Colours of Film

Hues and Cry

Colours of Film -
The Story Of Cinema
in 50 Palettes
aka
Colors Of Film -
The Story Of Cinema
in 50 Palettes (US edition)
by Charles Bramesco
Frances Lincoln Books
ISBN 9780711270312

I’ve been wanting to read Colours of Film - The Story Of Cinema in 50 Palettes for a while now. In fact, I’ve bought copies of it for people as Christmas and Birthday presents in the recent past… so I was pleased to finally have a copy to call my own. Alas, the book is not quite as good, purely on the information level, as I was expecting… although it does look quite beautiful. The format of the book is that it’s set into four sections... which makes less sense when you realise the movies in the book are visited in chronological order instead of being bunched in with common types of colour usage and modes of operation that similar films deploy.

After a brief introduction we have the first of four sections… these sections are Over The Rainbow, Unbound Imaginations, Making A Statement and Digital Wonderlands. The first section starts off well with the author talking about the ‘vandalism’ that is colourisation (good for him) and the first colour film, The Miracle from 1912. Other items of interest from the opening of each section are that George Eastman took his own life at the age of 77 (having nothing left to achieve) and, in a section on Mad Max - Fury Road, the acknowledgement of the backlash (I remember it playing out on Twitter myself) of the cliché of orange and teal as a colour palette basis in movies. Each section then contains a number of movies with one to three frames blown up large on a page and two or three of the dominating colours displayed as a swatch alongside them. Also with a breakdown of the three colours in smaller swatches.

However, for all the spectacle of the book (and it does look great which, honestly, is worth the price of admission, so to speak), there were a few things which got on my nerves and dragged me down a little. And I don’t just mean the exclusion of Blade Runner… which in a book about colour on film seems like a cardinal sin in itself. My first inkling of trouble within the covers was the author’s description of the early Zoetropes as being… wait for it… GIF-like. Nah, mate… it’s the other way around. GIFs weren’t invented until 1987 whereas the Zoetrope was first invented in 1834. So… just no. Also, I see what you’re saying here but it’s kind of a vulgar comparison.

Secondly, the reviews of each film, while necessarily including a mention (sometimes a focus) on the use of colour are… just simply that. Just reviews and, honestly, if I’d read some of those reviews before watching the works in question, I might never have watched some of my favourite movies. Amélie is a particular sticking point for me… the film is rendered as a cynical and somehow unappealing prospect when reading this review, not helped by the author likening the shades of yellow in the palette to urine. I mean, really?

Thirdly though… let’s get to the elephant in the room. Never mind that the colours picked for the swatches are somewhat random (a pixel higher or lower with the magic wand in photoshop… which I suspect is what was done… would give a different hue) but they are not true renditions of the colour in the films in question anyway. Although the information provided breaks these down to both RGB and Hex colours, the simple fact of the matter is that we are looking at those colours rendered in print, in CMYK. There’s no getting around that, they’re never (or rarely ever) going to be the same colour you see in the movie, surely? 

Of the 52 films included in this book of 50 (yeah go figure which three films he’s bizarrely counted as a single entry), comprising A Trip To The Moon, Intolerance, The Wizard of Oz, Fantasia, Black Narcissus, The River, Singin’ In The Rain, All That Heaven Allows, The Searchers, Vertigo, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, Red Desert, Colour Me Blood Red, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cries and Whispers, Touki Bouki, Bobby, Don’t Look Now, Ali - Fear Eats The Soul, Jeanne Dielman, God Told Me To, Suspiria, Ran, Blue Velvet, Dick Tracy, Blue, Schindler’s List, Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White, Three Colours Red, Chungking Express, Se7en, Belly, Peppermint Candy, The Virgin Suicides, But I’m a Cheerleader, Songs From The Second Floor, Traffic, Amélie, Spirited Away, The Aviator, Saw II, Speed Racer, Enter The Void, Amer, Tron: Legacy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mad Max: Fury Road, La La Land, Black Panther and Lovers Rock… it’s the late Derek Jarman’s Blue which shows up the insanity of talking about colour in film at this base level the most. The feature film itself consists of a long monologue with the screen just showing a frame of the colour blue. So, that means the film frame and the swatch should be exactly the same colour, filling the page in a wash of that hue, right? But no, the frame and the swatch look totally different and, since they’re both rendered in CMYK, it brings a new level of preposterousness to the exercise too, above and beyond the differences of seeing hues projected by light or by printers ink.

Other than that though… yeah, Colours of Film - The Story Of Cinema in 50 Palettes is a wonderful looking book and makes a nice present (I was certainly pleased to finally get one) but, approach with caution and be wary of using it as some kind of colour bible, would be my advice.