Movies and Film: Draining Away and Saturating with Color

Draining Away and Saturating with Color

In fact, it's almost impossible to say what "natural" color looks like. That bottle of Cabernet that looked blood-red in the kitchen pantry the night before is gloriously rosy outdoors on the picnic cloth the next day.

After the Hollywood studio love affair with saturated color, cinematographers experimented with taking away the richness of color for special effects or ironically exaggerating it even more. As an example of the latter, Dick Tracy (1990) is a live-action movie with the bold coloring-book or Sunday-comics primary colors to match the grotesque makeup of its comic-book villains. The colors are rich and supersaturated.

Desaturated color can be found in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (Deserto Rosso, Italy, 1964), whose very title suggests that the film is about thematizing color-draining as the absence of values. The title's desert is also the desert of contemporary society.

In contrast, the "Ascot Opening Day" sequence of My Fair Lady (1964), though shot in color, photographs mainly black, white, and gray objects for a paradoxically hard-edged nostalgic effect. Suits, dresses, hats, furniture: All are black and white.

Many thrillers since the 1980s have been filmed in color, but very darkly, in a style called "color noir." Films as disparate as the murder mystery Body Heat (1981), the science fiction thriller Blade Runner (1982), and the Tim Burton fantasy Batman (1989) share this style. Some critics believe that it reflects the same cultural anxiety that the original 1940s film noir style denoted: an anxiety about cultural values in the middle of an affluent but spiritually empty society.