Theory of the film : (character and growth of a new art) (1952)

CHAPTER NINETEEN REMARKS ON THE COLOUR FILM AND STEREOSCOPIC FILM The technical problems of the colour film have no interest for us. Colour in the film has artistic significance only if it expresses some specifically filmic experience. If it merely wanted to compete with the artistic effects of painting, it would be doomed to defeat from the outset and could never be anything but a primitive and trite parody of the greatest and most ancient art. The artistic reason for colour cinematography can lie only in the experience and expression of colour in motion. MOVING COLOURS One of the dangers of the colour film is the temptation to compose the shots too much with a view to a static pictorial effect, like a painting, thus breaking up the flow of the film into a series of staccato jerks. On the other hand the filming of colours in movement, provided our technique is sensitive enough to record them and our sensitivity sufficiently developed to absorb them, could open up a vast domain of human experience which could not find expression in any other art, least of all in painting. For a painter may paint a flushed face but never a pale face slowly being warmed to rose-red by a blush; he can paint a pale face but never the dramatic phenomenon of blanching. Why does the beauty of a painted sunset often strike us as trivial, although in nature a sunset is always exciting and interesting? Because in reality a sunset is an event, not a static condition, it is a change of colour, a transition from one spectacle to the next which is often rendered a mere formula by the rigid abstraction of a painting. 242