Text: 'Colour: The Film Reader'

As part of my research into colour theory, and following my reading of 'If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die', I have also read 'Colour, The Film Reader' by Angela Dalle Vacche. Whilst covering and validating some of the same colour associations made by Bellantoni, Vacche also gives directions for production design to bring out colours in sets, and cites several other theorists and film-makers in their approach to colour theory. Below I have summarised the main points she raises:

• 'Colour is not simply a choice a filmmaker makes at the level of film stock; rather, having selected colour, it becomes a constructive element of mise-en-scene, one that works alongside lighting, sound, performance, camera movement, framing and editing.' It is important for creating meaning, mood, sensation, or perceptual cues.
• 'Colour, as we have become accustomed to saying of sound, serves a contrapuntal function; the hot, saturated reds rub up against the iciness of the performance and the dialogue.'
• Colour is usually defined with respect to 3 variables. Hue allows one to distinguish classes of colour, lightness represents a hue's relation to black or white and saturation represents a hue's relation to a gray of the same lightness.
• Usual reaction splits into two categories: warm and cool colours. Red, orange and yellow connote excitement, activity and heat. Green, blue and violet are cool and retiring colours, suggesting rest, ease and coolness. 
• Mixing these colours with white conveys youth and informality, with gray, refinement and charm, and with black, strength, seriousness and dignity.
• Each colour has many different associations. Red can mean danger, warning, blood, life, love, stimulation and anger. 'It can be used in a revolution or a church.' Introducing another colour changes its meaning, and different shades of colour or strength suggests type of love.
• Orange - 'bright and enlivening', suggesting energy and action.
• Yellow - wisdom, light, fruition, harvest, riches. Darker shades connote deceit and jealousy.
• Dark green, blue and violet are 'cooling, quiet colours.' They are tranquil and passive, not suggesting activity.
• Blue - truth, calm, serenity, hope and melancholy.
• Purple can be different depending on whether blue or red is dominating - aggressive or dignified. Royalty, pomp and vanity.
• Magenta - materialistic, arrogant and vain.
• White, gray and black stimulate very definite emotional responses. Black, being 'no colour', is distinctly negative and destructive - night, fear, darkness and crime. Gray is gloomy, dreary and mature, its neutrality suggesting vagueness, inaction and mediocrity. The luminosity of white symbolises spirit. It represents purity, cleanliness and peace, uplifting and 'ennobling' a colour, whereas black lowers and evils it.
• 'The modification of a positive colour by the introduction of another hue modifies the mental reaction to the degree of the intensity of that hue which is introduced'
• Speaking on film production: 'In preparation we read a script and prepare a colour chart for the entire production. This chart may be compared to a musical score, amplifying the picture in a similar manner'.
• You must carefully analyse each sequence to ascertain what dominant mood or emotion is to be expressed. 'When this is decided... plan to use the appropriate colour or set of colours which suggest that mood, thus actually fitting the colour and augmenting its dramatic value'.
• Colour separation is the difference between hues of two colours to make them stand out photographically. If using warmer flesh tones in a set, make sure the background behind actor is left in shadow, creating a 'cool contrast to the faces'.
• 'It is important that sets must have interest and variety. They must not be flat. When the sets have depth it is much easier to introduce interesting shadows and coloured lights for special effects'
• 'I should never want to fill the screen with colour; it ought to be used economically - to put new words into the screen's visual language when there's a need for them' - Alfred Hitchcock
• While colours can be 'uniquely discriminated' and can carry symbolic value by virtue of that discrimination, colours also gain significance by their association and contrast with other colours.
• 'Cool colours in Hitchcock's work evoke a sense of emotional detachment or distance'. In contrast to cool colours, warm colours or earth tones such as tan, brown and forest green are widely associated with a sense of emotional warmth and the 'redemptive qualities of the nature world'.
• The 'Warning Series' of colours - bright, saturated and solid yellow, orange and red (either individually, in sequence or combined in the same image to indicate 'progressively greater degrees of danger').
• The opposition between black and white signifies a morality via its association with light and darkness: 'Black suggests villainy and white suggests goodness'. Black and white can also be blurred or combined in elements of set or costume to convey blurring of moral boundaries.
• 'Colour doesn't have an absolute meaning, it depends on relationships and comparisons - and in this regard its closest analogue may be music'
• The combination of colours in to what is called harmony or disharmony is subject to cultural conventions. Using brilliant solid colours is unnatural - 'Generally the colours of nature and everyday life are unsaturated'.