The Cine Technician (1939)

21 l.l E G I Is K-T I-! ( 11 N I C I A N March-April, L938 Ivor Montagu sees Red. HEAVE.N save colour films from colour film experts ! Colour film experts make me see red. So long as colour films are in their hands, the whole affair will be a muck and colour make no progress. Don't you know them? We've all suffered from 'em. The\ call ai the studio with their sample. "Look at that perfect green," the\ say. Or that "marvellous yellow." Let's see a scene of blacks and whites for a change. Thai 'd be a test of ail\ colour system. The experts pack each of their sample shots lull oi as many colours as the\ can find at once. It the\ go outdoors, it's herbaceous borders. Tl it's indoors, it's a girl wrapped round in the sort ot shawl that made the ambitious chameleon burst, with half-a-dozen different coloured cushions and curtains and carpets pinned up behind her head like the concubine oi some merchant in an eastern bazaar. It's not onl\ the samples. It's the whole film. All their funny-colour monstrosities are ruined 1>\ passing under the expert's thumb. "Come and see the blue skies, or the green pinewoods, or the yellow deserts, or the gay scarlet uniforms, or the Max Factor complexions." What the public wants to see is the stor\ . and all these colours, beautiful as thev may be, get in the way. I'm not running down colour. Colour is the effective thing. The thing ol the future. A colour shot in a black and white film nets a cheer. But that's when you choose the right place to pop the beaut\ spot in. Are you old enough to remember tinted stock? 1 remember when sunset landscape and sunset shots and such like were tinted red on a blue base 01 tinted blue on a red base it didn't matter. Ever} tune such a shot came on the screen at the right sentimental moment your trade show audience would (dap. It was sure-fire. This is not a plea to go back to those old days ami mix together black and white with colour-process stock. But the principle is absolutely right. The colour tints, unreal as you liked, got the cheer because they came in at the right tune when the audience were meant to sit back and sniff up beauty. The rest of the time they were allow ed to get on with the stor\ . II Technicolour (1 don't mean Technicolour specially, but anj and all of these sxsteins that let colour experts run their colour films) wants people to appreciate beautiful pinewoods 01' uniforms, it can only do so by keeping them li^lil out oi tin picture wherever they arc are not wanted. What is a close-up lor'.' So you can sec a lace big? Fiddlesticks! To concentrate attention to it. Which is is don'' easiest by eliminating the1 rest. (Principle of Zen Buddhism, but pass that for the moment). Exactlj the same with colour. If is not a blind bit of good having ,i heroine emote in front ol a beautiful background. Your storyteller, at the moment, wants either the heroine's glycerine or the background. Both together mix and muddle the audience, which L;ets no clear impression and hence is bored. Colour film makers have to make up their minds about the order of their narrative. Separate the (dements. and express each to the n'th degree in its sequence. Think", a novelist. He writes a venture or two about tic heroine's tragedy and heightens it with a bit ot nature description, the storm, or the desolate moor, oi what not. The colour film expert makes his paragraph out of words from both sets of ventures mixed up together. Here we come back to what 1 said about the colour system being the one that can render black and white best. And this is true. Before aou can tell a story in colour, you must learn how to tone down and subdue colour so you don't notice it where it is not wanted. And this is only nature, after all. Talk with a man in his office. Then tell me. What colour was his desk'.' His carpet? His eyes? His suit? His tie? The keener you were on l; < ■ 1 1 i 1 1 ■_; that job. the less likely you are to have noticed. And it you put that scene on the screen in a colour film the converse is just as true. rfdie more you want the audience to be attending to the anxiety and drama of the seem-, the less you should distract them with the colour. Hitchcock's idea of the colour film scene of every atom of the set in black and white and the character men in evening dress, just until the crucial moment when the dash of gory red blood appears on the shirt front — that's heightening the drama to a height ordinary black and white can't reach. Only one full length colour film ever packed 'em in (in its own field in competition with domestic black and wdiite, of course) the wa\ people who invented colour dream of. That was a Soviet film. "Nightingale — My Nightingale. " The colour is frightful, lousy and untruthful beyond compare with a dozen other systems. Why was it so successful, dust two reasons are enough. The heroine wore Gretchen-blonde hair, and when the hero tries to give the promised signal from the tower window, a shot through his breast stained his handkerchief with his heart's blood. I assure you. believe it or not. the simple hokum ot that flaxen hair lifts up the seduction scene to the 'nth degree above black and white, as docs that waving redstained kerchief. The audience eat it. To cobbler's there's nothing like leather. So long as colour experts are allowed to interfere with colour films, so long they'll keep trying to parade their own colour sense and the fidelity, truthfulness and versatility of their system in every blessed shot, and succeed solely in boring the audience to worse than tears, as everybody knows 999 and a bit out id even L,000 colour features so far have done successfully . ddie task of the colour film expert is not merely to invent how to render colour (which it has done), but to invent how to hide colour (which wild horses won't persuade the lunatic even to allow us to do), and when he puts that means in our grasp we. the creative technicians, the scenarists, the directors and cameramen, will decide when and where which should be done, and this will so heighten our stories with colour that the audience will be knocked tor a six everj time, his shareholders recover breath, and himself net a pat on the back fol bis cleverness,