance, mystery, rest and languidness." (37) In the same way if the shade Aquagreen is associated with a seascape it "suggests an idea of wetness." (38) Of particular importance seems information of a temporal nature which the colours are capable of conveying. As their names themselves suggest, the shade Nocturne helps create a night-effect for exteriors, whilst for interiors Candelflame "definitely suggests the effect of artificial lighting." (39)
Moreover, despite the modest proportions of this article, a cue for discussing a hitherto unresolved question regarding the semiotic functioning of colour is given. The author provides a classification of colours according to their capacity to stimulate or on the contrary to tranquillise the viewer. Aquagreen, for example, is "tranquillizing but not subduing," Sunshine is "softly stimulating," whereas Azure is "tranquillizing to the point of becoming depressing." (40) In this case we find ourselves in the field of colour as pure, immediate, elementary sensation - a sort of "neutral" sensation, free of any content other than its pure aspect of stimulus. Even before being invested with a passional content (anger, jealousy, sorrow), the colours appear as agents of pure thymism, working almost like something which governs the distribution of energy, dispensing it to the subject in precise quantities. (41) If this is so, the analysis of tinted and toned films could provide film theory with a completely new field of research, that regarding the thymic economy of the filmic text, and the modes of production of its "passional curves." Moreover, such research could have significant consequences particularly regarding film editing. The article by William Uricchio (42) can be considered as an introduction to this currently neglected and potentially rich field; it is apparent that in interlacing with editing this thymic economy could be considered as a shock economy. Following Jones' scheme, for example, the alternating red and blue shots in the rescue sequence of The Lonedale Operator would respectively have a relatively "depressing" and distinctly "stimulating" air about them. The intercutting between the oppressive situation of the station where the operator finds herself threatened by bandits (in blue) and the desperate chase of the engineer who hurries to save her with his train (in red) is also an editing of incongruous thymic states, a succession of shocks which is really destabilising. The colours which follow or alternate during the film create a parallel level of editing which is interlaced with the actual editing of the shots. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the colours along the linear axis of the film produces contrasts in which the colours act on each other. To quote Jones' article for the last time: "The eye by now used or even strained by a green like Verdante, will perceive at the beginning of the following scene tinted in a pink shade a color of spellbinding subjective saturation. This instantaneously fixes the emotional tone of the scene, after which the retina begins to readjust causing a considerable reduction of the saturation effect. Having completed its mission, the color... slips into the background... [and] allows the action to continue its dramatic course without the distracting influence of a pronounced color." (43)
An attempt could be made to express in semiotic and textual terms what Jones only explains as a physiological phenomenon. It could be said that the contrast between colours appears as a prolonged shock which does not end at the punctual moment of the passage to a new shade but resists, softening as one draws away from the point of contrast. This derives from the fact that when associated to a change in shot the shift to a new color tends on the one hand to reinforce (through the chromatic contrast) and on the other to prolong (through the durative aspect of the contrast) the punctual shock effect produced by the cut. So if seen as an editing element, the monochromic colouring is (at least potentially) far from enacting a source of sensory comfort, as is sometimes still held to be true regarding colour even in the post stencil-colouring era. (44) Here colour appears rather as a destabilising element which by its nature resists the "invisibility" of the editing.
However, even if colour is inserted into the temporal and tensive dimension of the film, the tinting and toning techniques produce a "static" colour which cannot be bound to the figures and move with them. We therefore have to consider one of the difficulties, or even one of the impasses, which involves research on colour in the cinema: the colour/motion opposition. It has just been seen how colour in tinting and toning can play a "rythmic" role, if a wider meaning is given to this expression: a pattern of alternation and opposition of perceptible effects. Thus the shock-colour is at last congruous with the new regime of vision conveyed by cinema, against the peluche-colour of the nineteenth century stencils. Hence: a comforting success of cinematic modernity, while colour rids itself of the pleasant task of "cuteness" and unveils, as the exalted Lumière train had already done, the real face of cinema - its terryfing but sublime, medusa-like face. Unfortunately faith in progress and the future of history can be queried. There would seem to be three particularly thorny questions: a) what are the causes (whether aesthetic or commercial) of such an important change? b) What proof, be it empiric or textual, can be produced to demonstrate the rhythmic/thymic effect produced by colouring? c) What is the relationship of this "movement of colours" - both in the sintagmatic version, through blocks, of coloured cinema, and in the following, "disseminated" version of reproduced colour - with the movement of the figures whether understood in a physical, narrative or rhythmic sense?
Readers who seek a comprehensive answer to these problems will most likely be disappointed: in examining cinematic colour one is aware that both empirical work on texts and theoretical apparatus are badly lacking. Thus comprehensive explanations, especially regarding the crucial and elusive question of the colour/motion relationship, can hardly be given. However, in this opening issue of Fotogenia the articles by Fihman (45) and Roque (46) witness an attempt to define the field. Although these two texts (one musically biased and the other pictorically) may seem peripheral as to the main line of inquiry, they offer an invaluable contribution to the delineation of that ambivalent area which is determined by the superimposition of colour and motion and which sees the cinema as a catalyst.
We intend to provide some answers, however inconclusive, to the above-mentioned questions. As to the reasons of the passage from colour as sensory comfort to colour in motion, it can be argued that it is in part due to reasons irrelevant to the cinema and which result from the "commercial aesthetics" already referred to and from technical-economic reasons specific to cinematic production. Also, more interestingly, it is due to the fact that the aesthetics of painted colour necessarily contrasted with the new visual and image-producing order carried out in cinema. Such a hypothesis would call into question the current dichotomy between early and institutional cinema, and would stress the immediate novelty of the cinema even if veiled in nineteenth century residue, of which colour would be the most clumbersome. This hypothesis would require substantiation but here we limit ourselves to speculation. Obviously if this were the case it would be clear how far the study of colour can change aquired categories in film history.
As for the way in which tinted and toned films were received by the audience, insufficient information is available. The lack of material is, of course, in itself indicative. It is relevant to mention how Moussinac in his Naissance du cinéma (1925) includes a short paragraphs (47) in which he imagines the possibilities which would be opened to the filmmaker with the introduction of colour film. He also describes the possibilities to carrying out particular emotional effects through the succession of two scenes having two different chromatic dominants: strangely he did not realise that it was exactly what the cinema of his time carried out through tinting and toning. This authoritative evidence seems to support the hypothesis that colour in coloured films somehow tended not to be perceived and so belonged more to the communicative and phatic aspect of the cinema than to the expressive part. Obviously this does not necessarily mean that colour in early cinema did not have an expressiveeffect, but the dichotomy between perception and effect seems to introduce another impasse which possibly runs through the whole history of colour in the cinema.
Regarding the third question concerning the relationship between the movement of colours and the movement of figures, Aumont's article (48) will be useful. Dealing with the the subject of the colour of flesh, he analyses the original solutions which cinema offered to a classic problem of painting, that of the relationship between colour and design. This contrast is formulated by, for example, Simmel as follows: "If form somehow represents the abstract idea of a phenomenon, color exceeds form in two different aspects: it is more sensual and more metaphysical; its effect is an the one hand more immediate, on the other deeper and more mysterious. If form can be defined approximately as the logic of the phenomenon, colour is rather equivalent to its psychological and metaphysical character." (49)
Thus colour exceeds form (and speaking of cinema this could go for figures too), in two different aspects. On a lower level we could locate all sensory or thymic effects; higher up the symbolic (or in Simmel's words "metaphysical") associations, which in film can also assume iconographic valencies. Fievet considers this second aspect in his analysis of Vertigo. (50) His article is useful above all for describing the procedures and symbolic values of Hitch-cock's colour productions.
Somewhat surprisingly, Eisenstein's writings on colour appear to propose, in Mayer's reading, (51) an idea of colour which brings to mind Simmel's discussion of form and colour. Eisenstein suggests that colour can organise an interplay of synaesthetic correspondences, linking different elements inside the filmic test. However (and here lies the originality of Mayer's interpretation), in order for textual synaesthesia to take place, the meaning of colour has to be based in what Eistentein calls "an absolute correspondence," placed outside the filmic text. As is clear, one only has to exchange the terms (psychological for synaesthetic and metaphysical for absolute) to go back to Simmel's proposal. We then witness a new impasse, and not necessarily the last to be found by researchers in the study of film colour. But, to paraphrase Simmel yet again, studying colour could possibly mean risking chasing between the terms of this dualism.
(Translated by Elizabeth Freeman)