When the cinematographer Jack Cardiff, aged 84, talks at the new National
Film Theatre Cinematography season about painting with light, you have to
remember that Cardiff, who was the first Briton trained to use Technicolor,
is actually two years younger than that process. Although Kinemacolour,
the original movie colour, was a British patent, used to record the 1911
Durbar at Delhi in a sumptuous haze, Herbert Kalmus (of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, hence nicolor) invented Technicolor in 1912, patented it
in 1915, and shot The Gulf Between in it in 1917.
We could get here into the technics - splitting the white light that enters
a lens through prisms within the camera to register on film its three major
colour components, blue, green and red; when projected, they overlap onscreen
and reassemble the spectrum again before your eyes. That's how it's done.
But it's more revealing to consider what colours movie-makers want on screen.
And why. Colour palettes are personal, emotional, national and historic
- we don't use the words 'colour values' for nothing.
Take Herbert Kalmus himself (born 1881) and his wife Natalie (born 1891),
who was credited as 'color consultant' on all Technicolor productions until
the patent expired in 1949. As children, the first artificial colours the
Kalmuses saw would have been the late 19th-century's new printing inks and
dyes - Technicolor's own dyes are related to these - which at last made
possible bright chromolith colour plates for books, advertising, and packaging
labels.
Those inks/dyes allowed mass-reproduction of the aesthetics of high 19th-century
painting with its expensively brilliant oil-paint range. Chemical purples
of the 1880s coloured baby Natalie's idea of glamour, so that when she consulted
on The Garden Of Allah, 1935 - a David Selznick production that put serious
studio money behind colour - she fought with Selznick and his designer over
their decision to tone the whole to dusty desert tints. Kalmus could only
imagine romance in the Sahara as a spectacle in alizarin crimson.
Selznick recorded the dispute, which he won, in his memos. It became important
two years later to his definitive Technicolor movie, Gone With The Wind.
What Selznick wanted was the ability of the process to register everything,
down to the grass blades, brighter than God made it, perfect for his ultimate
American artefact.
Technicolor was US technology at its zenith - all that skill and effort
just for pleasure. And what it put on screens was a visible expression of
the supreme prosperity of the US. Atlanta in flames in a scarlet flare showed
a land with resources to burn, and the ruddy skin and Max Factor lip tones
on GWTW's cast (and on Judy Garland in the Technicolor fantasy The Wizard
Of Oz) made visible the glowing health of America - they were all in the
pink. Hollywood colour films of the 1940s make it evident that the US was
the last place on Earth not bleached out by depression and war.
In comparison, the German Agfacolor process (later nicked by the Russians
and called Sovcolour), which premiered in 1940, was biased to grey-green:
scientists at the Neue Photographische Gesellschafte, which developed it,
came from an art-school, Arts & Crafts aesthetic, more subdued than the
US preferences.
Second world war documentary footage shows its loyalty through colour -
in newly rediscovered John Ford Technicolor film of the 1944 Normandy landings,
purple smoke billows over emerald crop land. That's why colour freaks found
the opening of Steven Spielberg's 1998 Saving Private Ryan weird: he took
the coating off his camera lenses and so suffused his hues with grey-greens.
It looks as if he had filmed Omaha beach in captured German Agfacolor stock,
flying the enemy's colours.
Even where there was no locally branded process, national and personal tastes
modified Technicolor. And gifted directors soon understood how to use its
resonances to manipulate audiences. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's
Black Narcissus (1947) was set in a Himalayan royal love nest converted
to a convent. The intense blues of its wall-decorations are accurate to
India, but very disturbing (a blue environment depresses unless there is
high, bright sun). Photographer Jack Cardiff lit interiors even bluer, and
put green in the shadows of a red dawn, because together those colours are
tragic (he adopted the combo from Van Gogh's painting The Billiard Room
At Arles).
It's irresistible to make your own list of what film colours do for the
director and to you - look at our rainbow here - although you have to allow
for different social, political and emotional meanings in other cultures.
In China, for example, red is the colour of weddings, celebrations, communism
and change, which charges Zhang Yimou's film Red Sorghum, and its solar
eclipse shot through hot filters, with the power of a red shift.
Think how overwhelming were Francis Coppola's The Godfather I and II. He
drove photographer Gordon Willis nuts by filming already sombre scenes severely
underlit, so that the private world of the Mafiosi would show on screen
as unprecedentedly morbid. Remember the shade of ginger of the hair of the
heroine Janet Frame in Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, how it marks
her as outstanding, cursed and blessed against any background. Or just recall
the lips of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Howard Hawks's Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes, splendiferous curves of paint in the shades called Fire
and Ice.
Jack Cardiff's lecture at the NFT on Thursday opens a cinematography season
which runs till January.
