Color: The Film Reader, Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds), (2006)

London: Routledge, 214pp., ISBN: 9780415324427 (pbk), $35.95, ISBN: 9780415324434 (hbk), $125.00

The works of prominent film studies and visual arts scholar Angela Dalle Vacche – such as The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema and Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film – have consistently offered original and revealing insights into images of all sorts. This time, she and co-editor Brian Price shift their focus to the study of film colour – a subject that has yet to be honed at the theoretical level, at least compared to its recent and notable renaissance in film aesthetics proper – with their newly published Color: The Film Reader, the first anthology of its kind to ‘approach color from different perspectives, providing scholars with a sense of the myriad of ways in which color in film can be described’ (7).

This intent is quickly followed by the caveat that ‘there is no one way to address color,’ and that this volume ‘should suggest the lines for further work, but with a reminder that color thrives on difference – perceptually, culturally, and as art’ (8). The Reader’s 21 essays are divided into four key sections in keeping with the multi-faceted nature of the subject: ‘Color Technology and Visual Style,’ ‘Color Theory,’ ‘The Filmmaker as Color Theorist’ and ‘Case Studies.’ While these categories can be immensely useful guides, they sometimes tend towards being too sweeping, forcing the reader to shuffle mentally back and forth when essays are not entirely relevant to the subject at hand – I think of André Bazin’s ‘A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery’ in the ‘Color Theory’ section although it seems far more of a case study that only mentions colour at the end, or Scott Higgins’ ‘Demonstrating Three-Strip Technicolor: Becky Sharp,’ which is more of an historical survey of how the process was received than an actual case study of the film.

Additionally, I am unsure if I find the chapter ‘Color Technology and Visual Style’ the strongest and most thought-provoking (exceptions exist, however) because the theoretical questions posed by these essays are the most nuanced, hidden underneath much historical exposition, or if this chapter simply comes first in the book. In either case, the two red threads I could trace throughout the Reader were introduced as early as these beginning essays: first, the search for an identity for film as its own medium, away from photography, painting, music, theatre or television and, in tandem, a resistance to the confined forms of the naturalistic (read: Hollywood, as if that was not a paradox) in favour of excess and the fantastic. Steve Neale’s largely historical ‘Technicolor,’ chief colour consultant for the Technicolor monopoly Natalie Kalmus’ ‘Color Consciousness,’ J.P. Teloitte’s ‘Minor Hazards: Disney and the Color Adventure,’ and Dudley Andrew’s ‘Postwar Struggle for Color’ trace the history of subduing the unnaturally colourful potential of film, relegating colour to the domain of musicals and cartoons, from both the American side (protecting film from itself, according to Kalmus) and the French side (as a mode of resistance to Hollywood, according to Andrew).

In contrast, the essays of the following two chapters (‘Color Theory’ and ‘Filmmaker as Color Theorist’) argue in favour of abstraction from stylistic economy, the naturalistic and the narrative, but are largely redundant. Rudolph Arnheim (‘Remarks on Color Film’), Trund Lundemo (‘The Colors of Haptic Space: Black, Blue and White in Moving Images’) and Bazin advocate the primacy of the work of art by way of colour, while David Batchelor (‘Chromophobia’) and Price (‘Color, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros’) weigh the political, economic, and ethical stakes of such a project. The collection of essays written by filmmakers – Sergei Eisenstein’s celebration of colour as a key component of montage, Nagisa Oshima’s bitter relationship to the colour green, Eric Rohmer’s conversion to anti-realist colour schemes, and Stan Brakhage’s singular process of painting film – is somewhat interesting as trivia, but remains too short in length and in supply to be as fruitful as one would hope.

Similarly, while acknowledging Dalle Vacche and Price’s introduction to the ‘Case Studies’ chapter that ‘[c]olor aesthetics are, in many respects, most difficult to deal with at the level of meaning and interpretation [ . . . ] [T]he polysemic nature of color has been cause to ignore questions of meaning and related concerns with the validity of interpretation’ (129), the book’s final seven essays leave the reader unfulfilled. These critical essays span a wide range of works – by Hitchcock, Sirk, Mamoulian, Stahl, Godard, Antonioni and Jarman – but analyses of the filmmakers/colour theorists of the preceding chapter may have been more telling (or, vice versa, primary texts in the third chapter written by the filmmakers analyzed here), or perhaps even a greater number of colour film stills to support the criticism. Some of the essays are unique and intriguing in approach, such as Dalle Vacche’s ‘Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert: Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement (Architecture and Painting)’ which draws upon a paragone/contention between the arts, or Peter Wollen’s ‘Blue,’ which celebrates the power of colour to redeem a film from the commodification of ‘modern art’ (196) and even filmmaker Derek Jarman in the face of death. As Dalle Vacche and Price rightly observe, the possibilities of interpreting colour in film are endless, and a juxtaposition of opposing arguments on the same film could have sparked some interesting dialogues; as it is, the only real contrast offered in these pages is Dalle Vacche’s analysis of colour in Red Desert as a reflection of Giuliana’s (Monica Vitti) psychology, while Branigan dismisses emotional states as a factor for colour choice in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Deux ou trios choses que je sais d’elle, 1966) (180). Other essays in the chapter essentially chart variations in colour within particular films (or jump from instance to instance, film to film) in a seemingly arbitrary way with little theoretical traction.

Compared to books on more deeply considered subjects like film sound or ties to the visual arts, Color: The Film Reader becomes something akin to a list of films and filmmakers who have paid exceptional attention to the possibilities of colour. The essays have been collated into a set that is, on the whole, rather flat and lacking in cohesion. However, one key explanation for the Reader’s shortcomings may lie with the pioneering nature of the project – Dalle Vacche and Price have collected essays from a vast number of disciplines and time periods by authors who were writing on film colour without any canon or trajectory on the subject. As the editors observe, ‘unlike the major areas of investigation within film studies – genre, auteurism, national cinema – to name but a few, color remains an area of inquiry significantly less well heeled’ (1). As a result of their disparate original channels of publication, many essays repeat the need to pay greater attention to film colour but barely scratch the analytical surface. The Reader nevertheless remains an important stepping-stone in film studies – maybe Color: Towards a Film Reader – and if a reader turns to the bibliography in hopes of learning more, Dalle Vacche and Price’s aim of ‘suggest[ing] the lines for further work’ (8) can be considered an accomplishment.

Carmen Siu is an independent scholar.