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Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 131–134.

Technicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

“Hitchcock’s Color Designs

RICHARD ALLEN

In spite of Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock’s reputation is not that of a colorist. His legacy is largely in black and white – only fifteen of his fifty-three films are in color – and Psycho (1960) is not among them. Furthermore, the defining influence on Hitchcock’s style is the aesthetic of German Expressionism that is identified with the visual repertoire of black and white. Yet Hitchcock’s films represent a remarkably thoughtful and complex engagement with the aesthetics of color at the level of expression, theme, and form. Hitchcock’s films, like the work of many colorists, draw on a range of conventions that pertain to the symbolic and emotional significance of color that are deeply embedded in Western culture and the traditions of pictorial, dramatic, and novelistic representation that have sustained it.

There are two overarching assumptions that govern my approach to understanding color in Hitchcock whose justification resides in part in what one may discern from Hitchcock’s working method and in part from studying the overall relationship between narrative and style in Hitchcock’s work. The first assumption is that Hitchcock approaches his color films as blank canvases in which every element of color placed in the frame is put there for a reason. In an essay first published in 1937, well before his first color film, Hitchcock wrote:

I should never want to fill the screen with color: it ought to be used economically – to put new words into the screen’s visual language when there’s a need for them. You could start to color film with a boardroom scene: somber paneling and furniture, the director’s all in dark clothes and white collars. Then the chairman’s wife comes in wearing a red hat. She takes the attention of the audience at once, just because of that one note of color.
(Hitchcock 1995: 258)

In a later interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Hitchcock states:

Color should start with the nearest equivalent to black and white. This sounds like a most peculiar statement, but color should be no different from the voice which starts muted and finally arrives at a scream. In other words, the muted color is black and white, and the screams are every psychedelic color you can think of, starting, of course, with red.
(Hitchcock 2003: 136)

The second assumption is that Hitchcock puts color in his films to enhance our understanding of character and story, a practice that is borne out by the comments of his long time collaborator, costume designer Edith Head, who worked on his color films Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man who Knew too Much (1956), Vertigo (1963), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), and Family Plot (1976). Head wrote:

Hitchcock thinks in terms of color; every costume is indicated when he sends me the script. … There is always a reason behind his thinking, an effort to characterize. He’s absolutely definite in his visual approach and gives you an exciting concept of the importance of color.
(Quoted in Kindem 1977: 75)

Hitchcock confirms this attention to costume detail in his own report of a shopping trip with Eva Marie Saint, the star of North by Northwest (1959). He recommends she be dressed in “a basic black suit (with simple emerald pendant) to intimate her relationship with (James) Mason,” in “a heavy silk black cocktail dress subtly imprinted with wine red flowers, in scenes where she deceived Cary [Grant],” and in “a charcoal brown, full skirted jersey and a burnt orange burlap outfit in the scenes of action” (quoted in McGilligan 2003: 567).

Hitchcock’s approach to color design is one that balances the expressive demands of color with the constraints of realism.¹ Thus Hitchcock spent nine days refilming Rope (1948) in order to achieve the gradual darkening of the color scheme from day to night and to avoid lurid Technicolor.² Just as Hitchcock’s visual expressionism in his black-and-white Hollywood films supervenes on the conventions of classical cinema with regard to the representation of space and the placement of character within it, so to, Hitchcock’s expressive and symbolic deployment of color is wholly congruent with the constraints of photographic realism. […]

However, in comparison with black and white, color yields far more choice and hence far more elements to control. Hitchcock’s approach to color design demands first imagining the location as a colorless as well as an objectless space and building up the elements of color design alongside the construction of the mise-en-scène. Within Hitchcock’s practice of “coloring” the mise-en-scène, certain objects become privileged bearers of color meaning in the sense that their color can be most readily calibrated without undermining the overall surface realism of the design. Costume in Hitchcock is perhaps the most privileged color index because it is at once attached to character and can be readily calibrated to changes and development in the story. Color in the design of costume extends beyond the clothing of the protagonists to the clothing of extras who populate Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène. By carefully controling the color worn by his extras, Hitchcock is able to control the color design of public spaces. The color of vehicles, too, becomes readily orchestrated and Hitchcock obsessively exploits the color of taxis, buses, and planes for expressive purposes. Within interiors the main bearers of color meaning that can be readily changed and be strategically positioned in a set are lampshades and flowers. […]

Hitchcock’s approach to color is highly creative in its deployment of the full expressive repertoire that color affords, and even “experimental” in the way he organizes the elements of mise-en-scène to achieve the right orchestration of color within it. However, color in Hitchcock’s film functions strictly to augment, counterpoint, and clarify narrative meaning and expression. More specifically still, Hitchcock’s use of color is calibrated in relationship to the conventional moral coordinates of the romantic thriller and the identification he invites with the protagonists of the thriller. To be sure, Hitchcock subverts the conventional meanings of color and, in particular, the conventional ways in which color and color contrasts express gender difference, and in this respect his color design is congruent with his overall aesthetic where the tension between the norms of the romance and an ironic subversion of those norms is consistently maintained. However, whether Hitchcock is asserting conventions or subverting them, and often he is doing both at the same time, his deployment of color consistently serves the amplification of character and the elaboration of story.³

As color theorists have long recognized, while colors can be uniquely discriminated and can carry symbolic value by virtue of that discrimination (for example, red conventionally means warning), colors also gain significance by their association and contrast with other colors. It is thus helpful, as Edward Branigan points out, to approach the analysis of color in terms of groupings of systems of color, some of which conventionally have contrastive or opposed meanings and all of which may overlap with one another in different ways (Branigan 1976: 26). I will identify four main color groupings in Hitchcock’s films and demonstrate some of the ways Hitchcock uses these groupings in the context of individual films.

Color and its absence

The first contrastive grouping of colors to consider in the context of Hitchcock’s work is the opposition between the presence of color, of colorfulness, and the absence of color, of colorlessness. Absence of color is, literally speaking, the use of black and white and the gradations between them as opposed to the primary colors red, blue, and yellow (and green) and their derivatives. However, if we take the absence of color less literally it is also registered by the presence of muted colors, such as pale beiges. Conversely, colorfulness as opposed to colorlessness is registered not simply by the use of color but by the deployment of a range of hues in discreet blocks of bright, highly saturated, color. This contrast between colorfulness and colorlessness invokes the emotional resonance attached to the idea of color. Colorfulness evokes in Hitchcock’s work gaiety or cheerfulness, warmth or love, depending on context. Colorlessness, which is ubiquitous in Hitchcock’s late works, evokes negative emotions such as anxiety or depression, a sense of emotional vacuity or emptiness, and the loss of identity.

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Brian Price for his helpful comments.

Notes

¹ In Under Capricorn, Hitchcock worked with Powell and Pressburger’s cameraman Jack Cardiff to create what is at times a very luxuriant Technicolor feel, but while it is not “realistic,” color here is consistent with the generic motivation of the “costume melodrama.”

² See Laurents 2000: 134, and McGilligan 2003: 414.

³ Hitchcock approaches abstraction in specific moments in his work. In a sequence early in Torn Curtain (1966), a late work which is arguably his most refined in its use of color, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) walks to a book store in Amsterdam to pick up a package for her fiancé. She walks past store fronts that are successively painted in the primary colors of red, blue, yellow, and also green. These could be motivated as the “color” of the free world in contrast to the gray colorless iron curtain, but they also appear to exceed such a motivation, as if Hitchcock is announcing the color schemes of the film rather in the manner of a modernist colorist like Godard.

Bibliography

Branigan, E. (1976) “The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,” Wide Angle, 1:3.

Hitchcock, A. (1995) “Direction,” in S. Gottlieb (ed.) Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Essays and Interviews, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

– (2003) “Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels,” in S. Gottlieb (ed.) Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press.

Kindem, G. (1977) “Toward a Semiotic Theory of Visual Communication in the Cinema: A Reappraisal of Semiotic Theories from a Cinematic Perspective and a Semiotic Analysis of Color Signs and Communication in the Color Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” doctoral thesis, Northwestern University.

Laurents, A. (2000) Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, New York: Applause Books.

McGilligan, P. (2003) Alfred Hitchcock: A Portrait in Darkness and Light, New York: Reagan Books.”

(Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 131–134.)

Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 134–141.

Technicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

North by Northwest (USA 1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

“In North by Northwest, the colors of the room occupied by the nonexistent George Kaplan are the insipid and anonymous creams and beiges which may be standard fare in an American hotel suite but which also serve to evoke the nonexistence of its inhabitant. When the hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), reaches the destination in the Midwest where he believes he will at last meet Kaplan but almost meets his death instead, he is framed from above standing at a crossroads. Not only is the landscape denuded of signs of life (save for a field of dried-up corn), but also of color, save for the beiges and grays of a colorless, vacated wasteland, perhaps suggesting the wasteland that lies at the heart of America, but certainly evoking expressionistically the degree zero reached by the character. […]

Cool colors vs. warm colors or earth tones

The distinction between color and colorlessness is a general organizing principle of color design in Hitchcock’s work. It intersects and overlaps with a second distinction between cool colors and warm colors or earth tones, and cool colors and hot colors or yellows, oranges, and reds. The distinction between cool colors and warm colors again draws upon the emotional valency that is attached to color in Western culture. Cool colors are colors associated with the left-hand side of the visible spectrum and include most shades of blue but especially pale blue, sky blue, and aquamarine, and certain greens like lime green, and they include the grays, if we consider gray a color. Cool colors evoke in Hitchcock’s work a sense of emotional detachment or distance, of the domination of reason over emotion that is linked to the depiction both of masculinity and modernity. For example, the landscape of North by Northwest is dominated by blues and whites, right down to the character and organization of the clothing worn by the extras in the film. This color is embodied in the representation of the United Nations building in the film that is an image of the new world order, an order controlled by the impersonal and calculating machinations of mostly male agents in blue suits, and one in which it is impossible to visually distinguish friend from foe.

[…]

Hot colors: the warning series

The “warning series” consists of bright, saturated, and solid yellow, orange, and red either individually or in sequence or combined in the same image to indicate progressively greater degrees of danger. Often Hitchcock’s use of these colors, especially red, is highlighted in the image via a contrast with white and sometimes blue. By using hot colors to convey caution or danger, Hitchcock is obviously drawing upon deeply embedded cultural associations that draw on the relationship between red and blood and yellow and red and fire. The basic significance of this color patterning is to create warning or danger posed within the world of the film to the central protagonist, and its use in this respect is a ubiquitous feature of Hitchcock’s color design. […]

Just as Hitchcock orchestrates the relationship between cool colors and earth tones, he also orchestrates the relationship between cool colors and the warning series. In North by Northwest, the cool blues and whites of the Cold War landscape combine with the warning series, in particular red on white, to create an overall color scheme that in general terms evokes the danger that looms in this cool rationalized world for his protagonist. More specifically, this color scheme evokes the color of the American flag prominently displayed at Grand Central station and writ large in the landscape of the film in the manner that the face of the American presidents are inscribed in natural landscape of Mount Rushmore. The identification of the colors of the film with those of the American flag suggests the surface patriotism of North by Northwest that orchestrates the rescue of the heroine on the face of Mount Rushmore with the defeat of the villains who seek to undermine American national security. At the same time, of course, the color design of red, white, and blue is distributed equally between the representation of the “family” of spies that center upon Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) who are shown in a high-angle interior shot pacing across a red, white, and blue carpet, and the C.I.A. headed by the Professor (Leo G. Carroll) who sit in their blue and gray suits and white shirts in an office of red leather-back chairs with an American flag in the corner. These respective organizations are visually interchangeable in the film, reflecting the way in which they both seek to destroy Roger Thornhill: Vandamm through actively wishing to kill him, thinking he is an American agent; the Professor by allowing Vandamm to continue to believe this fiction, which also has, as its consequence, the targeting of Roger Thornhill by the American police who wrongly believe him to be a murderer.⁵

[…]

Black versus white

I have already discussed the role played by black and white in Hitchcock’s films in opposition to color. However, in the context of Hitchcock’s color films, the opposition and relationship between black and white takes on its own independent significance as an element of color design. Indeed, Hitchcock’s use of black and white is arguably as central as the opposition between cool and warm colors and his use of the warning series in his overall approach to color design.

Hitchcock draws on a range of cultural associations attached to the opposition between black and white. The opposition between black and white signifies morality via its association between light and darkness: Black suggests villainy and white suggests goodness. […] While women are more commonly associated with redemptive whites, threatening women may appear in black. […] For both male and female, the whiteness connoting purity or redemption is often initially hidden. Eve Kendell (Eva Marie Saint) in North by Northwest starts out wearing a black suit over a white blouse that is largely concealed when she first encounters Roger Thornhill on the ’20th Century Limited’. When she sends the police who are pursuing Thornhill off the scent, her jacket is open and her white top more exposed, by the time she kisses Thornhill, her black jacket has been taken off and her presence is defined in medium closeup. Once Eve has contacted Vandamm and his men and sends Thornhill to his death, she is once again defined by her black suit. But redeemed by the end of the film, she climbs up into a bunk in the sleeping car of the train in white pajamas.

Men reveal their underlying goodness by taking off their jackets and revealing a white shirt beneath. […] Roger Thornhill wears a suit throughout North by Northwest until the fake staging of his death and his subsequent hospitalization. He rises from his bed a new man, determined to take action to rescue Eve Kendell and is now defined not by his cool blue suit but by a crisp white shirt.

Notes

⁵ The way in which color blurs the boundaries between different agencies in North by Northwest is developed further in the highly articulate color scheme of Hitchcock’s late film Topaz. For a detailed analysis see Brill 1988: 188–90.

Bibliography

Brill, L. (1988) The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.”

(Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 134–141.)

North by Northwest (1959)

Color systemTechnicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

GalleryNorth by Northwest (1959)

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North by Northwest (1959)

Color systemTechnicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

North by Northwest (USA 1959, Alfred Hitchcock). Credit: Harvard Film Archive, item no. 700. HDR photograph by Barbara Flueckiger.
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North by Northwest (1959)

Color systemTechnicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

GalleryNorth by Northwest (1959)

Quote

Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 137–138.

Technicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

Frenzy (GBR 1972, Alfred Hitchcock

“Frenzy subjects the association of earth tones with redemptive nature and redemptive femininity to a systematic ironic reversal. Gorhem Kindem points out that the ubiquitous browns of Frenzy to which we may add their association with black and whiteness suggests the overwhelming presence of pollution (Kindem 1977: 212). A pompous and grandiose government official in the opening of the film articulates the fantasy of a pollution-free environment, but the camera reveals that the pool of London that he presides over is like a cesspool. The corpse of a dead female prostitute floats in this cesspool with its ass exposed in a manner that links the theme of pollution to the body of the woman and to the anus. This imagery articulates a range of associations that precisely invert the redemptive connotations of earth tones in relationship to female sexuality. Here Hitchcock draws a metaphorical equation between the pool of London as cesspool, and the body of the woman as diseased or corrupted nature. The London revealed by Hitchcock’s camera is metaphorically like a diseased or dirty “whore”. While this imagery may seem to implicate Hitchcock in misogyny, Frenzy makes very clear that this image of woman as corrupted nature is not something that contrasts with male civilization but is its product.

[…]

Hot colors: the warning series

The warning series relates to the Hitchcock’s protagonists in two distinct ways. Sometimes where a protagonist is wearing the warning colors it may represent the fact that they are a target of danger, as when Eve Kendell (Eve Marie Saint), wears an orange dress in the final scenes of North by Northwest, or Babs Milligan (Anna Massey) wears an orange dress just before she is murdered by Rusk (Barry Foster) in Frenzy. […] A further distinction may be drawn between the objective and subjective functions of the warning colors. In these examples the warning color is objective, indexing something threatening or threatened, but a warning color may also indicate “expressionistically” the mental state of a character. Frenzy provides an extraordinary illustration of this when Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) looses a bet on a horse and crushes the grapes he is eating beneath his foot (a literalization of the sour grapes that afflicts the character) in closeup. This shot is followed by an “insert” shot of a red double-decker bus that looms in the image moving in the same direction as the character. Obviously the bus could be realistically motivated by its proximity to the pavement, but the shot in fact exists purely to cue the color red and hence index Blaney’s rage in a moment of Eisensteinian montage.

Bibliography

(Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 137–138.)

North by Northwest (1959)

Color systemTechnicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

GalleryNorth by Northwest (1959)

North by Northwest (USA 1959, Alfred Hitchcock). Credit: Harvard Film Archive, item no. 700. HDR photograph by Barbara Flueckiger.
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North by Northwest (1959)

Color systemTechnicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from Eastmancolor negative

GalleryNorth by Northwest (1959)

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Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 131–134.

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Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 134–141.

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North by Northwest (1959)

North by Northwest (1959)

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North by Northwest (1959)

Allen, Richard (2006): Hitchcock’s Color Designs. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–144, on pp. 137–138.

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North by Northwest (1959)

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North by Northwest (1959)