Filter

Quote

Degenhardt, Inge (1996): On the Absence and Presence of Colour in Film. In: Monica Dall’Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore and Leonardo Quaresima (eds.): Il colore nel cinema muto. Bologna: Clueb, pp. 88–102, on pp. 95–96.

“The development of colour systems ready for industrial production advances the emergence of colour film. In the following decades in film history, the cinema learned to use colour in a great variety of ways. Agfacolor and Technicolor not only contributed to the perfecting of the colour systems, but also increased the experience of all concerned with the principles of directing and staging colour. Divorced from the characteristics of colour in nature, the cinematographic sensibility for colour developed as a specific aesthetic means of expression. This corresponded to the development of colour perception and aesthetic evaluation, which, particularly in this century, was greatly stimulated by a number of authors (such as Kandinsky, Matisse, Itten) with their theoretically based investigations. A discourse on the artistic cinematic possibilities of colour design did also emerge among cinematic artists (for example, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Renoir, Truffaut, Agnès Varda, etc.), though in European film making colour designing never attained as high a professional standard as it did in Hollywood. Using colour is actually transpiring to be a process in which fixed codes and established criteria are becoming less and less acceptable. Even today, when colour has long become the norm in film and on TV, sensational discoveries can still be made.”

(Degenhardt, Inge (1996): On the Absence and Presence of Colour in Film. In: Monica Dall’Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore and Leonardo Quaresima (eds.): Il colore nel cinema muto. Bologna: Clueb, pp. 88–102, on pp. 95–96.)

Tags

Quote

Eggert, John (1932): Kurzer Überblick über den Stand der Farbenkinematographie. In: Bericht über den VIII. Internationalen Kongress für wissenschaftliche und angewandte Photographie, Dresden 1931. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, pp. 214–221, on pp. 215–218. (in German)

Harriscolor

“Mit fortschreitender Entwicklung ist die Herstellung des Farbenbildes durch Heranziehung geeigneter photographischer, chemischer oder optischer Hilfsmittel ganz mechanisiert worden. Sie fußen auf der Zerlegung des farbigen Bildes in mehrere Teilfarbenbilder, die in geeigneter Weise kombiniert werden. Man unterscheidet nach der spektralen Auswahl zwei Gruppen farbenkinematographischer Methoden:

1. Die Zweifarbenverfahren,

2. die Dreifarbenverfahren.

Diese teilen sich wieder nach der Farbensynthese in zwei (von der ersten Unterscheidung unabhängige) Gruppen:

1. die subtraktiven Verfahren,

2. die additiven Verfahren.

Wir besprechen zuerst die subtraktiven Methoden und beginnen mit den Zweifarbenverfahren. Die beiden typischen Farbstoffe, die letzten Endes die Farbwirkung hervorrufen, sind ein Orangerot (1) und ein Blaugrün (2). Durch diese beiden Komponenten, ist das Spektrum, grob gesprochen, in zwei Teile zerlegt. Reine rote bis gelbe Töne werden stets durch Farbstoff (1) wiedergegeben; dabei kann natürlich die Anfärbung vom satten Grundfarbstoff bis zum Weiß (unangefärbt) stattfinden. Das gleiche gilt für Farbstoff (2), der die Töne von Grün bis Blau vertritt. Schwarz wird durch räumliche Hintereinanderlagerung beider Farbstoffe (zwischen Lichtquelle und Schirm) gewonnen, denn der blaugrüne Teil des Spektrums wird zunächst durch (1) ausgelöscht und der rotgelbe Teil durch (2) verschluckt.¹ Das weiße Licht wird also in 2 Portionen fortgenommen – daher die Bezeichnung “subtraktive Methode”. Die Grauleiter entsteht entsprechend durch Hintereinanderschaltung schwächerer (aber in Summa neutral wirkender) Anfärbungen von (1) und (2), und schließlich besteht die Möglichkeit, durch Kombination verschieden kräftiger Anfärbungen beider Farbstoffe eine relativ umfangreiche Reihe von Mischfarben (z.B. die Fleischfarbe) hervorzubringen. Das Problem besteht nun darin, diese beiden Farbstoffe jeweils in der richtigen Konzentration an die richtigen Stellen der beiden Teilbilder zu bringen, die durch Über- oder Hintereinanderlegung die Gesamtwirkung hervorrufen.

Zur Herstellung der beiden Teilnegative bestehen hauptsächlich zwei Möglichkeiten: die Strahlenteilung und der Zweipack. Wie Abb. 1 an einer schematischen Darstellung des Strahlenteilungsprinzips unter Fortlassung der Linsenoptik zeigt, fällt das vom aufzunehmenden Objekt kommend Licht zunächst auf den halbdurchlässigen Spiegel S. Die eine Hälfte der Strahlung wird reflektiert und erzeugt auf dem (panchromatischen) Film p₂ hinter dem Rotorange-Filter F₂ ein Bild des Rotorange-Anteils, da das vorgestellte gleichgefärbte Filter die übrigen Lichtarten fortnimmt. Die andere Hälfte der Strahlung geht durch S hindurch und entwirft auf dem Film p₁ den Blaugrün-Auszug, weil das eingeschaltete gleichfarbige Filter F₁ den komplementären Teil des Spektrums absorbiert. Mit Hilfe der Perforation des Films lassen sich die zusammengehörigen Bilderpaare exakt zu konturgetreuer Deckung bringen, wenn durch die sonstigen optischen Bedingungen der Apparatur identische Abbildungen gesichert sind. Es besteht also auch die Möglichkeit, die auf den Einzelfilmen p₁ und p₂ erzeugten Bilder durch geeignete Hilfsmittel auf einem gemeinsamen Film untereianderstehend anzuordnen, wobei nach jeder Aufnahme die doppelte Filmlänge wie normal transportiert wird; solche Negative werden nicht im Kontakt, sondern optisch kopiert. – Abb. 2 zeigt die Trennung der Lichtarten nach dem Zweipackverfahren, bei dem die Aussonderung der beiden komplementären Lichtarten durch die verschiedene spektrale Empfindlichkeit der photographischen Schichten erfolgt. Ein blaugrünempfindlicher Frontfilm liegt bei der Aufnahme Schicht an Schicht und im engen Kontakt mit einem rotempfindlichen Schlußfilm. Das Licht tritt in den Zweipack durch das Zelluloid a des Frontfilms ein, gibt auf diesem den Blaugrün-Auszug, während das organgerote Licht auf die Schicht des Schlußfilms d wirkt, nachdem es durch ein mit dem Frontfilm verbundenes Orangefilter c von den Resten der Blaugrünstrahlung befreit wurde. Auch in dieser Anordnung wird durch die Perforation das exakte Aufeinanderpassen der beiden Bilder gewährleistet. Bemerkt sei noch, daß unter Einschaltung eines zweiten halbdurchlässigen Spiegels in die Strahlenteilungskamera oder eines Zwischenfilms beim Dreipack² der Übergang zur Dreifarbenphotographie möglich ist, da auf diesem Wege (bei Anwendung entsprechender Filter) drei getrennte Farbauszüge herstellbar sind.

Mit Hilfe der auf die eine oder andere Weise gewonnenen beiden Teilnegative ist nun im anschließenden Positivprozeß die Einführung der genannten beiden Farbstoffe zu bewerkstelligen. Dies kann nach zwei Verfahren geschehen. Entweder man stellt von den Negativen auf photographischem Wege oder mit Hilfe des Chromatprozesses Gelatinereliefs her, die man im komplementären Sinne anfärbt und im Absaugeverfahren auf einen Blankfilm mit Gelatineüberzug hintereinander und unter Innehaltung exakter Konturdeckung überträgt; der Orangerot-Auszug liefert also das blaugrün gefärbte Teilbild und umgekehrt, wobei schließlich beide Bilder auf der gleichen Schichtseite des Blankfilms übereinanderliegen. – Oder man kopiert (wie Abb. 2 zeigt) die beiden zusammengehörigen Teilnegative gleichzeitig auf einen zwischen ihnen liegenden doppelseitig begossenen Positivfilm, so daß die entsprechenden Kopien zunächst als Silberbilder auf getrennten Seiten liegen. Verwandelt man diese in Farbstoffbilder durch chemische Tonung (Eisenblau- oder Urantonung) oder durch Virage (z. B. Jodsilberbeizfärbung) wiederum im komplementären Sinne, so ergibt sich ein ebenfalls wie beim Absaugeverfahren, subtraktives Zweifarbenbild. Schließlich kann man auch die Negative oder zweckmäßiger die auf einem doppelseitig beschichteten Film einander gegenüber angeordneten Duplikatnegative in gebleichte Gerbreliefs überführen und zu den Aufnahmefiltern komplementär anfärben. Die nachfolgende Tabelle zeigt, in welcher Weise eine Anzahl bekannter Verfahren die genannten Methoden (in zum Teil etwas modifizierter Weise) kombinieren. In der letzten Spalte der Tabelle wird auf die beiliegende Tafel verwiesen, für die die Firmen Technicolor Motion Picture Corp., Boston, Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, Multicolor-Films-Inc., Los Angeles, Universum Film. A.-G., Berlin, und “Sirius” Farben-Film Ges.m.b.H., Berlin, einige Probebilder in dankenswerter Weise zur Verfügung gestellt haben.

Dem Multicolor-Verfahren ähnlich sind das Magnacolor-, Polychromide-, Photocolor-, Colorcraft-, Coloratura- und andere Verfahren, die zum Teil die Strahlenteilung als Aufnahmemethode verwenden. Das Harriscolor-Verfahren bedient sich eines einschichtigen Positivfilms und erzeugt die einzelnen Teilbilder in verschiedenen Schichttiefen. Das Foxcolor-Verfahren ist dem Kodachromverfahren analog. Bei dem Zoechrom-Verfahren werden die den einzelnen Teilnegativen entsprechenden Teilbilder auf nacheinander aufgebrachte Schichten nacheinander kopiert, entwickelt und gefärbt.

Bei den subtraktiven Verfahren wird grundsätzlich so vorgegangen, daß von dem ursprünglich weißen Licht durch geeignete Farbstoffe diejenigen spektralen Anteile entfernt werden, die nicht dem aufgenommenen Objekt entsprechen: die gewünschten Bildfarben bleiben als Differenz
übrig.

¹ Bei gewisser Farbstoffauswahl bleibt übrigens gelegentlich an Stelle von Schwarz ein Lichtrest in der Tönung von dunkler Sepia zurück.

² Diese Anordnung wurde bisher nur für die Zwecke der Amateurphotographie, nicht für Kinefilm benutzt.”

(Eggert, John (1932): Kurzer Überblick über den Stand der Farbenkinematographie. In: Bericht über den VIII. Internationalen Kongress für wissenschaftliche und angewandte Photographie, Dresden 1931. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, pp. 214–221, on pp. 215–218.) (in German)

Tags

Gallery | (6 images)

Jesse James (1939)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Gallery | (5 images)

Fantasia (1940)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Quote

Higgins, Scott (2007): Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, on pp. 58–60.

Technicolor No. IV: Three-strip

“Nearly every commentator on Becky Sharp singles out the Duchess of Richmond’s ball as evidence of the film’s dramatic approach to color. The scene must owe a good part of this attention to Mamoulian’s promotion of the sequence as the pinnacle of Becky Sharp‘s design. In his paper “Some Problems in Directing Color Pictures,” the ballroom sequence provides the sole example of the proper, dramatic, and emotional use of color:

You will see how inconspicuously, but with telling effect, the sequence builds to a climax through a series of intercut shots which progress from the coolness and sobriety of colors like gray, blue, green, and pale yellow, to the exciting danger and threat of deep orange and flaming red. The effect is achieved by the selection of dresses and uniforms worn by the characters and the color of backgrounds and lights.¹⁷

Whenever he discussed color, Mamoulian would return to this scene, most notably in his interview with Anthony Slide and in his article “Colour and Light in Films” for Film Culture in 1960. When, as noted above, Mamoulian told Slide that he intended the “dramatic climax of the film to coincide with the color climax,” he was referring not to the end of Becky Sharp, but to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, a scene that occurs in reels four and five. The sequence is certainly the film’s most spectacular set piece, and so it follows that it should be an arena for the production’s most ambitious color design.

Close analysis of the sequence is complicated by the state of the preservation print at the University of California-Los Angeles, which I consulted. Indeed, the history of this sequence is a testament to the fragility of the medium. In 1943, Pioneer Pictures sold Becky Sharp to Film Classics, which shortened the film, released it in two-color Cinecolor, and junked portions of the negative.¹⁸ In the mid-1980s, with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute, film preservationists Robert Gitt (of the UCLA Film and Television Archive) and Richard Dayton (of YCM Laboratories) set out to reconstruct the film. Gitt and Dayton were faced with an incomplete set of materials. For reel four, which features the start of the ballroom sequence, there were no surviving yellow materials. Reel five, in which Napoleon attacks and the guests flee the ball, was missing important portions of the magenta record.¹⁹ To solve these problems, Gitt and Dayton printed the magenta record of reel four twice in order to simulate yellow, and printed the yellow record in portions of reel five twice to simulate magenta. In the resulting print, colors were compromised at the start and toward the conclusion of the sequence, full three-color occurring only in the middle. Gitt and Dayton described the shifting color with reference to Joseph’s jacket: “In the course of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, which takes place during reels four and five, Nigel Bruce’s costume changes from dark green to deep blue and then to a light blue, as we go from simulated yellow, to full three-color and then to simulated magenta.”²⁰

Fortunately, additional preservation materials were retrieved from the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome late in 1984, and they were incorporated into the preservation print. According to American Film, that material was used to fine-tune the print’s overall color balance and to improve reel nine. My viewings suggest that the color in the Duchess of Richmond’s ball may have been evened out somewhat. A noticeable shift does occur at the break between reels four and five: Lady Bareacres’s (Billie Burke’s) dress changes from medium gray Blue Mist to light Pistachio Green.²¹ The end of the sequence, though, does not appear to undergo a radical variation in color. Gitt suggested to me that the sequence is mostly accurate, aside from the loss of purples and greens in a few shots of guests fleeing.²² Still, given the relatively unstable colors, my description relies on the full three-color portion of the scene (after the start of reel five and before the lighting change that occurs during the attack) for identification of the major colors, and I extrapolate to account for details in the surrounding portions.

Notes

¹⁷ Rouben Mamoulian, “Some Problems in Directing Color Pictures,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, August 1935, 151. Mamoulian’s essay is also included in the Technical Bulletin of the Academy Technicians Branch, May 1935, 18–21; in International Photographer, July 1935, 20–21; and in Richard Koszarski, The Hollywood Directors, 1914-1940 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 288–293. A condensed version appeared as “Colour and Emotion” in Cinema Quarterly, Summer 1935, 225–226.

¹⁸ Robert Gitt and Richard Dayton, “Restoring Becky Sharp,” American Cinematographer, November 1984, 100. My discussion of the reconstruction draws heavily on this thorough and detailed article. For a brief discussion of the Italian material, see “Lookin’ Sharp,” American Film, July-August 1985, 9. According to Gitt, a complete subtitled print was uncovered at the Netherlands Filmmuseum, but only after completion of the film restoration (Gitt, interview with the author, 2005).

¹⁹ Gitt and Dayton, “Restoring Becky Sharp,” 104.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ The color change in reel four also noticeably affects the Imperial Blue accents on George’s collar, which can be seen clearly at the end of reel three, during the silhouette scene. When reel four commences, these blue accents have shifted to deep black.

²² Gitt interview.

Works Cited

American Film. “Lookin’ Sharp.” July-August 1985: 9.

Gitt, Robert, and Richard Dayton. “Restoring Becky Sharp.” American Cinematographer, November 1984: 99–106.

Koszarski, Richard. The Hollywood Directors, 1914-1940. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.

Mamoulian, Rouben. “Colour and Emotion.” Cinema Quarterly, Summer 1935: 225–226.

–. “Painting the Leaves Black: Rouben Mamoulian Interviewed by David Robinson.” Sight and Sound 30, no. 3 (Summer 1961): 123–130.

–. “Some Problems in Directing Color Pictures.” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, August 1935: 148–153.”

(Higgins, Scott (2007): Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, on pp. 58–60.)

Tags

Quote

Street, Sarah; Watkins, Liz (2013): Interview. Christopher Challis. In: Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (eds.): British Colour Cinema. Practices and Theories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10–30, on pp. 11–26.

Technicolor No. V: Dye transfer prints from chromogenic negative

“Chris Challis was born on 18 March 1919 in Kensington, London and attended school in Wimbledon. He entered the film industry, working as a camera assistant on Gaumont-British newsreels before working at Denham Studios when three-strip Technicolor was introduced to Britain. Challis was an assistant on the World Windows travelogues shot by Jack Cardiff in the late 1930s and on other productions, including location work in India for The Drum (1938). He worked as a cameraman for the RAF Film Production Unit during World War II. In the post-war years he was camera operator on Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes before photographing The Tales of Hoffmann, Gone to Earth (1950), The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), Oh … Rosalinda!! (1955) and The Battle of the River Plate (1956). During his long career he photographed many popular British films including Genevieve (1953) and Footsteps in the Fog (1955), and worked with British and American directors, most notably Stanley Donen, Billy Wilder, Joseph Losey, J. Lee Thompson and Ken Annakin. He became known for his ingenuity, reliability and expertise and is credited as cinematographer on major box-office successes including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Evil under the Sun (1981). He won a BAFTA for Best Cinematography for Arabesque (1966). He retired in 1985 after working on Steaming (1984), Joseph Losey’s last film. He died in May 2012.

[…]

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon, ‘A Feature Cinematographer Photographs the Olympics’, American Cinematographer vol. 57 no. 4, April 1976, pp. 406–7, 458–9.

Brett, Anwar, interview with Chris Challis, ‘Reflections on a Golden Age’, Exposure, October 1998, pp. 16–17.

Challis, Christopher, ‘Hoffmann sets new pattern in film making technique’, American Cinematographer vol. 32 no. 5, May 1951, pp. 176–7, 194–6.

Challis, Christopher, Are They Really So Awful? A Cameraman’s Chronicles (London: Janus Publishing, 1995).

Film Dope entry on Challis, no. 6, November 1974, pp. 41–3.

Petrie, Duncan, The British Cinematographer (London: BFI, 1996), pp. 80–2.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

DATE OF INTERVIEW: 17 OCTOBER 2008

INTERVIEWERS: SARAH STREET AND LIZ WATKINS

[…]

LIZ WATKINS: Were there any problems with colour resolution using the widescreen processes and those different lenses when they first came in?

CHRISTOPHER CHALLIS: No, not really when we went over to Kodak.

LW: Eastmancolor?

CC: Although it was a multilayer emulsion the definition on that was pretty well as good as black and white and of course the best Eastmancolor was printed by Technicolor. Instead of having a contact print they printed up and made separation negatives and then they printed on the imbibition system, so they’d got that under control you see? With Eastmancolor you have no control in the printing other than how dense you make it and you can only do corrections with colour filters. So it’s pretty crude, whereas if they printed with Technicolor they could reduce it all to the Technicolor and it was very good. Eastmancolor got better and better.

LW: So did it improve or change Eastmancolor?

CC: They improved the emulsion – it got faster and less contrasty and it became very, very good.

LW: Were there problems with colour fading with Eastmancolor at this time? At what point did this occur? I wonder because there’s a lot that has been written on colour preservation – at what point did that become an issue? Were people immediately aware of that?

CC: I don’t obviously know the answer to that but I would think it’s fairly long term. Technicolor negatives were black and white anyway so you could go on ad infinitum. I don’t think they faded all that quickly; it’s like ordinary colour photography. Some Kodacolor prints fade and others don’t. It’s extraordinary. If they’re in direct sunlight they do. That’s why I think they can do so much with remastering; it’s absolutely uncanny. I had a wonderful experience of that because in quite the early days of Cinemascope I made a film with Micky and Emeric called Oh … Rosalinda!!, which did all sorts of things with Cinemascope. You know that Cinemascope was an additional lens, was put on the front of the conventional camera. We had a duff one and definition was not terribly good. Also, it was in the very early days of Eastmancolor and the colour rushes were just dreadful. I could never get anything right and I was getting more and more depressed about it and I don’t think I ever saw it on release – I absolutely hated it! Many years later I was living in Scotland and I got involved with the Edinburgh Film Festival. I did some things for them and as a ‘thank you’ on about the second or third year they held a party for me and got all sorts of people who had worked with me. It was a great surprise and they got Micky’s widow, Thelma [Schoonmaker] and one or two other people and they said ‘Well, we’ve got another surprise for you.’ After we’d finished our drinks they screened Oh … Rosalinda!! It had been remastered and looked wonderful – much better than it ever did when we made it.”

(Street, Sarah; Watkins, Liz (2013): Interview. Christopher Challis. In: Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (eds.): British Colour Cinema. Practices and Theories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10–30, on pp. 11–26.)

Tags

Gallery | (8 images)

Million Dollar Mermaid (1952)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Gallery | (68 images)

Marnie (1964)

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

Gallery | (9 images)

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Quote

Street, Sarah; Watkins, Liz (2013): Interview. Christopher Challis. In: Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (eds.): British Colour Cinema. Practices and Theories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10–30.

Technicolor No. IV: Three-strip

“INTERVIEW

CHRISTOPHER CHALLIS, BSC, FRPS

Chris Challis was born on 18 March 1919 in Kensington, London and attended school in Wimbledon. He entered the film industry, working as a camera assistant on Gaumont-British newsreels before working at Denham Studios when three-strip Technicolor was introduced to Britain. Challis was an assistant on the World Windows travelogues shot by Jack Cardiff in the late 1930s and on other productions, including location work in India for The Drum (1938). He worked as a cameraman for the RAF Film Production Unit during World War II. In the post-war years he was camera operator on Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes before photographing The Tales of Hoffmann, Gone to Earth (1950), The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), Oh … Rosalinda!! (1955) and The Battle of the River Plate (1956). During his long career he photographed many popular British films including Genevieve (1953) and Footsteps in the Fog (1955), and worked with British and American directors, most notably Stanley Donen, Billy Wilder, Joseph Losey, J. Lee Thompson and Ken Annakin. He became known for his ingenuity, reliability and expertise and is credited as cinematographer on major box-office successes including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Evil under the Sun (1981). He won a BAFTA for Best Cinematography for Arabesque (1966). He retired in 1985 after working on Steaming (1984), Joseph Losey’s last film. He died in May 2012.

[…]

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon, ‘A Feature Cinematographer Photographs the Olympics’, American Cinematographer vol. 57 no. 4, April 1976, pp. 406–7, 458–9.

Brett, Anwar, interview with Chris Challis, ‘Reflections on a Golden Age’, Exposure, October 1998, pp. 16–17.

Challis, Christopher, ‘Hoffmann sets new pattern in film making technique’, American Cinematographer vol. 32 no. 5, May 1951, pp. 176–7, 194–6.

Challis, Christopher, Are They Really So Awful? A Cameraman’s Chronicles (London: Janus Publishing, 1995).

Film Dope entry on Challis, no. 6, November 1974, pp. 41–3.

Petrie, Duncan, The British Cinematographer (London: BFI, 1996), pp. 80–2.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

DATE OF INTERVIEW: 17 OCTOBER 2008

INTERVIEWERS: SARAH STREET AND LIZ WATKINS

SARAH STREET: To start off broadly, we thought we’d ask you how would you define the role of Director of Photography?

CHRIS CHALLIS: I think it’s different on every film. It depends on the film, the style of the photography and very much on your relationship with the director. Some directors have a great visual sense, they know exactly how they want their picture to look and it’s an integral part of the way they’re going to direct it. That’s the ideal situation because it gives you a lead into what you want to do. Others who don’t have a visual sense, and they’re in the vast majority I think, then you’re in a bit of a vacuum because you don’t know which way to go with it. Now I think it’s [DOP] a very important part of the film and I admit that I’ve always felt that you are the director’s sort of paintbrush. He’s the artist, although you’re sort of carrying it out and doing the artist’s part of it, and it does differ from working in the initial stages and pre-production with the art director, the costumes and looking for locations. Of course it’s all changed now because of digital – it’s incredibly easy I think. You can photograph anywhere really – you could come in here and cover us talking to one another with these [domestic] lights. For Technicolor it’s different because it’s all arc lights and building a set, and the equipment was impressive, I mean physically impressive.

SS: When did you first become aware of Technicolor as someone who was keen to get into film and cinematography? Can you remember when you first heard of it?

CC: I started in the film industry with Gaumont British News. My father knew the managing director of Gaumont British News and Castleton Knight,¹ and they were just starting to use live sound for doing interviews and things. They didn’t use sound normally and newsreel cameramen were like photographers. The cameras were quite small and they didn’t have assistants or anything like that. With the advent of sound they needed help to lug the gear around and everything like that and so I think I was one of the first people ever to get that job and I had a year or just over a year of covering all the sort of things that the newsreel seems to ply.² They were a major part of cinemagoing; there were cinemas that just showed newsreels and there was great competition between the films. I happened to see or read that Technicolor were coming to England and doing the first colour film in Europe which was Wings of the Morning [1937]. It was made at Denham but Technicolor brought their own technicians. They took over a couple of machines in Humphries Laboratory in London, processed the negatives and made a black-and-white rush print, and then the negatives were shipped out to the States and the colour didn’t come back for four weeks and then it was only a pilot, it wasn’t a whole scene. It was a scientific process at that stage. I took myself down to Denham and the head of the camera department, George Kay, gave me a job. It was only loading magazines in the darkroom but I thought it was a step toward realising my ambitions. I suppose it was in a way but I spent most of my time loading these enormous magazines. At the end of the film the demand for colour was growing so rapidly that Technicolor decided to build a laboratory in Europe and they chose England in Harmondsworth on the Bath Road. So at the end of Wings of the Morning the laboratory was almost built – just the building because it didn’t have any of the equipment in it – because all the processing machines had to come from the States. They kept me on and so I was the first actual employee and I was very lucky because it was like going on a sort of university course.³ I went through every department as they were installing the equipment which came over without lenses. The lenses and the prism, which was the heart of the process, were made by Taylor and Hobson in England; I went through all of that and so I knew exactly how the process worked.

SS: Did they screen Wings of the Morning and have discussions about it because it was the first feature film? Do you remember anything of the reaction to that particular film?

CC: Do you mean during the making of it?

SS: Yes, during the process. I imagine everyone was intrigued to see this first British feature?

CC: Yes, of course they did, but it didn’t involve me, I was too busy loading the camera!

SS: Have you seen it since?

CC: I have, yes.

SS: Do you like it?

CC: Yes, and they were terribly impressed with it because Technicolor was a scientific process originated in California, where colours appear harsher and that’s the way they expected colour to be rather than how it was, particularly in the Irish locations that were a bit misty and hazy.

SS: It was quite soft, wasn’t it?

CC: There’s less contrast and everyone thought it was beautiful. The advent of colour had an enormous impact because people thought in terms of black and white.

SS: Yes, people seem to judge colour very harshly if it was seen to be not quite right.

CC: Technicolor retained a very strict control over what people did with it. Natalie Kalmus⁴ especially was in charge of colour control and she interfered with everything that our directors wanted to do, or the cameramen. They [the Color Advisory Service] didn’t like things like contrast and it was only later when it got into the hands of Jimmy Wong Howe⁵ and people like that that they started to experiment.

SS: Did you feel that the Color Advisory Service was something that took part in the production process? In reality, how did it impinge on people’s work?

CC: In the early stages it took a very big part because they vetted everything. There was no such thing as white and they dipped all the whites to a one- two- or three-grade dye because of the contrast which was a great problem. It was very difficult to get a good result because of the light levels. Dark colours went black and light colours [went] blue. There’s no such thing as having a pale blue or a pink because it would photograph white under certain conditions and you couldn’t see dark colours because they went black. So they tried to keep all the clothes the same, toward the middle range.

SS: So was that quite useful to some extent to prepare the production side?

CC: Yes, I think it was, so as far as the look of the picture was concerned it was very difficult to do anything unusual. They didn’t like low key lighting or anything like that.

SS: I’ve read about Natalie Kalmus developing charts for films. Is that true? Were you aware of a chart that was devised in these terms, because they don’t seem to be in the archives anywhere?

CC: Well if you were to see Natalie Kalmus you’d think she was the last person in the world to have anything to do with it because of course she dressed, well, she looked like an explosion in a paint shop.⁶

SS: Did you work with Joan Bridge because I get the impression that she was somebody who really knew about colour and was very helpful?

CC: Yes, she was very much better, much less aggressive than Natalie Kalmus, and she got along better with the artists. Joan Bridge was much more diplomatic. She only worked on the English films and became a colour consultant when they [Technicolor] opened up here. She had most of the contacts and during shooting she would come down once a week and maybe she would see the rushes and things.⁷

SS: We’re very interested in The Drum which was one of the early Technicolor British films.

CC: Oh yes, that was the first feature film made from the Technicolor laboratory in Harmondsworth.⁸

SS: Was Technicolor very helpful with advice about humidity controls and temperature or did you pioneer filming in a difficult location?

CC: They’d never done a location like that ever, and of course we didn’t shoot sound at all so the camera wasn’t quite as heavy.⁹ I was a trainee assistant [listed on Film Index International and IMDb as ‘focus puller’] and we had a unit if you could believe it; it was a major film. We didn’t take artistes [to India] but the unit consisted of a cameraman who was Osmond Borradaile¹⁰ and Geoff Boothby was the director. Henry Imus was the American Technicolor technician and I was his trainee assistant.¹¹ I flew to India and yes, Technicolor did a lot of research on conventional film under extreme conditions such as heat leads to a build up of latent exposure; it’s like a fogging over which eventually ruins it. Also you can get static if the film gets very brittle and looks like lightening, and humidity affects it. So they did a lot of research in California and produced a whole series of recommendations about temperatures. Their thinking was that where we were going we would have the facilities that they had in California; in actual fact we hadn’t anything, there was no such thing as refrigeration. They had this idea of packing the film stock in drums, which was rather strange considering the film’s name! Each drum took what we termed two ‘groups’, and a group contained 1,000 foot screen footage but 3,000 foot linear footage of separate cans [because of the three records needed for three-strip Technicolor].¹² The film was put in the drums with a silica gel which acted as a dehumidifier, and then tightly sealed and then soldered the metal drums. But of course when they [Technicolor] gave me a list of the film’s useful life at various temperatures, they were so unrealistic. I’d arrived in Karachi and had to go by train to Delhi across the Sinai desert and the temperature was well over 100 in the shade. I thought I might as well go home because I wasn’t even going to get to Delhi with the film let alone the rest of it, but thought we could try various ways of keeping it cool. The train didn’t have corridors so you had half a carriage with a shower and everything else but there was no air conditioning. They had galvanised tin baths in which they put eighty-pound blocks of ice. I had all the film stock in my compartment surrounded with these and covered with a tarpaulin sheet to try and keep it cool, and by the time we arrived in Delhi we had to renew the ice because it had gradually melted. The dust was colossal crossing the Sinai desert and so with all this water melting and everything I was in sort of two inches of mud. But finally the only check that I could develop was hand tests: I could break off a foot of film of each of the unexposed negatives, develop it and then see whether the fog level was building up.¹³

SS: But you wouldn’t be aware of how the colour might be affected?

CC: No, because we were dealing with three black-and-white images. The other interesting thing was that they had these camera report sheets which the assistant was responsible for and they were very, very extensive in their coverage; you had to record everything and they had this thing called a ‘lilly’. There’s three white cards, one at right angles, and two at forty-five degrees on either side, and you took a reading either side with a photometer so it would be whatever setting, 1,500 foot candles this way and 2,000 that way, 4,500 this, and all this had to be noted for each single shot and then you also had to give a brief description of the scene. If it was a close-up of you then I would have to describe the colour of your clothes and the settee behind you and the colour of your hair, and so they had all this data and they were really quite ridiculous about it. All this built up but for four months we’d had no contact; we couldn’t send any film back so we had it with us all the time.

SS: I wonder what happened to that kind of documentation because it strikes me that those kinds of records would be wonderful for researchers because British studios weren’t very good at keeping records.

CC: They went to Technicolor. They took the Technicolor cameras apart and I’m told that when we came back from India with what was the first film George Kay sat up all night reading all of my reports and he congratulated me. I got a rise and was made a qualified technician.

SS: So your notes would be very useful for other films, other texts?

CC: They would give a good lead, yes. When they printed the rushes they didn’t print in colour, they printed these pilots. Every shot you did a ten-foot or a fifteen-foot take with the ‘lilly’ in front and the colour chart and a greyscale, and that’s what they printed up. So we’d got the rushes in black and white and the colour pilot so we could see what it was like. They needed all these notes for the people who were to do the grading. When I became the Director of Photography I certainly sat in on all the grading and added my comments to everybody else’s. It was such a laborious process because once the negative had been cut – the final cut – they had a black-and-white print of it. The negative was handed over to Technicolor for negative cutting and they cut the negatives into this master, then they started printing in colour. Well of course when you saw it side by side cut together it was sometimes wildly different from how you thought it looked during shooting. This is when grading started. They would make a print based on the grading of the colour pilot, which they’d made originally, and then you would screen that and they might say ‘it’s too dark or it’s too blue and it was minus point this’, and they would make those corrections and make another print which took another two or three days and you’d see that and if that still wasn’t right, then you’d have to make more corrections. If you think you had to do this for every shot in the film then you can imagine how long it took. But Technicolor was a wonderful process because as a cameraman one had enormous control, not in the shooting but in the printing of contrast because the final colour print consisted of a black-and-white key which was printed from the blue record which was the sharpest of the three films. What defeated Technicolor in the end was definition, and they put this black-and-white key on to improve definition, contrast or reduce colour saturation. They used this idea in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

SS: In the transition shots?

CC: Yes, they were all done that way, by increasing the black-and-white density and losing the colour. You could slowly do away with the colour and bring it back vice versa. I think, I believe Ossie Morris used it quite a lot to do some effects.

SS: Can you say more about blue being the particularly dominant register in the Technicolor process?

CC: Of course. The basis of the process was a prism and it reflected a third of the light and transmitted two-thirds approximately and you had two gates at right angles; in one of them ran the green record which was by itself because it had filters on the back. So the green record only recorded the subtractive colour, and on the bi-pack the two films ran emulsion to emulsion. The red record, which was the back one of the two, was photographed through the blue record so the definition on the red record was very, very poor. The blue record was a different type of emulsion so it was much sharper and that’s why they used that to make a black-and-white picture. If you hadn’t the least idea of how it worked you’d say of course that it can’t be done.

IN CHALLIS’S BECTU INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN GOUGH-YATES ON 11 OCTOBER 1988, HE GIVES SOME INTERESTING DETAIL ON TECHNICOLOR CAMERAS AND TECHNOLOGY WHICH IS INCLUDED HERE:

KEVIN GOUGH-YATES: Can you say something about the Technicolor cameras of this time?

CHRIS CHALLIS: There was only the one camera which was three-strip, it had three films running in it so it was large as you can imagine. It hadn’t got a turret – it had single interchangeable lenses in its mount and magazines had 3,000 foot and so were jolly heavy to cart around. It was a difficult camera to take on location because obviously the heart of the Technicolor process, which is still an engineering miracle to me, was that, it had two gates in the camera which were at right angles to each other and one was a single film and the other was a bi-pack. Two films running together, emulsion to emulsion, and the image coming through the lens was split, intensity-wise, allowing approximately a third of light through to the single film and two-thirds to the double. This was done by the means of a prism which had a spotted surface across the middle which allowed part transmission and part reflection of the image. The location of this prism was unbelievably critical. The images had to exactly coincide in the registers so when finally the thing was printed you could enlarge it up on a cinema screen and you could get reasonable definition. There was a degree of adjustment in the printing, but nevertheless it had to be as right as one could have it in the camera and it was adjustable by means of moving the prism, but it was a jolly difficult thing to do on location. I mean the reading of the register was done in the cameras when you were working in England – the camera came back to the laboratory every night and they went into the mechanical department and they were serviced and the register was checked and then you did a photographic check of the register every morning on the floor before you began to shoot. You photographed a chart which was read that evening under a toolmaker’s microscope so they could check the image size and the spread and [that] everything was within the tolerance to get the sort of definition they wanted in the final print. Well when you were away from home, a long, long way, you obviously couldn’t have a microscope check because there was nobody to do that, so you had to do it visually. And of course you were into all sorts of problems if you were out in hot countries because you had a jig in which you put two pieces of film and you drilled this with this special jig of five holes; one in the middle and one in each corner of the actual aperture and these I think were twelve-thousandths of an inch in diameter. Then you put the film into the camera, the strip of film that you’d drilled, and you put it down into the register so that you actually used the claws to pull it into the right position and the register pins would hold it just as the film would actually come down when the camera was being used. You took the pressure plates out of the gates and you put lamps so you were shining light through the back of the film and then you put the prism in and you looked through the lens with a telescope and then you could see these five holes one at a time. If they coincided as you were looking through the filters on the prism they were white, but if they didn’t you had a magenta or green fringe around it and you had to then adjust this prism on a rocker as it was on a sort of knife edge until you got the best distribution of error over the whole area. I mean it was never absolutely perfect but you had to get it as right as you could get it. It was an awful business doing this; we had to do it every night when you were away from home.

KGY: How did the equipment change over the years?

CC: Very little. It was incredibly advanced compared to any other camera when it came out. The lens mounts were just magnificent. They were on roller-bearings and they had a motor focus so the assistant could stand away with a slave motor and follow focus on it. It had a parallax corrector at a time when many other cameras, you know, the old Mitchells had the image upside down and no parallax corrector. It was a very advanced camera for its time and never really changed. The blimp was enormous; it had to be housed in all this to make it quiet. It had wonderful geared heads which have now become universal although they had them when nobody else had them. The geared heads were by Moy of England which is rather interesting [the geared head, which was operated with handles, fixed on to the studio dolly and made the camera easy to operate despite its weight]. To give you an idea of light levels, in the studio on Wings of the Morning and around that time you had to use 700 foot candles, wide open on the lens; you had to shoot wide open. It had to be an arc, basically because the process was balanced to white light or daylight. So there was no incandescent, no other coating of film that was compatible; it was all balanced to daylight, to white light. So anything that you used you had to balance, so of course arc was all right, it was slightly blue and you used a very pale straw-coloured filter. [CC notes that internal filters and effects were problematic in this system because of the high lighting levels required; CC gives an example of an internal filter in the camera which would cut the light by 35 per cent as problematic because with ‘700 foot candles you could just about light a head and shoulders’].

[REVERT TO 2008 INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT]

SS: Were you aware of other processes like Dufaycolor and Gasparcolor?

CC: Yes. Of course colour was available to amateurs long before it was professionally. They raked up a lot of that early film for this BBC series [The Thirties in Colour, BBC4, 2008].

CC: Technicolor had other processes before the final one. They had a bi-pack process where they stuck the two films together for the final print.

LIZ WATKINS: The colour on some of the World Windows films¹⁴ seems quite distinctive from what’s found in feature films and I was wondering if they were definitely filmed using the three-strip process?

CC: Oh yes, they were made fairly shortly after The Drum. Jack Cardiff photographed them. He was a camera operator on Wings of the Morning and he worked for Denham Studios. He was a very unusual sort of chap who wanted to be a Director of Photography (they didn’t call them that then, they called them cameramen), but this was a break for him and his contribution to the World Windows films was enormous. They came into being in a very strange way because Kay Harrison met Count von Keller and his wife socially.¹⁵ Count von Keller was German and he had escaped from Germany. He was a bon viveur, an extraordinary man, and he had this American heiress wife who had a lot of money. His great love was fast cars and I suspect fast women, but they’d also travel and Kay Harrison said to him, ‘Well, if you’re going to do all this travelling and go to all these places, why don’t you make films?’ To which he apparently said, ‘I don’t know anything about film.’ Kay replied ‘I can put you in touch with people who do’, and that’s how it all started. The first three were all made in Italy and an Italian named John Hanau who worked in the film industry was a partner with von Keller. We did one of the Rome Hunt [Fox Hunting in the Roman Campagna] which is the only fox hunt in Italy. The hounds were imported from Yorkshire. It’s quite unique because it’s very pictorial. You’ve absolutely got a conventional hunt that could be in England. Then we did one of Rome itself [Rome Symphony] and we did one of Vesuvius [The Eternal Fire]. They were so impressed with them because they were much better than any other travel films, different from the Fitzpatrick travelogues.¹⁶ Jack’s contribution was great I think visually and they became much more than simple travelogues. United Artists distributed the films and was very impressed and wanted more. So we went to the Middle East and it became more complicated because we wanted to be able to track the camera. We wanted a dolly, tracks and reflectors so we needed a camera car. We built a special Bedford truck which we took out to Palestine, drove it across the desert to Damascus and then down to the Persian Gulf. Then we made a whole series of them and the final lot were made in India. I went back to India and we made a whole series of films there. They would have gone on had it not been for the war.

LW: We were wondering if you could tell us about the lighting levels for exterior filming for Technicolor?

CC: We didn’t take any lighting equipment; it was all exterior shooting. We didn’t have electricians or anything like that with us.

LW: So that was sufficient light?

CC: Yes. We had this truck and we had a camera car which was Count Keller’s. He loved motor cars and he had a Packard shooting break camera car and two open Buicks for transporting people or anything like that. So it was quite a little convoy and we drove enormous distances. It was very exciting and they were lucky that they had Jack, who was very imaginative. He had ideas such as in the one about Petra [Petra], a rose-red city which is half as old as time; he had lovely shots of these steps that had been cut into the rock, going up them with the camera. Petra was a strange, enormous building. I think now there’s a Hilton you can go and stay in but when we went we had to stay in chaos in camps, and you went in through this gorge where you could either walk or ride on a donkey and you can really touch both sides and that’s the only way in.

SS: Had the films been scripted?

CC: They were scripted, yes. It wasn’t a tight script but the two directors who directed them [Hans Nieter and John Hanau], leap-frogged so while one director directed one, the other chap was preparing the second; he went there and got an outline to the script. The Arabian Bazaar was one of the second batch. We also did Jerusalem, Wanderers of the Desert, that’s the one with the Bedouins, and we did the one in Petra; that was quite a handful.

LW: In Wanderers of the Desert there’s a sequence that looks as though it’s shot at night. It has very intense blues, but the lighting levels would have been problematic?

CC: Well, that’s called ‘day for night’ photography. It was very phoney really but you couldn’t do it any other way than with a special heavy blue filter and neutral densities. It may look like night, I don’t know.

LW: [laughs] It was very blue.

SS: So because there were no lights you were using filters on the lens?

CC: No, no filters. I don’t think we did much in the early stages but later on I used to if one had a very bright sky. On a fixed, or static shot, I’d put a neutral density one on; I’d cut it more or less to fit so it would cut down on the exposure on the sky without affecting anything else. You didn’t use colour filters unless you wanted to for an effect. We cameramen, Jack certainly, and to an extent myself, had filters made for us by a couple of ladies who used to make them by hand; graduated colour filters and things like that for special effects.

SS: I suppose with the camera being different it wouldn’t be the kind of filter that would be current?

CC: It wouldn’t be used for anything else, that’s right.

SS: Would you perhaps be putting filters on lights sometimes instead?

CC: Yes, but of course you couldn’t for something like World Windows, you’d just cut the exposure down for the night [scene]. To give you an idea of the light levels, the Technicolor process was colour-balanced to daylight, to the colour temperature of the daylight. The only light source that matched daylight was arc, so it was all arc lighting. Well the arcs were enormous and they gave off a lot of fumes so if you had a big set with a lot of arcs you very quickly built up a haze in the studios and you started to see the beams of all the lights. Of the conventional incandescent lights, the biggest one listed in those days was five kilowatts and you could direct it to the colour temperature of daylight with a blue filter. If you had that largest incandescent light available with the blue filter on you could just about light a seated figure in a domestic interior and daylight from a window, two or three metres away. But that’s all it would give enough light for. So you could imagine what it was like lighting a big set. On The Tales of Hoffmann, which was shot on a silent stage, it was the old shape of things to come because we recorded at Worton Hall studios, Isleworth, for all the model work. They moved to Shepperton and it was known as the ‘silent stage’, the biggest in Europe but it was not soundproofed. We shot the whole film on that stage because it was shot to playback. Sound didn’t bother us and so we had the space and light.

SS: Shall we talk about The Tales of Hoffmann because we’ve read that one of your favourite memories is working with Powell and Pressburger?

CC: The art director was Hein Heckroth. Hein came from the background of opera; he was art director of the state opera in Hamburg and also a very good painter. But when they made the ‘Red Shoes ballet’ which was a film which was within a film [The Red Shoes], it was such a success Micky said, ‘Well we’d better do a complete opera and that’s the way we’re going to do it and we’re not going to do many special effects in the laboratory. We’ll have to do everything in the camera’, so we did most of the effects theatrically as you would do them on the stage; we did a lot of work with gauzes. As you probably know if you have a black gauze, paint something on it and light it from the front, it becomes more or less solid so you can paint a backdrop. If you take the light off the front and light from behind it disappears and you can do a tremendous change. Now that’s the theatrical side of the thing but of course light levels in the theatre are nothing and the human eye adapts so well, whereas we were doing the same thing with enormous light levels and changing had to be done with dimmer shutters because you can’t fade an arc light like you can with a resistor electric light. If you’ve got a lot of them then they have to be mechanised so they all worked electrically, then they all stuck and jammed and it was an absolute nightmare. My favourite sequence was the Venice sequence.

SS: Did you feel able to have ideas accepted and that you were very much part of the collaborative team?

CC: Oh yes, terrifically so. In fact we had one wonderful thing where the silent stage was built quite a little way off from the main studio buildings at Shepperton and Micky had the idea that after we’d seen the rushes we’d want to discuss them and talk about what we were doing. So he had a marquee put up by the silent stage and we used to have lunch brought out to us there so we didn’t have to go to the studio restaurant. It was a lovely idea really and it worked jolly well. Micky’s films were exciting because he was a great, efficient director and he had enormous energy. They were the most extraordinary unconventional couple; I mean, you would never have thought that they would ever work together. They had really nothing in common. Emeric was a mid-European Jew; Micky was a 100 per cent English. Emeric spoke with a heavy Hungarian accent, and they were a wonderful team. I knew them both very well as friends as well and I worked for them for years and I never, never heard either of them run the other one down which is pretty unique in the world of entertainment. They were great, great friends and welded together as a wonderful team. Either Micky or Emeric told me that they had been in America for the premiere of I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). They came back on the Queen Mary and Micky said that on the first night at dinner they were just talking about things and Emeric said to him, and I can’t do his accent, ‘Michael, would it not be a good idea if we made a film in heaven and on earth and earth was in colour and heaven was in black and white?’ and Micky said straight away that it was a great idea. Now Emeric didn’t know whether it was technically possible, and Micky said that when they got off the boat five days later they had an outline of the working script of the film which they took to Rank and they got the go-ahead. It was a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

SS: Oh yes, so imaginative with the colour composition.

CC: It was pure cinema, as much as Disney.

SS: Am I right in thinking that the black-and-white sequences were actually, in the transition scenes leading up to when the film flips from black and white to colour, filmed with the Technicolor cameras but then not processed for the Technicolor printing?

CC: Yes that’s right because they needed the three negatives.

SS: I’ve read that that was supposed to be less jarring than if it had been filmed with a conventional black-and-white camera?

CC: Yes with all the transition scenes.

LW: So you could print a black-and-white film from the three-strips of Technicolor negatives without any problem?

CC: Yes, it would come out in black and white.

LW: So the printing process introduces the problem with contrast and colour?

CC: The definition was fine, as good as straight black and white really, but then colour had an enormous impact as much as sound. They were the people that I liked to work with. My favourite directors were Micky and Stanley Donen, who was very, very similar. He grasped suggestions that I had and Joe Losey was good to work with.

SS: Did you have much contact with what went on in the lab?

CC: Yes, not initially but in the final printing.

SS: It can seem like a somewhat mysterious process of what actually went on in the lab, and maybe Technicolor sought to impose colour control at that stage? We’re fascinated by the whole process but with the lab stage being so important, we wondered how much intervention you were able to have?

CC: Well you had it at the end in the final printing but not during the actual shooting because the rushes were processed at night, you got them the next day and it was a fait accompli with Technicolor in the early stages. They were very conscious of anything they thought was a technical defect because the process hadn’t made the grade. There was one wonderful thing on Black Narcissus when it all fails and the nuns come back and there’s a shot of Sister Clodagh [Deborah Kerr] in her office in Bombay or something like that.

SS: Calcutta?

CC: Yes, Calcutta. There’s a big window and it’s pouring with rain. Jack did this close-up of her and lit her through a bit of glass but he had water running down it and so it had the effect of rain. Well this shot didn’t come back from Technicolor with the rushes; we got the rushes but minus this shot and everyone said, ‘What’s happening?’ They said, ‘It’s a problem with the printer. It’s not a very good print and we’re re-printing’. This went on for about four days and we never got it back. Eventually Frank Bush, who was the whipping boy of the mechanic department, came over and he told Micky and Jack that they’d had a problem in the lab and they hadn’t got it tied down and it looked as though we’d have to retake this shot. He said, ‘You know we’ve got this effect on it’ and Jack said ‘It’s supposed to be there!’. So they were trying to get rid of it desperately; that’s a true story.¹⁷

LW: That’s interesting the way an effect can be perceived differently. I was wondering if you could tell us more about The Tales of Hoffmann! Were you using blue gels which you would deliberately fade before using them?

CC: There were no really big incandescent lights in that period. Technicolor made a blue glass filter which was fitted into the lamp which we used rather than gels. Technicolor then made stock which was colour balanced to incandescent light so you didn’t need filters and it made the process faster. You didn’t need so much light and that changed everything enormously. You then had to put filters on the arcs because they were too blue. So basically you’d use arcs outside and as they made the bigger incandescent lights ten kilowatts you’d use those inside and they’d make lighting a bit easier. But it was a great process and good in the camera.

LW: We wanted to ask you about Footsteps in the Fog. Joan Bridge was colour consultant on that film as well and there’s a preponderance of browns and greys in the colour. Is that part of the design or something which occurs in filming?

CC: That was done in printing. You didn’t have to use filters if you wanted to have an overall warm tone on something that’s candlelit. I wanted it to be dark and murky and it worked quite well in the fog scenes.

SS: Could I ask you about The Battle of the River Plate?

CC: The picture was going to be in Cinemascope and I was actually working on another film while everything was being got ready. At the last minute John Davis fell out with Cinemascope and then we were landed with this awful VistaVision camera.¹⁸

SS: I think it looks wonderful.

CC: Yes?

SS: I was struck very much by that wonderful mobility and in the scenes in Uruguay, almost travelogue types of scenery.

CC: Well it looks all right on DVD and when it’s projected the same way it was shot. It’s not too bad when you see a reduction print but colour, well in black and white it doesn’t work well I don’t think. Then Technicolor converted their cameras to do the same thing and called it Technirama and they put an anamorphic lens on the front of it so it became enormous. We shot The Grass Is Greener (1960) that way.

[…]

SS: Are you often consulted when this remastering takes place? […] presumably it’s possible that there are […] instances when a remastered film can look different, even untrue to the original idea?

CC: Yes, but I never have been consulted, although I must say most of them have been pretty good. I mean, they have just made a DVD in America of The Small Back Room (1949), which was my second picture as a Director of Photography and my first film with Michael Powell. They interviewed me, which was included in the DVD and it looks absolutely great; so does Gone to Earth.

SS: Yes, it does. It’s a very fascinating film. Your work often seems to involve quite a lot of location work. The landscapes are very striking.

CC: Gone to Earth was shot again entirely with Micky. I loved making it and it did look quite nice with all the shots in the countryside and beautiful landscape. [David] Selznick was the co-producer and he’d just married Jennifer [Jones] and at the end he had the right to alter the production for the American market if he so wished. He wanted to do all sorts of things, have an extra scene. Micky wouldn’t do it so Rouben Mamoulian directed. They wanted me to photograph it and I said to Micky, ‘What am I going to do?’ and he said, ‘Well, you should go, you know, keep our end up a bit’. So I went and it was the funniest thing because Selznick was extraordinary. He used to be up all night writing scripts, changing the scripts and it went on and on and on and it was three weeks before we did anything. Eventually we shot it and we had an all-American camera crew who were very anti having this young limey coming over, which I think didn’t make any sense really. They got lots of work out of it but anyway there I was and Mamoulian had a pact with Selznick that he’d only do it if Selznick didn’t come on the floor when he was directing Jennifer. Selznick used to come on the floor and I’d hear this sort of ‘psst, psst’, and he’d be hiding behind a flat and he’d call me over. He said, ‘Suggest to Rouben that …’ [CC would reply]: ‘I can’t do that’. It was ridiculous and the American crew filled me with grim stories of Selznick, that no cameraman had ever completed a picture with Selznick and that he interfered on everything which he did and I was going to have a hard time. We had one new scene with Jennifer going to her room. I suggested candlelight with a candle and David talked to me about it and said he wanted it low key and that was fine. In the middle of lighting it he came on the floor and looked around and said, ‘You’ve got too much light! I want it dark.’ So I said, ‘I know you do, David, that’s why I’m doing it but we need more light than one candle’. [Selznick replied]: ‘Turn some of the lights off!’ It was ridiculous. So I said,

Look, David, let me do it. If you don’t like it tomorrow I’ll go home and I’m very happy to go home, I would like to go home. I’m fed up with being here – I would really be delighted to go back.

So he turned on his heel, walked off the floor and all the crew had backed away. They slowly came back and we shot it. And the next day at rushes it looked fine and at the end Selznick got up, turned around and he said ‘Chris, you’re quite right, I apologize.’ Arthur Fellows, who was his assistant, said, ‘He’s never done that before in his life’. He liked you to argue with him, and they all were terrified of him.

SS: So would he override people at Technicolor?

CC: Oh he’d have a go. He’d have a go at overriding everybody. But if you made your point as I think I did and it didn’t really bother me if I was going to get the sack. I wasn’t employed by him anyway; I was employed by Micky and Emeric and I was quite happy. He liked people to be like that. Micky was like that and could be absolute poison.

SS: Yes, his autobiography gives a little sense of that.

CC: I mean there’s a side to him which isn’t in the autobiography of extreme loyalty and kindness. I know many instances of that and I liked him a lot. I thought he was a great director and they were great movies. Now they’re all coming back including Peeping Tom (1960), which I didn’t like.

SS: We’d like to ask you what it was like to be in your profession as a cinematographer for so many years. You worked primarily as a freelance is that right?

CC: Except for one ghastly period when I was under contract to Rank and only because John Bryan who was an art director became one of the Rank producers. I made The Spanish Gardener (1956) with John.

SS: Did you feel you would just literally have to be doing whatever was thrown at you rather than have any choice?

CC: Well, apart from John, they were a pretty dead outfit. They had all second-rate pictures, dreadful things because I had to make a couple while I was under this contract. I actually got the sack in the end. They wouldn’t release me and there was some terrible hiatus where they had a huge programme and suddenly they hadn’t got anything. They had redundancies and everything else. The unions asked for a meeting with John Davis and I got co-opted onto the ACT.¹⁹

LW: Something we’ve read and would like to know more about is when the Technicolor lab was set up in the UK and American technicians came over to run training and to establish a working practice. Did that cause any problems you can recall? Was it possible eventually for British cinematographers to go and work in America?

CC: It wasn’t possible, really. When I went to do the extra scenes for Gone to Earth they had to employ an American cameraman who never came; he didn’t have to come and – he was paid more than I was. The unions were very strong – they wouldn’t let you train at all. Technicolor had all their own people for a long time. The three-strip cameras belonged to Technicolor. You couldn’t hire any other camera from any other process and the cameras went back to the lab every night and they were serviced. They had a big camera department and a service department and then the normal crew on a picture. On a Technicolor picture not only did they supply the camera but the equivalent of the first assistant who was known as a ‘Technicolor technician’ because on location he did very much more than a normal camera assistant inasmuch as he did the servicing of the camera.

SS: Can you tell us about Genevieve, a successful colour British film you worked on?

CC: The story behind Genevieve was quite annoying really. I was on holiday and I had a phone call from George Gunn who was in charge of the Technicolor camera department. He said,

Well, I’ve got somebody who is going to make a picture called Genevieve about the London to Brighton run and I think it’s a very good script and I’m trying to persuade him to make it in colour and he says no way, he can’t afford it, there just isn’t the money in the budget.

I half persuaded him that it was going to be a tough assignment whoever shoots it because you’ve got to shoot in any conditions really; literally any conditions. He said, ‘Would it interest you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I’ll have to check with Henry [Cornelius]’. Henry said, ‘It’ll be nearly all on location because we can’t afford the studio rental.’ We were starting very late in the year – it was September or October when we shot it. Nothing matches anything else but strangely enough colour looks better in that dull light and if you can get the minimal exposure and you can sort of enhance it slightly with a bit of arc light to get a shine or something like that so when it comes to it, it doesn’t look bad really. Funnily enough I got some of the best reviews for photography I’ve had on Genevieve, so the rest of them must be awful!

SS: Do you think there were any particularly British conditions that made British Technicolor films made in the UK look a little different from those made elsewhere, experimentation aside?

CC: Yes, I do I think there is a different quality of light. I mean the soft sunlight that you get here a lot of the year where there’s a lot of moisture in the atmosphere is quite different from anywhere else. It’s different certainly from California which makes the colours hard, and Africa is hard and brash and even the South of France. I also think that we had some exceptionally good art directors and some good cameramen. You can almost thank Korda for that really because he brought Georges Périnal who was a wonderful cameraman from France and Harry Stradling from America. We learned from them quite rapidly and we had Freddie Young, who was marvellous and a great champion of our cause and a great cameraman. We built up a pretty good school of cameramen I think. There was Geoff Unsworth of course; Geoff was a fabulous technician at Technicolor and Douglas Slocombe was wonderful. Arthur Ibbetson was jolly good. Ossie Morris of course was excellent. And so I think that there maybe was a British school of cinematography which was slightly different. We went for softer light conditions and out of necessity we very often had to shoot without direct sunlight and we realised that it could look very good.

SS: Did you tend to discuss amongst yourselves? I’m imagining a group of fellow professionals who knew each other when they were working on a particular film who’d discuss the latest developments?

CC: Yes, yes.

SS: So you saw their latest film when it came out and there was a sort of community of cinematographers?

CC: Yes, very much so.

LW: Were there any particular colour effects at this time that you couldn’t get with Technicolor that you could with Eastmancolor or vice versa?

CC: Yes, colour reproduction was very far from being perfect for any process, Technicolor, Eastmancolor, Agfacolor or anything else. The areas of absolutely correct exposure are crucial. That’s why you have the theory about Technicolor not liking experimental colour because in dark areas, which are necessarily underexposed areas or bright areas which are overexposed, the colour rendition goes to pot a bit and that’s true of all colour processes. I don’t think there’s any way round that unless you accept having absolutely flat light, which is what Technicolor wanted, but it’s not suited chromatically for a lot of subjects. I mean I’m told that when Jimmy Wong Howe did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) all the sequences that were in the cave and in Technicolor were terribly low key. He had a terrible row with Natalie Kalmus; they wanted that all flat lit and he wouldn’t do it. Of course it was a wonderful sequence. The colour was probably quite wrong but it didn’t matter because dramatically it was terrific. So I think the answer is you know you can’t reproduce every colour perfectly but the compromise is fine, depending on how it’s used and that’s true of all processes.

NOTES

¹ L. Castleton Knight was the overall ‘producer’ of the Gaumont British News from 1934 to 1958.

² Kevin Gough-Yates’s BECTU interview with Challis (11 October 1988), tape no. 59, includes reference to Challis showing Castleton Knight some 16mm footage he’d shot for a school project.

³ In his BECTU interview Challis also praises the grounding he gained from Technicolor, commenting that: ‘They didn’t let anyone out to be the equivalent of a first assistant until they’d done a lot of work in the laboratory and knew a bit about it.’

⁴ Natalie Kalmus (1892-1965) was head of Technicolor’s Color Advisory Service, in the 1930s and 1940s. She is credited as advisor on all Technicolor productions until 1949.

⁵ James Wong Howe (1899-1976) was a celebrated Chinese-born Hollywood cinematographer. He worked at Denham on three black-and-white films in 1937.

⁶ It was common for cinematographers to claim that Natalie Kalmus knew little about colour on the basis of their dislike for her wardrobe.

⁷ Joan Bridge (1909-2009) worked with Natalie Kalmus when she was in the UK. She is credited on many British films as colour consultant. She had studied Dufaycolor, and had useful contacts for Technicolor when operations began in the UK.

⁸ Challis only worked on the Indian location shoot.

⁹ The blimp needed for filming with sound made Technicolor cameras extra cumbersome, so greater mobility could be obtained if sound was added in post-production.

¹⁰ Borradaile was responsible for location shooting in India; the rest of the film was shot by Georges Périnal.

¹¹ Henry Imus (1908-81) was an uncredited camera operator on Wings of the Morning.

¹² This detail also features in Challis’s BECTU interview. For greater clarity the following sentences are an amalgam of the detail provided in both interviews.

¹³ In the BECTU interview Challis recalls that during shooting the drums were kept in pits dug in the ground that were packed with blocks of ice.

¹⁴ The World Windows short travelogue films were shot in Technicolor during 1937-40 by Jack Cardiff in a number of locations, including India, Italy and Israel.

¹⁵ Kay Harrison (1895-1962) was managing director of Technicolor Ltd.

¹⁶ The ‘Fitzpatrick Travel Talks‘ were an American series of Technicolor films made by James Fitzpatrick and distributed by MGM.

¹⁷ There is no such shot in Black Narcissus. This ‘missing’ scene is discussed in Sarah Street, Black Narcissus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 59–60.

¹⁸ Challis also discusses widescreen techniques in the BECTU interview, confirming problems with VistaVision.

¹⁹ John Davis (1906-93) was managing director of Rank, and the ACT was the trade union, the Association of Cine-Technicians.”

Tags

Quote

Misek, Richard (2010): Chromatic Cinema. A History of Screen Color. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, on pp. 33–34.

Technicolor No. IV: Three-strip

A Matter of Life and Death (GBR 1946, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger)

“Heaven/Earth. In Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a wartime pilot finds himself miraculously surviving a plane crash, and unexpectedly caught between Heaven and Earth. Accordingly, AMOLAD is set both on Earth and in Heaven, but in an inversion of the model established by The Wizard of Oz, the scenes set on Earth are color and those set in Heaven are black-and-white. Color is reality not fantasy, essence not addition. In the film’s most famous transition, a monochrome close up of a rose dissolves into color. Like the blush in The White Rose, color is intrinsic to living objects. It is also exclusive to living objects: it is not just that we see Heaven in black-and-white, Heaven is black-and-white: “One is starved for Technicolor up there!” an angel declares. Color is not an addition – blackand-white is an absence.²³

[…]

Even AMOLAD, though an apparent inversion of classical Hollywood’s chromatic norm, can be regarded as an example of what Bordwell calls “nondisruptive differentiation” – an allowed divergence from the classical Hollywood paradigm that provides the pleasure of novelty without causing undue confusion, thereby reinforcing the paradigm (1985: 71). Michael Powell’s view of cinematic color was a conventional one: “that an ordinary street scene on the screen looks less real when coloured” (Powell & Heckroth 1950: 5). His reaction to Emeric Pressburger’s idea of making the film a chromatic hybrid was to assume that Heaven would be “all colour and gold and that sort of thing” (Macdonald 1994: 251). Pressburger’s perverse chromatic choice was a model of allowed divergence: identify the dominant paradigm (in this case, the belief that color signifies fantasy), find a way to subvert it (make the fantasy black-and-white), but be sure not to question the basic assumptions of the paradigm (that black-and-white and color are opposed).

Notes

²³ The film’s black-and-white was also technologically a subtraction. The scenes in Heaven were shot in three-strip Technicolor processed without the dyes; Michael Powell reminisces that cinematographer Jack Cardiff suggested this as the only means of achieving the rose’s transition to color (1987: 498).”

(Misek, Richard (2010): Chromatic Cinema. A History of Screen Color. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, on pp. 33–34.)

Tags

Gallery | (6 images)

Little Hiawatha (1937)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Gallery | (3 images)

The Drum (1938)

Color systemTechnicolor No. IV: Three-strip

Quote

Eggert, John (1932): Kurzer Überblick über den Stand der Farbenkinematographie. In: Bericht über den VIII. Internationalen Kongress für wissenschaftliche und angewandte Photographie, Dresden 1931. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, pp. 214–221, on pp. 215–218. (in German)

Zoechrome

1. Die Zweifarbenverfahren,

2. die Dreifarbenverfahren.

Diese teilen sich wieder nach der Farbensynthese in zwei (von der ersten Unterscheidung unabhängige) Gruppen:

1. die subtraktiven Verfahren,

2. die additiven Verfahren.

¹ Bei gewisser Farbstoffauswahl bleibt übrigens gelegentlich an Stelle von Schwarz ein Lichtrest in der Tönung von dunkler Sepia zurück.

² Diese Anordnung wurde bisher nur für die Zwecke der Amateurphotographie, nicht für Kinefilm benutzt.”

Tags

Quote

Elway, Thomas (1923): The First Successful Color Movie. In: Popular Science Monthly, Feb., pp. 59–61, 114.

Technicolor No. II

“The First Successful Color Movie

How an Inventor, by Ingeniously Combining Blue-Green and Red-Orange on Double Photograph, Tricks Our Eyes into Seeing Delicate Shades of All Colors, Vividly Representing Life

By Thomas Elway

WHEN I was told, a few week ago, that another new process for taking motion pictures in color had been “perfected,” I confess I smiled skeptically to myself.

I had seen many colored movies before. They had left me either unimpressed or thoroughly displeased.

To be sure, I knew that this new method had been invented by a scientist of distinction – Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, of Boston – and that 10 years of patient research and experiment had gone into its development. I was told that more than $1,000,000 had been spent upon these experiments; that the enterprise had the financial backing of no less a figure than William Travers Jerome, former District Attorney of New York, and that artists and motion picture experts who had seen the film hailed it as a phenomenal improvement, charming in its colorful realism, lessening eyestrain, and destined to revolutionize motion picture work.

A Colorful Dream Comes True

And, finally, I had fully shared the great dream of motion picture enthusiasts during the past decade – the dream that the movies some day would be shown to us in all the beauty of natural color, enhancing enormously the power of their appeal.

Nevertheless, I did not realize the art had advanced far enough to make this dream a reality. But when I witnessed the private exhibition in New York of this new colored film feature – a play called The Toll of the Sea starring the young Chinese girl, Anna May Wong, whose fame has begun to spread eastward from California – I was frankly surprised by the unexpectedly high quality of the color work. Here was a film in which colorful costumes and feminine beauty moved convincingly across the screen, with slight trace of the garishness, flicker, and distracting color fringes that have hurt so many other color films.

Not that this color work is perfect. Some of the reproductions of blues and greens are bad. The yellows are even less satisfying. But this motion picture does constitute, to my mind, the best color work done so far in the films, and the process used, the new Technicolor process, promises still better things to come. For the first time I have begun to expect something really big from color photography on the screen, something that will affect the fundamentals of motion picture art. It isn’t only that we may expect enhanced charm of settings, and still greater beauty of feature in our heroines; or that we shall see them blush real blushes, as we now see them weep real fears; that expressions will be more lifelike, costumes more fascinating, natural scenery more magnificent.

[…]

Two-Color Dyes

In this particular feature, as in most other color movie processes, the two colors selected are a reddish orange and a bluish green. These colors are represented by two dyes, carefully chosen from more than 200 dyes that were tried. As I shall explain later, the original photograph consists of two separate images. One image, printed on one side of the film used in projection, is dyed blue-green; the other, printed on the reverse of the film, is dyed red-orange. Where the images overlap, these dyes blend. In projection onto a screen the light is colored by the dyed images, the colors blend likewise, we see both images together, and the eye does the rest.

What we really see are various shades and mixtures of blue-green and red-orange. What we think we see are all the colors of the spectrum. It all depends upon the capacity of the eye for being wrong about colors. It is just like the rabbit that you think you see coming out of the conjurer’s hat.

This is what the two-color photograph is, but how is it taken? In exactly the same way. You take two photographs at the same time, one through a screen that lets pass only the blue-green color, absorbing all others; the second through a screen that absorbs all but the red-orange. Suppose you are photographing a red and blue dress. The red parts “take” only on the photograph made through the red-orange screen. They will not show on the other photograph. The blue parts, on the other hand, take only through the blue-green screen. Now we dye one photograph red-orange and the other one blue-green. The first represents the red parts of the dress, the second the blue parts. We put them together, one on top of the other (of course both are transparent), and we have a color photograph of the dress.

All this is simple enough, but when we come to apply it to motion pictures, there are difficulties. The greatest is to discover some way of taking two photographs at the same instant, through the same lens.

This problem Doctor Comstock solved in a very ingenious way. Just back of the lens of the camera he placed a silver mirror with holes in it. Half of its surface is polished silver, the other half is holes. It stands at an angle of 45 degrees to the beam of light. What happens to the light can be seen immediately from the diagram on page 59. One half of the light is reflected at a right angle. The other half goes straight on. The light beam from the lens is thus split into two beams, exactly alike. One of these beams is led through the blue-green color screen, to make the blue-green image at one point on the film. The other is led through the red-orange screen and makes the red-orange at the same instant on a lower portion of the film. Then the film moves and two new images are made again, one above the other.

The film consists, then, when removed from the camera and developed, of a succession of double pictures (one below the other) all still in black and white. One picture of each pair corresponds to a blue-green image, the other to a red-orange image. This film, of course, is a negative.

The next step is to make the positive print from this negative. On this print the pair of images taken at the same instant and that are separate on the negative must be brought together and superposed. The blue-green one of a pair is printed on the front of the positive film, the red-orange one is printed on the back of the same film. They must now be dyed.

In this process the positive film is run through one dye bath that contains in solution the blue-green dye and the red-orange dye. The dyes are taken up selectively by the two images on the film; the blue-green dye “takes” only on the blue-green image; similarly, the red-orange dye colors only that image. The result of this selective dyeing is a colored positive print ready for projection. Aside from the technical difficulties involved in the perfection of color movies, there remain other still more interesting problems – problems of directing, of acting, of the psychology of audiences. At present the movie actress’s make-up, for instance, is a horrible looking mess of yellow cheeks and blue chin and forehead; blues for what is to be white, yellow for healthy flesh. For color movies all this must change.

An effective make up, I believe, may prove to be greenish or violet, with reds inclining to orange, instead of the yellows and blues now used. Certainly, when the color movie make-up technique is so perfected as to simulate a beautiful star’s natural color of complexion, hair and eyes, we shall have more fascinating photo plays than ever.”

(Elway, Thomas (1923): The First Successful Color Movie. In: Popular Science Monthly, Feb., pp. 59–61, 114.)

Tags

Quote

Eggert, John (1932): Kurzer Überblick über den Stand der Farbenkinematographie. In: Bericht über den VIII. Internationalen Kongress für wissenschaftliche und angewandte Photographie, Dresden 1931. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, pp. 214–221, on pp. 215–218. (in German)

Sirius

1. Die Zweifarbenverfahren,

2. die Dreifarbenverfahren.

Diese teilen sich wieder nach der Farbensynthese in zwei (von der ersten Unterscheidung unabhängige) Gruppen:

1. die subtraktiven Verfahren,

2. die additiven Verfahren.

¹ Bei gewisser Farbstoffauswahl bleibt übrigens gelegentlich an Stelle von Schwarz ein Lichtrest in der Tönung von dunkler Sepia zurück.

² Diese Anordnung wurde bisher nur für die Zwecke der Amateurphotographie, nicht für Kinefilm benutzt.”

Tags

Quote

Higgins, Scott (2007): Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, on pp. 137–171.

Technicolor No. IV: Three-strip

The Adventures of Robin Hood (USA 1938, Michael Curtiz, William Keighley)

“The Adventures Robin Hood is a turning point in Technicolor design. For the first time in a three-color feature, the palette is opened wide and intricately organized. Far from returning to demonstration, Robin Hood‘s assertive design modulates color to effectively direct attention and underscore drama. Indeed, the film draws on the methods forged in the restrained mode and brings them to a system in which hue, rather than tone, is the dominant variable. In so promoting hue, this assertive mode of design limits the power of subtle variations to punctuate, underscore, or ornament. When color is “always on,” it may cease to be a meaningful element. Robin Hood addresses this problem, and clears a path for films that follow, by varying the function of color across the film. At different stages of the narrative, the color design emphasizes different kinds of tasks, all the while favoring a wide mix of hues. Though restraint would continue to inform an important trend in design, Robin Hood laid the foundation for a new way of thinking about color.

With an open palette, the design generates more complex harmonies and contrasts than did previous three-color features; red and green, as well as blue and orange-gold complementaries, figure prominently. Still, Robin Hood effectively ties color to drama. It relies on conventions of coordination and narrative subordination while increasing the opportunities to display vivid and complex schemes. At different narrative stages Robin Hood takes advantage of restraint, relying on minimal correspondences and changes to underline actions and themes. At other points, bold contrasts and strong color punctuate story material, making the chromatic commentary more obvious.

[…]

To a great extent, Robin Hood‘s assertive design stems from the adventure genre’s basic structure, which strings together a series of large production scenes that offer clear opportunities for showcasing color. Certainly, color was accounted for at an early stage of production. In May 1937, a memo from Walter MacEwen instructed screenwriter Norman Reilly Raine to “keep color in mind when rewriting the script.” The story editor explained: “When we originally started on Robin Hood it was not contemplated as a Technicolor production. But now … Mr. Warner wants to be sure that every advantage is taken of the color medium.”⁶ The final shooting script contains nineteen specific references to color, many of which were retained in production. The film as written was predisposed to spectacular color.

[…]

The film alternates brief stretches of exposition with scenes of action and pageantry. The large “production numbers” involve masses of actors and ornate settings and deliver spectacular color. The banquet at Nottingham Castle, the banquet at Robin’s camp in Sherwood Forest, the archery tournament, and Prince John’s interrupted coronation motivate the film’s most elaborate color schemes. However, even routine scenes integrate a generally bolder palette than we have encountered.

EMPHASIZING VARIETY

Robin Hood‘s most noteworthy design aspect is its insistence on color variation. Whereas the default designs of the restrained mode tended toward a rather narrow array of browns, grays, and earth tones, Robin Hood consistently builds up palettes that mix green, red, pink, blue, and yellow. How this commitment to variety permeates the film is apparent in those scenes and sequences that do not foreground color as a source of spectacle or dramatic emphasis. For example, consider the range of color supplied by the ragtag assembly of dispossessed Saxons that Robin shows Marian in the forest. As Robin describes the plight of the “poor devils,” the camera tracks past a series of color accents. First, a young child in a blue-gray shirt and dull olive green hat provides a fairly subdued point of variation. Then color picks up as the camera passes by an old woman with a Melon orange vest and Shell Pink cowl. In the background, a woman with bright Porcelain Blue accents on her skirt draws attention while, in the foreground, the camera discovers a man in a Hot Coral red hat. Next to him sits a hunched figure with a vivid Lincoln green scarf. Robin is briefly halted by an old woman in a Pastel Lilac cowl, and the shot concludes after it quickly passes over a succession of purple and blue accents. The huddled masses, in Robin’s forest, are fashionably colorful. Hues are somewhat less saturated, and the accents more dispersed, than in the opulent displays of Prince John and his royal cronies, but the film’s tendency to pack compositions with diverse colors does not abate.

Far more than films in the restrained mode, Robin Hood prods the spectator to recognize color. At times this variety helps draw attention to small details of the mise-en-scène, like the blue stitching on an extra’s brown outfit as Robin passes him during the archery tournament, or the light blue bridle on Will Scarlett’s (Patric Knowles’s) horse after he brings Much (Herbert Mundin) to Robin and King Richard. Color accentuates the texture and details of a rich production design. At other times, props inject splashes of color without in themselves appearing particularly distinctive. For example, the various table settings in the banquet scenes provide dashes of red or yellow at the margins of the frame. Here, the rather weird contents of the fruit baskets – red and yellow gelatin at the Nottingham banquet, red chili peppers during the forest feast – are meant to go unnoticed; the props serve as simple vehicles for chroma. In either case, the near-constant play of assorted colors attests to the producers’ efforts to keep hue vital and perceptible.

Adapting techniques from both the demonstration films and the restrained mode, Robin Hood develops three strategies for drawing attention to this color design. By alternating scenes of high and low color, extending establishing shots to showcase colorful sets and costumed extras, and selectively suppressing and revealing hues within sequences, the film refreshes color as a point of interest. We have already seen these methods, but Robin Hood stands out for foregrounding color more regularly and for employing these devices to serve such a decidedly varied palette. It is worth briefly considering how the assertive mode of design takes up these three routines.

The contraction and expansion of the palette from scene to scene is the film’s most notable tool for renewing our awareness of color. Momentary reductions help amplify the normally rich design. This is really a reversal of the tactic used in A Star Is Born, where a reduced palette was briefly expanded at key points. Indeed, it harks back to Becky Sharp, though, as we will see, the effect is less obtrusive and the color designs are more complex. The first instance occurs just before Robin’s introduction. Two brief vignettes illustrating Prince John’s tax-collection methods are rendered in subdued gray and brown tones. For example, at a blacksmith’s forge, a Saxon landowner is being chained as a slave. The scene is dominated by browns, the forge’s flame and the slave’s reddish brown (Mineral Red) collar providing accents. A priest in a soft Starlight Blue robe protests and is pushed off by a soldier. The scene mixes a restrained blend of neutrals and subdued, limited reds and blues.

The brief repression helps accentuate the burst of color brought by our introduction to Sherwood Forest. First, amid lush green foliage, Sir Guy and his company gallop through the forest, bringing with them the vivid reds, blues, and yellows of their capes and flags. Next, color erupts in the frame with bright green grass and blue sky as Robin and Will Scarlett charge in at full speed from a rolling meadow. The heroes leap over an obstacle, delivering streaks of red and green. Two cuts deliver a medium long shot and then a medium close shot of Robin and Will, green and red, framed against the blue sky.

The movement from carefully subdued neutrals and accents to strident red and green complementaries adds punch to Robin’s entrance. In a film that deals heavily in complex combinations of bold colors, the confrontation between Robin and Sir Guy, which mixes red, blue, and green, benefits from its contrast with the previous sequences. Color has been effectively scored, like Erich Korngold’s music, which moves from a stern, foreboding theme during the tax-collection scenes to a stirring crescendo with the arrival of Robin and Will.

Robin Hood also elaborates the well-developed tactic of extending establishing shots to motivate parades of vivid color. As we will see in our analysis of the banquet at Nottingham, this strategy repeats that of the panoramas in Trail of the Lonesome Pine or the establishing shots in Goldwyn Follies, but with greater breadth of color and a more precise choreography of hue. Again, the nearest precedent might be found in Becky Sharp. The opening of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, with its organization of strong contrasts and display of chromatic plenitude, presents a schema that Robin Hood repeats and revises. For example, four establishing shots open the archery tournament, reveling in an exceptional array of red, green, blue, and gold. In a tactic that informs the whole film, spectacle is generated by creatively displaying color rather than by simply demonstrating its variety. The four shots don’t inundate the frame all at once, as in the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, but reveal the palette in degrees, through staging and camera movement. Robin Hood expands on an inherited convention to showcase designs of unprecedented complexity.

Bold maneuvers, acceptable in transitions and the openings of scenes, might be judged distracting in the thick of the drama. Robin Hood‘s third strategy for drawing attention to color involves manipulating the palette on a small scale, often in the midst of action. Once again, a basic version of this tactic had been exercised in Becky Sharp, in which Mamoulian revealed accents through camera movement. And as we saw in Lonesome Pine, the restrained mode could capitalize on small variations, drawing attention to discrete dashes of color (like the green accents in the Gap Town office). Robin Hood has to modify the procedure because the continual variety of color raises a problem for cueing attention. The graphic power of a fresh hue depends either on its intensity or on the simplicity of the palette in the surrounding mise-en-scène.

One way Robin Hood resolves this issue is to momentarily remove hues so that they gain prominence when they reappear. This method, less striking in A Star Is Born and Trail of the Lonesome Pine, seems a logical option for a film with a decidedly complex color scheme. It can refresh the visual impact of color without forcing more color into the frame. The procedure famously adds punch to the climactic duel between Robin and Sir Guy. As they fight, the characters slip beyond the view of the camera so that only their shadows remain on screen. After a brief view of these battling silhouettes, Robin, in his green and brown outfit, and Sir Guy, in Flame Scarlet, reemerge, bringing complementaries back onto the scene. In the midst of an ongoing action, suppression and revelation renew color’s power.

With each of these three devices, Robin Hood returns to the territory of demonstration, but with the greater precision and integration taught by years of restraint.

COSTUME COLOR

Characters’ clothing provides the central means for introducing and varying color, and it offers the film’s strongest juxtapositions. Generic motivation is important here. One trait shared by most of the films in this book is that the female leads are granted the greatest range of costume color; they provide the chromatic center of a given scene’s palette. Except in Becky Sharp, male players have been restricted to a set of grays, browns, and limited accents. As a historical adventure film, Robin Hood is granted a great deal more room for color among its male leads. This is especially true of the villains, whose regal pretensions make them prone to opulence. Sir Guy, for example, has seven major costume changes, only two fewer than Maid Marian. Moreover, color accents in his outfits range from saturated Flame Scarlet and Rich Gold to Sky Blue and Ultramarine Green. Even Robin, who usually sports the hallmark Lincoln green and Leather Brown, contributes some vivid Crimson details.⁷ And as the film expands the field of men’s wardrobe, it retains the breadth of feminine costuming.

Robin Hood‘s costumes radically juxtapose strong complementaries. Red and green contrast is especially prominent, presented in scenes that feature Robin and either Will Scarlett of Sir Guy. But it also emerges in the juxtapositions of Robin and Marian during the forest banquet; she wears a brownish Chili Red velvet cape to contrast with his Lincoln green hood and tights. The scheme also shows up in individual costumes, most significantly in Robin’s green cape, which features a Cardinal Red lining. This is a distinct break from the restrained mode, which so carefully avoids mixing strong complementaries. As noted in the introduction, various color theorists have suggested that complementaries tend to “attract” one another, since together they complete the spectrum.⁹ Whereas the restrained mode saw this as a liability, Robin Hood‘s costumes exploit it for decorative and narrative ends.¹⁰

To a degree, these costumes are mandated by tradition. Robin Hood must wear green, and Will Scarlett, red. But from this starting point the film exploits complementaries with unprecedented force. The color scheme can be drawn into underlining story conflicts, as we will see in our close analysis of the banquet scene. But generally, as when Will and Robin first meet Little John (Alan Hale), the decision to use these mixtures must stem from the impulse to foreground color variety. After Little John upends Robin during their famous staff fight, they join Will at the bank of the stream, and their costumes are fully displayed. Will, in red, and Robin, in green, are united with Little John in a red hat, Pastel Yellow tights, and a Sky Blue shirt. Red, green, yellow, and blue are arranged across the frame like hues on a color chart.

Whereas the designers of Goldwyn Follies and A Star Is Born were content to rest with easy harmonies between the women’s colors and the men’s neutrals, Anderson uses the costumes for Robin Hood as a rich exercise in coordination and contrast. In the forest banquet, for instance, we have noted that Marian’s Chili Red velvet cape contrasts with Robin’s Lincoln green outfit, but the juxtaposition is subdued by the cape’s deep brownish undertone. Other accents push the costumes’ color relationship in the direction of both coordination and contrast. The clasps on Marian’s cape feature large, deep emerald stones that pick up Robin’s greens. On the other hand, Marian’s faint lavender veil offers significant contrast in both hue and value. The intent is clearly to harmonize the costumes through an intricate play of accents, leaving large areas of each outfit (Marian’s shimmering silver dress, Robin’s Leather Brown vest) more or less neutral. Robin Hood balances an array of interrelated accents.

Relationships among costumes are further complicated by set dressing and extras. Consider, for instance, Sir Guy’s introduction at the film’s opening. A dissolve brings on-screen a long shot of Prince John’s room in Nottingham castle. The composition is immediately remarkable for featuring relatively strong contrasts of red, blue, and gold. The shot, a slight high-angle, frames the room, showing Prince John, seated at left, picking at a plate of fruit. Across from him, a red velvet curtain runs down the right edge of the frame. This curtain is the foremost in a series of color accents arranged diagonally into the depth of the shot. The second accent is a midground table, covered in a red velvet cloth with gold trim. An overhead spot picks the table out from the general illumination; the cloth shimmers, aided by reflections from a gold goblet and fruit bowl. Gold fringe along the edge of the tablecloth makes the piece a strong chromatic magnet.

The primary function of the red is to set off Sir Guy’s rich blue cape as he stands just left of the table, his back to the camera. Sir Guy is the third station in the diagonal of color accents. His vivid blue costume, juxtaposed with the systematic placement of red, makes Sir Guy the color center of the frame. Color leads the eye through the set, defining key areas of the space. The diagonal is completed by another red accent, this time carried on the sleeves of a guard leaning in semishadow against the back wall. Sir Guy’s cape is set like a blue sapphire in a band of rubies; the surrounding highlights contribute to its radiance. With this early shot, Robin Hood establishes color as a commanding force.

The bravura moment of color choreography is yet to come. The film cuts in toward the table as Sir Guy spins around to face Prince John. As the cut brings the red plane of the tabletop forward, Sir Guy’s movement causes his cape to flare, amplifying the red-blue contrast of the previous shot. In the same instant, the gold lining of his cape flashes, and the yellow emblem on the front of his black vest blazes into view. The gold tones on the costume coordinate with the tableware and the tablecloth fringe, and a yellow apple in the fruit bowl serves to match Sir Guy’s emblem. This powerful combination inaugurates the film’s basic triad of red, blue, and yellow, the pigment primaries. As he turns and completes the triad, Sir Guy helps strike what Johannes Itten would call a “color chord.” Colors lock together and reinforce one another. The strong contrast makes this first medium long shot of Sir Guy arresting; the repetition of gold and yellow helps connect red and blue areas without subduing the contrast. One would be hard pressed to find a more elegant maneuvering of color mise-en-sène in the 1930s.

Elsewhere, the interactions of costume and setting are more decorative, but they point toward a general quality of Robin Hood‘s design. Less concerned about emulating standard monochrome techniques, the filmmakers willingly exploit color as a means to stylize the image. In the forest banquet, for instance, the backgrounds become an active source of color. The initial two-shot of Robin and Marian is staged before a crowd of frolicking outlaws dressed in garments captured from Sir Guy. They generate a constant swirl of orange, green, and blue just beyond the plane of focus. As the revelers move about, coordinating and contrasting accents emerge and retreat, creating a constantly evolving set of color relationships. The shallow-focus close-up of Marian is particularly adventurous; background colors are abstracted as unfocused red and gold capes whirl by behind her. At the same time, the compositions avoid the pitfalls of Mamoulian’s attempt to blend action and color. Because the colors are so densely packed and in such rapid motion, individual hues never achieve the prominence they enjoy in Becky Sharp. Robin Hood is more confident in its use of color: the palette is more complex, and the filmmakers are less concerned with so deliberately staging and motivating the background accents.

FUNCTIONS OF COLOR

Since color is brought forward so vigorously by the film’s design, one might expect color to serve more-ostentatious functions here than in the restrained mode. One influential view of Technicolor is that it encouraged garish and painfully obvious color symbolism. However, this film is actually less effective at drawing on color to build chromatic motifs than either Lonesome Pine or A Star Is Born. The heavy variation of color means that it is more difficult to thematize specific sets of hues. Instead of giving color symbolic duties, Robin Hood shifts its function across the narrative. Some stretches of the film favor spectacular flash, while others more closely tie color to drama. This militates against building motifs over the course of the film, but it enables the assertive design to flexibly serve tasks like punctuation and underscoring. The concept of function provides a key to analyzing this outstandingly intricate design, and it can help us correct an important historical misunderstanding about the way color served narrative under Technicolor’s reign.

Robin Hood‘s design adheres to a large-scale pattern of four phases, with different kinds of color functions favored in each. In the first fourteen segments, until Robin’s sentencing after the archery tournament, color is paraded and renewed, but not allowed to recede for an extended period. Early on the film favors methods that emphasize color variety, and thus local changes in dramatic tone are less likely to trigger marked changes in color design. For example, the scene in which Prince John angrily orders Robin’s death and the seizure of Saxon wealth immediately precedes the playful scene of Robin and Will meeting Little John. Both scenes feature vivid green, red, blue, and yellow-gold accents despite their dramatic contrast. Color functions decoratively.

Within the environment of this first phase, very broad manipulations of color connect to narrative. For instance, the banquet at Nottingham and the banquet at Robin’s forest camp parallel each other because each presents a high point of design; color is more forcefully exhibited as a source of spectacle. During Robin’s feast, his men steal the vivid vestments of Sir Guy’s company, forcing the royalty into brown and gray rags. The regimented unfolding of color that marks the opening of Sir Guy’s Nottingham banquet is parodied by a chaotic play of highlights during the forest party. That Robin’s men have become the source of color reinforces the plot turn in which they, briefly, seize power from their oppressors. Both color and authority change hands; Robin’s success has stripped the Norman rulers of their color. In fact, though, color design within this phase of the film must overcome a good deal of interference to achieve significant color scoring. Two scenes of strong decorative color can parallel each other, but in general, foregrounding techniques dominate and dampen subtle variations.

However, in the second phase, consisting of the next eleven segments, variations in color parallel narrative developments more closely. After the brilliant display at the archery tournament, colors are somewhat muted when Robin is sentenced to death, then nearly eliminated as he is chained in the dungeon. The standard array of varied accents returns for Robin’s escape and the surrounding sequences. Then, when Sir Guy discovers Marian’s complicity and she is sentenced to death, color design once again takes a turn toward more somber tones. The fortunes of the protagonists alter more rapidly in this portion of the film, and color design is more sensitive to dramatic change.

The broad pattern enters a brief third phase in the four swift expository segments that follow Marian’s sentencing. Bess (Una O’Connor) warns Much of Prince John’s murderous plans, and Much intercepts the royal assassin. As Robin meets King Richard (disguised as an abbot), Will rescues Much, and they race to spread news of Richard’s return. During this busy stretch of events, color reverts to relatively undistinguished neutrals and accents. The variation in hue is not truly restrained, since eye-catching highlights continue to surface from scene to scene, but the techniques for renewing an awareness of color are withheld. The rapid flow of action limits opportunities for color showcasing, and this helps set up the last phase of high-profile color design.

When Richard dramatically reveals his identity, color display returns, and it continues through the end of the film. Prince John’s interrupted coronation and the climactic battle bring together the boldest costumes from throughout the film and employ nearly all of the favored methods for foregrounding color. The opening and concluding portions of Robin Hood tend toward decorative designs and color showcasing. Together they frame two middle portions in which color more readily echoes dramatic tone and then recedes briefly. This structure stems partly from a general principle that favors bold and vivid display during action and spectacle sequences, which are concentrated toward the film’s start and conclusion. By shifting the ways color functions across the film, Robin Hood‘s design manages to integrate lessons learned from the restrained mode with bombastic, spectacular display.

During the second phase, moment-by-moment manipulations of color underscore narrative developments. Here, the film’s debt to the restrained mode is most marked. Following Robin’s capture at the archery tournament, for instance, Robin and Marian are clothed in similar tones of deep brownish red. Together, they contrast with Sir Guy and members of his tribunal, who wear rich greens, blues, yellows, and reds. Robin and Marian are chromatically united, sharing a common point of contrast. The play of coordination and contrast is as skillfully developed as in any of the restrained films, and far from the garish or heavy-handed style often attributed to Technicolor.

The purpose of the trial’s design is made particularly clear by a series of shots as Sir Guy reads his decree. In medium shot, Sir Guy’s flaming costume consumes the frame. His bright Marigold yellow hood with satin Blue Turquoise lining sets off a Fiery Red robe, a blinding version of the primary triad. Editing presents an eye-line match of Marian, and then a brief shot of Robin, as Sir Guy declares, “There may be some who will regret that a man of your peculiar talents should be cut off so early in life.” At the end of the sentence, framing returns to Sir Guy, sandwiching the two subdued, coordinated images of Robin and Marian.

Their harmonies are precise. She wears a black dress with a sheer, very deep Eggplant purple cowl topped by a crown with a subtle gold border. Two figures behind her provide a few accents. On the left, a man in a bluish Quarry gray tunic with soft Starlight Blue details establishes a receding but textured foil to Marian’s warmer hues. The figure on the right is more heavily shadowed, but a hint of green comes through, and a large, highly polished silver-gray necklace creates a strong achromatic highlight. The scheme in Robin’s close-up is even sparer, but it offers strong affinities with Marian’s. He wears a Deep Red Brown hood (which appears nearly Oxblood Red in the highlights) over a brownish Nutmeg gray shirt. Their outfits share red as a dominant, and that hue is toned down to the point of near neutrality, almost eliminating contrast. The bright silver-gray highlight of Robin’s neck iron echoes the necklace in Marian’s shot, and a slight hint of soft blue in his far-left background picks up the blue accents behind her, shoring up the somber harmony with surprising exactness.

In the second phase of the film, these colors communicate character relationships. Marian had previously favored costumes that incorporated elements of Sir Guy’s and Prince John’s extravagant schemes while also offering points of coordination with Robin. Here, that coordination has thoroughly won out, signaling her allegiance to the outlaw. Of course, color is not solely responsible for making the point. Earlier scenes established her growing sympathy for Robin’s cause, and Sir Guy’s knowing glance shows that he has detected her change of heart. Still, color has been precisely scored to the plot point. Since Robin and Marian will not openly declare their love for several scenes, these indirect signs of affection carry some weight. Moreover, the kind of accord developed between them, based on the understated modulation of dark hues and achromatic accents, was dictated by the mood of the event. The shooting script describes Marian as “emotionless” and explains that she “gives no sign” when Sir Guy shoots her the glance. Robin and Marian’s reticent hues convey their silent, melancholy attachment.

Such careful contrast and coordination is a legacy of the restrained mode. But while the second phase of the narrative can well accommodate that kind of scoring, punctual accents rule the day in the more florid phases. Punctuation, when it is carried by sudden bursts of color, thrives in the open palette, especially when bold costumes streak across the frame. We have already noted the green and red highlights that help underline Robin and Will’s first appearance in Sherwood Forest. Similarly, when Robin’s men leap out to surround King Richard, who is disguised as an abbot, their movement across the foreground creates a rush of bright reds and greens. Bursts of color accentuate brief moments of action, making this technique particularly prevalent during the opening and closing phases. Because it is fleeting, punctuation does not seem forced or obtrusive. In its first and final phases, the design favors a hit-and-run approach to color scoring.

Punctual color emphasizes both minute actions and large-scale developments. At one end of the spectrum, the red lining in Robin’s cape provides a flourish that climaxes his speech at Gallows Oak, when he swings his arm upward and exclaims: “And swear to fight to the death against our oppressors!” The grand gesture exposes the cape’s scarlet lining, delivering a burst of complementary color. The same technique is expanded to punctuate King Richard’s unveiling before Robin and his men. Richard opens his black cloak to reveal his saturated Flame Scarlet uniform, emblazoned with bright yellow (Dandelion or Sunshine) lions. His soldiers, too, open their cloaks, revealing bright white costumes emblazoned with red crosses. According to Rudy Behlmer, this visual effect was important enough to merit a noted historical inaccuracy. Knights of the Crusades wore the red crosses on their backs when returning to England, but in this scene they bear the marks upon their chests “in order to make the revealment of the king and his nobles more effective dramatically.”¹¹ Costume, once again, is the pivotal tool for generating spectacle, and color takes the central role in briefly punctuating the action.

By varying the functions of color across the film, Robin Hood‘s design can grant narrative roles to Technicolor while keeping to a broad and assertive palette. Localized color scoring follows the character’s fortunes during the second phase, and punctuation comes forward in the others. Large-scale color motifs, however, suffer. For example, red and green would seem to be good candidates for an adversarial motif, perhaps underlining the battle of the royals against Robin and his men. Though several scenes build up a thematic pattern of color, the design’s commitment to variety blunts these associations. Robin’s band consistently offers accents of blue, red, and yellow, and Sir Guy’s foot soldiers wear the same brown and green colors common to Robin’s men. Various knights, as well as Sir Guy himself, wear green at several points in the film.¹² Whereas the conservative use of red and orange allowed those colors to form precise patterns in Lonesome Pine and A Star Is Born, Robin Hood’s liberal palette diminishes the power of individual colors, discouraging finely tuned chromatic motifs.

Because of its cluttered palette, Robin Hood, when it reaches after thematically significant color, does so in an unusually bold and literal manner. The film’s popularity (it is one of a handful of early Technicolor films with which most viewers are familiar) and the blatancy of its attempts at color motifs have skewed our historical understanding of Technicolor aesthetics. For instance, Richard Neupert, in his generally excellent discussion of Technicolor style, uses Robin Hood as an example of what he considers the rather clumsy way that narrative and color align in the classical era.¹³ The view is exemplary of a general critical attitude toward “glorious” Technicolor. Against the background of our study, we might see Robin Hood‘s thematic use of color as anomalous rather than typical, and appreciate how the shifting of functions enables a nimble narrativization of color.

The film’s nearly symbolic use of color is most clearly illustrated by several peculiarly emphatic instances of red, and they merit analysis because they can help us counteract some common assumptions. At the conclusion of the second scene, Prince John offers Sir Guy a toast to affirm their designs upon the throne. As he sets down the decanter, Prince John knocks over his goblet of red wine. The camera follows the characters’ surprised glances, tilting down to discover a puddle of deep, almost black, red wine on a stone gray floor. Neupert has analyzed this sequence as part of a motif that, for him, makes red “a major signifier of John’s bloody treachery.”¹⁴ The spilled wine is “hardly a subtle foreshadowing of John’s bloody reign,” though it also helps characterize the would-be ruler as a “clumsy oaf who lacks the grace and finesse of a true leader like King Richard.”¹⁵

For Neupert and others, this is typical of how Technicolor sought to narrativize color. Natalie Kalmus’s discussion of red as symbolic of danger and blood in “Color Consciousness” supports this view.¹⁶ From this perspective, the red motif “underlines and motivates the ensuing violence” when red accents occur in the tax-collection montage. The “newly butchered sides of beef” at the butcher’s and the “roaring fireplace” in the blacksmith’s forge might seem like clumsy “red for danger” signs.¹⁷ I have already discussed the tax-collection sequence in connection with the contraction and expansion of the film’s palette. The two brief scenes are dominated by muted colors and subdued variation (including red accents), setting up the far more vigorous explosion of red and green when Robin and Will Scarlett, the saviors, come thundering in on horseback. In fact, the vignettes represent a brief respite from the stronger contrasts in surrounding scenes. This is not to argue that the dashes of red, identified by Neupert, might not serve to develop the motif, but this function is not particularly pronounced. When function favors punctuation over motif, any rather subtle emphasis on red gets lost in the varied palette.

The pooled wine is clearly a symbol for the blood that Prince John’s reign will spill, but such symbolism was not a common technique for binding color to narrative. This use of color is actually far less ambiguous than the motivic patterns set up by the restrained films. It recalls the literalness of Becky Sharp and La Cucaracha. Robin Hood‘s shooting script indicates that, as originally planned, the connection between blood and wine would have been even more heavy handed, but also transitional. The shot of dripping wine was to be followed by this scene, eliminated from the final production:

Dissolve To:
WATERING TROUGH TRUCK SHOT
We discover CLOSE-UP of rough flagstones and a fallen sword with blood dripping slowly down on them. TRUCK BACK to reveal a Saxon farmer lying half across a rough wood or stone watering trough with an arrow in his back, while in background four or five Norman horsemen are swiftly rounding up about twelve fine horses, bringing some out of the small barn, and herding them away.¹⁸

The color-symbol of the wine was originally linked directly to blood, and this was conceived as part of a transition to a series of vignettes illustrating Prince John’s oppression. Like most obtrusive uses of color, this unusual symbolism was to be consigned to a transitional montage sequence. Indeed, because the color of the wine on the stone gray background is not particularly vivid (it is nearly black), the power of the motif rests on a sort of literary association of spilled wine with blood rather than on the visual charge of color.

Two subsequent scenes tap into the association of red with the spread of terror, and to stand out amid the busy color design, they are made extraordinarily vivid. They both occur in another montage, which links a series of atrocities perpetrated by Prince John’s government. In one vignette, a knight who had ordered a Saxon hanged is struck in the chest by an arrow shot from off frame. The scene is drenched in red-orange light, motivated by an off-screen sunset; the legs of an unfortunate Saxon dangle in silhouette from the top of the frame. The shooting script describes these figures as forming “a grim, black silhouette against the blood-red sky.”¹⁹ The extreme use of colored light, mixed with near silhouette, anticipates the burning-of-Atlanta sequence in Gone with the Wind. It is certainly the most expressive use of colored light in the film. The bloodred backdrop and key light are, like the spilled wine, given a strong thematic charge. Color has been added to the conventional use of low-key lighting for representing a sinister act, creating a striking, painterly effect.

The next vignette takes place at the Saracen’s Head tavern, where soldiers terrorize the owner and threaten his daughter. In a fairly low-key shot, two soldiers split open a cask, letting flow a torrent of bright, saturated Fuchsia Pink wine. The color of the wine, already quite artificial, is spotlighted, making it a major highlight in the composition. With the tavern keeper chained to the wall directly beyond the cask, the wine stands metonymically for his blood. The burst of red vividly punctuates the violent action, once again recalling the wine spilled when Prince John first hatched his plan.²⁰

Compared to the bulk of Technicolor design in the 1930s, this chromatic motif is uncommonly deliberate and explicit. Neupert is correct to identify this use of red as an attempt to narrativize color, but we should also note the extreme stylization that marks these instances as a departure from Technicolor’s typical methods. As noted earlier, the film’s common technique for drawing attention to spectacular color involves revealing an array of colorful costumes and set pieces, most of which tend to be strongly motivated by the setting or event. By contrast, these examples depend on the bold expression of a single dominating hue. Red has been forced into the situation, making it unavoidably significant. These cases stand out from the rest of the film, indeed from the greater part of Technicolor production after 1935, because of the degree of color foregrounding and the method of showcasing a solitary hue. Red stands for Prince John’s reign of terror, and this function is bought at the cost of very obtrusive manipulation.

Just as importantly, this particular motif is developed within a montage, not woven into the fabric of a fully developed dramatic scene. The sequence condenses Prince John’s despotic rule into a swift succession of emblematic moments. In all, there are three vignettes, each ending with the interruption of a Norman evil by a well-timed arrow. The particulars of each scene are less important than the general impression of royal wrongdoings being righted by Robin Hood. Like the studio-makeover sequence in A Star Is Born, this montage offers the film’s most pronounced manipulations of color. In reaching after the sort of literalness that characterized the demonstration mode, Robin Hood consigns it to montage, a context that helps it better integrate with classical style.

The boldness of these instances can blind the historian to the finesse of Technicolor aesthetics as they developed in the 1930s. More often, color supports narrative not through the development of full-blown color-symbols, but by being generally keyed to mood and by punctuating accents. This is the dominant method even in Robin Hood, especially during the second phase. When the austere image of Robin chained in Nottingham’s dungeon gives way to Marian’s apartment, the gentle reintroduction of color accents helps signal the transition to a more romantic tone; color parallels changes in lighting, setting, and the orchestral score. Color, though central to Robin Hood‘s appeal, tends to be redundant when considered with other cues – integrated rather than clumsily laid on top. Indeed, this is a major distinction between an assertive film like Robin Hood and one from the demonstration mode; both feature broad palettes, but in assertive design, expressive choices do not so incessantly prioritize color. Varying the functions of color across the film allows Robin Hood to be spectacular and subtle by turns and to yoke a bold palette to basic storytelling tasks without appearing awkwardly overt.

UNWEAVING THE TAPESTRY: A CLOSE ANALYSIS OF THE BANQUET AT NOTTINGHAM

Robin Hood offers an exceptional opportunity to unweave Technicolor’s formal tapestry. In bringing our color vocabulary and our understanding of design options to bear on a single sequence, we can come to terms with how color works in the cinema to guide attention and cue our responses at every moment. Only close descriptive analysis can capture the complexity and richness of Robin Hood‘s design and ground our observations. Few scenes present a more rewarding challenge to analysis than the Nottingham banquet, the film’s first and most sumptuous display of color. In it, we can grasp how color works at a fine-grained level and how Robin Hood innovates both by elaborating opportunities for foregrounding and by bringing tactics for regulating color to a complex and assertive palette.

The scene begins with a display of regal pageantry as Prince John, Lady Marian, Sir Guy, the High Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper), the Bishop of the Black Canons (Montagu Love), and various Norman knights share the feast. Once it gets underway, the sequence swiftly plants information and sets the narrative ball rolling, moving fluidly from exposition to spectacular action. Prince John announces his villainous coup with a simple declaration: “I’ve kicked Longchamps out! From now on I am regent of England.” Moments later, Robin storms into the hall, lays a deer carcass at John’s table, and announces, “From this night on I use every means in my power to fight you.” Prince John attacks, Robin escapes, and, amid a hail of arrows, Maid Marian flashes a concerned glance. The scene’s challenge is to provide a color design that supports the spectacular pageantry and heroics while also guiding attention through some rather dense exposition.

In another scene transition exploited for color effect, the Nottingham banquet opens with two elaborate establishing shots. Together, they illustrate Robin Hood‘s broadening of Technicolor’s palette. Blue, red, green, and yellow mix and mingle in a vivid demonstration of color. Yet these colors are also carefully managed, helping ease the shift from the flamboyant opening into the scene’s dialogue portion. As in most of the film, color is carried primarily by costume, and this allows it to be manipulated through staging and mobile framing. The director can fluidly shift emphasis by moving actors, thus helping integrate color with other elements of style. In concert with camera movement, sound, and character action, color leads the eye.

The first shot pans left across the hall from a high angle, presenting a master view of the set. Two long banquet tables run lengthwise down the center of the gray stone hall, Prince John’s table sitting perpendicular to them at the far left. Color structures the shot. The take begins and ends on color accents, and the movement of color motivates the pan. The scene opens on a torch burning with a bright orange flame high above a large fireplace at the far right of the hall. This brilliant embellishment is quickly eliminated from the frame as the camera follows a line of waiters clad in flat Slate gray-blue and deep raspberry (Lipstick Red) uniforms, entering midground right. The waiters provide the key point of color, and their trajectory motivates the pan, guiding attention through the set until the second torch, fastened high on the wall in the left foreground, delivers a momentary flash of orange. The brief take ends just as the royal table comes into view, efficiently conveying the banquet’s opulence and laying out the basic geography of the room. It also displays several of the key props for foregrounding color that the shooting script specifies, including the torches and “colorful banners … in brilliant hues.”²¹

Not to let an opportunity for showcasing slip by, the first take is followed by a second, more detailed – but functionally redundant – establishing shot. This take covers the same ground as the first, but it is a masterpiece of color choreography, deftly guiding the viewer through details and toward the site of narrative interest. The framing returns to the first torch, this time somewhat closer to the flame, revealing a deep red and white flag just beyond. Instead of panning, the camera cranes downward and tracks left, exchanging and revealing new color accents. Immediately, the torch’s orange flare is displaced by the roasting fire (directly below), and then another line of waiters, bearing trays of meat, enters from the right. Their movement again motivates the camera’s. The waiters bring attention to the midground with a primary triad: Chinese Red shirts and grayish Stratosphere blue vests adorned with bright Dandelion yellow trim along the sleeves and tails. The viewer who grasped the grand sweep of the banquet in the first shot is invited to return to the start and revel in Technicolor detail, this time with just a bit more brilliance.

The track successively introduces and passes over distinct sources of color. While our attention is locked on the procession of waiters, the camera reveals yellow-hooded falcons on a perch, one of them with a bright emerald plume. The momentary burst of green moves off right, and the falconer’s Sky Blue hat enters from the bottom. The color parade then modulates, adjusting our attention from the foreground to the midground and then to the background. Several waiters in a foreground medium shot pass out of the frame, and the midground is given over to a group of musicians in muted but rich costumes of brown, Lincoln green, and various tints of Cranberry. Swiftly, blue is reintroduced as the camera passes behind three men-at-arms in Azure Blue tights and brown jerkins. The palette contracts somewhat, offering a few well-defined variations.

Even in this very brief passage, color is thoroughly enmeshed with other elements of style. The waiters’ costumes direct attention to their procession, which, in turn, motivates the camera movement. Similarly, the appearance of the musicians provides a shift in color while also helping tie the orchestral accompaniment to the diegesis. The score softens and modulates into strings and flutes that roughly correspond to the instruments on screen. The musicians’ more sedate costumes initiate the transfer of color emphasis from the fore- to the mid- and background, aiding the transition into the main action of the scene. In like manner, by offering an on-screen justification for the music track, they tie it to the action at hand. Both sound and color begin to channel attention more directly to story events.

The exiting of the last waiter coincides with the onset of dialogue; an off-screen knight offers a toast to Prince John. As the music softens and the action begins, color contrast briefly recedes. But this simplifying of the foreground sets up a more varied palette at the rear of the dining hall, where the feast is in full swing. Knights and ladies seated at a dining table and facing away from the camera supply a particularly complex collection of accents. The scheme, which alternates cool and warm hues, is coordinated with a row of flags that emerges over Prince John’s table in the far background. The palette’s variety and order is remarkable. Seated from right to left are a knight in a Leaf Green cape, a lady in a burgundy dress and soft Pearlblush pink cowl, a knight in a burgundy cape, a lady in a Porcelain Blue gown with a soft pink cowl and a Leaf Green belt and hat, a Knight in a brown cape with a Lagoon green lining, a lady with a Golden Cream cowl, and so on. Contrast among the costumes is regulated by rather uniform shading: reds and yellows are toned down into gold and burgundy, and the brighter greens are quickly eliminated by the track. Thus, as the shot nears its destination, the array of color becomes more intricate, but also more carefully modulated. Color more pointedly flags narratively important portions of the set. Chromatic interest shifts first to the midground, where the knight proclaims his allegiance, then a more saturated spot of color marks out the far background, and the diners turn toward Prince John.

Prince John’s table forms the apex of the set. As the track slows and the camera pans left, the prince’s table, with its white cloth and deep red embroidery, offers the final stop in this tour of color. Centered on the wall behind it hangs a Cadmium Yellow gold curtain which coordinates with the lady’s Golden Cream veil in the midground. If this fails to catch the viewer’s eye, then the revelation of Sir Guy’s bright Flame Scarlet and gold costume does the trick. As the knights rise and turn toward John (blocked from view at the rear), a glimpse of Sir Guy, well beyond the plane of focus, impels attention toward the background. The shot ends when a single waiter crosses in from the right foreground and the camera tilts downward to discover a hound tearing into a pile of bones, a none-too-subtle commentary on Prince John’s voraciousness.

The opening of the Nottingham banquet does more than just extend chromatic display through a simple iteration of establishing shots. True, hue is deployed with greater variety, intensity, and richness than in previous major-studio three-color features. But color has also become more integrated with other stylistic registers, and it augments dialogue, music, and staging to engage us in the scene.

One familiar with the restrained mode would expect color to recede from emphasis as the scene continues. This is not the case. Rather than eliminate bright and saturated accents during dinner conversation, the cinematography and staging continue to manage a palette of contrasting hues. Wardrobe accounts for the majority of assertive colors. Sir Guy’s costume is perhaps the most intense. His Flame Scarlet shirt is accented by metallic gold embroidery and trim, Sky Blue sleeves and collar, and deep red stones set in gold metal clasps. The outfit repeats the basic primary triad of the waiters’ costumes, but with greater richness and saturation, especially in red hues that positively glow on the nitrate print. Each central character’s costume offers an equally striking accent. Prince John’s white satin shirt is studded with gold beads and blue stones and topped with a Bachelor Button blue hood. Marian’s dress is a pattern of aqua and rust red on a black field. A black cape affixed by silver clasps with deep emerald green stones drapes her shoulders. The costume is finished with a Rich Gold cowl and crown. Her outfit coordinates with other costumes and props by gathering together hues representative of the entire palette and adding green to the gold, blue, and red triad.

So bold an array of color challenges the low-contrast harmonies that Kalmus favored. Instead of squelching contrast, the design achieves coordination by repeating hues across costumes. As usual, the female lead’s ensemble is the linchpin. The blue lining inside Marian’s cape coordinates with Prince John’s blue hood, her gold cowl echoes the wall covering behind her, and her red and gold accents harmonize with Sir Guy’s. When Robin enters, her emerald jewels, and the green component, of the aqua pattern on her dress, provide the closest harmonies with the hero’s Lincoln green attire. The coordination highlight’s Olivia de Havilland’s star presence, forecasts Marian’s role as Robin’s love interest, and follows Technicolor convention of organizing the mise-en-scène around a woman.

But beyond repetition, the design’s color balance signals a new way of thinking about harmony in Technicolor. In concentrating heavily on gold, red, and blue, the mise-en-scène roughly adheres to the basic primary triad. As noted in the introduction, this triad secures harmony in the sense that, if combined, the hues would form a neutral gray. When properly distributed, yellow, red, and blue results in what Johannes Itten would call “harmonic equilibrium.”²² This kind of harmony, however, is different from that most often discussed by designers like Betancourt, Holden, or even Kalmus. They hoped to more simply mute differences of hue by insisting on analogous or split-complementary relationships. The high contrast of the primary triad resembles the juxtaposition of complementaries, but is somewhat less intense because it is dispersed among three hues. Robin Hood veers well away from Betancourt’s “present trend toward taste” while still delivering a scheme defensibly harmonious. Equilibrium is displacing similarity.

Admittedly, describing the palette as a “triad” is reductive, since it implies the use of three well-defined hues. In fact, there is a good deal of variation within the individual hue families. Yellow modulates from Sir Guy’s high-value, saturated gold trim to the brownish gold (Cadmium Yellow) wall covering. Blue shifts in tint between Sir Guy’s Sky Blue collar and Prince John’s Bachelor Button hood, and Marian’s blue accents are mixed with green. Other colors are blended as well. The Bishop of the Black Canons, seated several places to Marian’s right, is clad in his purple robe (between Royal Blue and Dahlia Purple), which blends red with blue. Characterizing the scheme as a triad might also miss the small green details, which include lettuce on the bishop’s plate, a knight’s Leaf Green robe just visible beyond the bishop, or a small spray of grape leaves that Prince John fidgets with as he talks to Marian. Yet green, like purple, is clearly a minor note in a palette heavily dominated by red, blue, and yellow. The design achieves the impression of complexity by repeating and varying three central hues, avoiding flat-out complementaries and simple blocks of bold color while still delivering some fairly pronounced contrasts.

When the central action kicks off, well-managed colors guide attention and support the drama. The principal characters seated at the head table are, from left to right, the High Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy, Prince John, Marian, and the bishop. They constitute the center of interest, but saturated hues and color contrasts crop up all around them. At each end of the table, knights in Flame Scarlet provide strong visual magnets, as does a scarlet-caped knight immediately beyond the bishop. Most often, the framing is such that these figures are only briefly glimpsed in long shots; the medium shots and medium close-ups that carry most of the conversation eliminate potential distractions. Acceptable as embellishments at the start of the scene, these color magnets recede as serious dialogue gets underway. Tabletop items are similarly manipulated to suit the scene’s development. At the start, Prince John’s table is cluttered with bowls and platters of red gelatin and meat dressed with apples. Later, when a knight at another table addresses Prince John, the red accents have been removed. Now dominated by brownish gold serving pieces, the table has been neutralized as a source of color. In a manner reminiscent of the restrained mode, the reflective surfaces of these cups and pitchers introduce rather unobtrusive texture into the frame, a play of varied brightness, or dazzle, rather than hue.

When background accents do pop up, they often serve the scene. For example at the right end of the table the bishop, in blue-purple, is positioned just in front of a scarlet-clad knight. The effect is practical: it helps mark the bishop as an important character before he speaks. In a medium shot of Prince John and Marian, the contrast drives attention to the rear of the frame, cueing us to notice that the bishop is listening. Just before he interjects, two shots frame Sir Guy in the foreground with Marian and the bishop at rear. In the second of these shots, Marian has leaned slightly back, revealing the bishop more fully as he responds to her questions about Robin Hood: “Aye, an impudent reckless rogue.” Color flags his position, preparing the way for the next cut, which brings the bishop into a medium shot as he continues. The visual magnet, encouraged by a wide, dynamic palette, has been harmonized with staging and performance and given a conventional function. Robin Hood features a broader and bolder palette than that found in most previous three-color design, but color is still attentively regulated from shot to shot.

Robin’s arrival triggers the scene’s first turning point, and the broad palette rushes forward to punctuate it. As the doors swing open, Robin fends off two men-at-arms and confidently strides into the hall, a deer across his shoulders. Two brief reaction shots blast bright color across the frame. In the first, a shot down one of the guest tables, a woman in a Dahlia Purple gown and another in a Candy Pink cowl contrast with the Sky Blue cape of the knight just beyond. In the foreground, a knight in a scarlet cape rears up and draws his sword, a punctual flash of red. The second reaction shot frames Prince John in the foreground and Sir Guy beyond him. The key colors here, Prince John’s Bachelor Button blue hood and Sir Guy’s Flame Scarlet shirt, repeat the accents of the previous setup. Just as Prince John turns, the scene returns to Robin, in long shot. These quick reactions deliver two jolts of blue and red, interrupting the more restrained brown and green compositions of Robin’s progress.

The visual contrast helps emphasize the opposition between Robin and his foes, an opposition made more evident in the next cut. Robin is halted by a group of men-at-arms, who block him with silver battle spears. The crisscross of glinting silver is at the center of a nearly achromatic scheme dominated by gray and brown, with Robin’s Lincoln green just peaking through. A cut back to Sir Guy and Prince John cracks the palette back open, reintroducing blue, red, and yellow. Robin’s defense of the common people clashes with Prince John’s exercise of elite power, and color underscores it. In a sense, the color design is opportunistic. This kind of contrast cannot be built into a meaningful pattern across such an assertive film, but at the local level, when practical, color can bolster a theme. One advantage of Robin Hood‘s production design is that it can so easily justify splashes of high-value saturated color for punctual effects. The challenge, of course, comes in managing and controlling that palette.

In tune with the scene’s development, color swells around grand actions and then retreats during tense confrontations. When Robin boldly approaches the head table, accompanied by Korngold’s rousing theme, another tracking shot sweeps past color highlights. When the carcass is dropped in front of the prince, it lands next to a bowl of red gelatin; we find that color magnets have resurfaced on the table. Once the dialogue gets underway, this detail is again dispatched.

Color accents are controlled, but never absent, and Robin Hood innovates new schemes for ornamentation even amidst taut exposition. By including accents at the margins, and fields of color in close-ups, the scene keeps color an active and visible participant. As the confrontation between Robin and Prince John heats up, camera angles begin to consistently introduce conspicuous sources of color into the foreground. Generally, these details, quite low in value, do not become troublesome. For example, a rather low-angle shot of Sir Guy and Prince John, as he whispers to a guard, brings a large platter of grapes and apples into the lower foreground. Whether a matter of lighting or paint, the apples are quite deep red, not as bright as some of the fed accents that adorned the table at the scene’s start.

This technique becomes more noticeable, though, in a medium framing of Robin, seated at a table across from Prince John, that brings an apple into the extreme right corner. The accent, clearly complementary to Robin’s Lincoln green outfit, is purely decorative, dressing out the composition as the hero begins his most important speech.²³ The pattern is magnified when a view of Robin, with his red apple at lower right, is directly followed by a view of Prince John’s table, also with a red accent in the lower right. The tactic amounts to cutting around the fruit bowls to make decorative color prominent.

Significantly, in each shot the accent remains near the edge of the frame, usually toward the foreground, and well away from the character’s face. In their endeavor to sustain color across the sequence, the designers decided that small touches of contrasting color, kept near the frame’s perimeter, were acceptable. Reserved for the margins, these accents never intrude into the central area of interest, and they could be readily justified as part of the banquet setting. Both conditions help naturalize the device, guarding against the perception that color has been forced into the shot. That said, this kind of consistent ornamentation bespeaks a more flexible approach to color. The old rules for subordination are being bent, perhaps broken.

Decorative color also makes inroads into the background of important medium shots and close-ups. Technicolor design conventionally sought out harmonizing backgrounds for close-ups, especially of female stars. Robin Hood invigorates the technique with a more assertive palette and directed background lighting. For example, the medium shots of Prince John isolate him against the Cadmium Yellow curtain draped behind his chair. Contrast between this deep brown-orange gold and his Bachelor Button blue hood flirts with the complementarity of blue and orange. These colors intensify each other, an effect amplified by lighting that targets Prince John’s hair and shoulders as well as the curtain. The bold but simple use of contrast lends a graphic punch to the closer takes of Prince John, and this helps him stand out from other characters.²⁴

The same technique glamorizes Marian’s close-ups, which use an extra to inject background color. An oddly cheeky squire clad in violet (between Royal Blue and Dahlia Purple) stands just beyond Marian’s chair, creating an uncharacteristic background highlight in some longer shots of the group. Assertive design threatens to disperse attention. But the detail pays off later during Marian’s close-up reaction shots to Robin. A patch of the purple appears in the rear left while soft facial lighting causes her gold cowl and crown to shimmer. In place of edge light, the illuminated purple velvet lends depth behind her shoulder. Moreover, this background accent bridges the aqua and rust red details on Marian’s dress. Color harmony helps stylize the love interest’s first close-ups. The color effect recurs when Robin fights his way out of the castle. Marian’s squire exits, and the bishop rises to comfort her, his blue-purple robe providing the background for her close-up. Curtiz and his team routinely embellish Marian’s close-ups with color, seizing on options opened up by a complex palette. Purple, it seems, struck an ideal harmony with de Havilland’s features, and it returns in later scenes as part of her royal wardrobe.

The banquet sequence climaxes with Robin’s spectacular escape from Prince John, giving us the chance to examine how Technicolor serves action. In the midst of a fight, Robin Hood‘s vigorous color choreography joins a new emphasis on editing as a means of wielding contrast. The escape sequence mobilizes color to emphasize discrete actions, to unify short series of events, and to guide attention toward key areas of the frame during the swirl of movement. As the cutting becomes more rapid, color arrangements shift quickly, and costumes, so carefully arrayed in the opening shots, form swift contrasts and accents. The sequence divides roughly into three stages, each featuring several stunts. First, as Robin dodges the guard’s surprise attack and scuffles with several knights, color alternates between high and low contrast. Sir Guy then attacks, setting off the scene’s most intense concentration of hue. Finally, Robin flees the hall and covers his retreat with a shower of arrows, accompanied by punctual color accents. The palette pulses during the action, creating rhythm, intensifying the appearance of frenzied activity, and emphasizing stunts.

The first several shots exploit color to make images quickly legible and to help set a rhythm for the action. Robin’s chair is struck with a spear, and in a long shot he rocks backward so that he can lift the chair as a shield. The shot is dominated by grays and browns; movement and focus draw attention to Robin’s action. This relatively low-contrast image is juxtaposed with the assertive hues carried in a medium long shot of Prince John’s table. The gold curtain is particularly prominent as Sir Guy rises and flings a candelabrum in Robin’s direction. The intense red, blue, and gold provide a distinct beat of color before focus returns to Robin’s composition. Color also guides attention by generating accents around each major character. Lady Marian, for instance, is the only central character whose costume is somewhat subdued, but she receives emphasis thanks to her purple-clad squire. Color guides viewers to the most important actions and reactions.

The next two stunts continue the rhythm of color bursts and recessions. As Robin repels the candelabrum with his chair and spins to face an off-screen attacker, the palette returns to brown and gray dominants, using Robin’s Lincoln green as the major accent. Colors remain within these limits as a knight in a gray cape and a brown and tan jerkin rushes the camera, and Robin heaves a chair to strike him down. Aside from a few blue capes that pass quickly in the foreground, the unit of action is rendered with a fairly unified, workmanlike palette. High contrast returns for the next stunt, a skirmish between Robin and two knights in red and blue capes. Color energizes the fight as the capes flash. Red, blue, and green notes help unify the action as a distinct phase of the fight. Meanwhile, in Marian’s last reaction shot, the bishop’s purple robe helps her compete visually with the tumult’s strong color.

The filmmakers begin to lay color on with a thicker brush as the action intensifies in the third stage. Once Robin has dispatched the knights, Sir Guy enters the fray in a flash of red, yellow, and blue. The next shot finds Robin upending several chromatically undistinguished men-at-arms (in brown and gray) and spinning around just in time to block Sir Guy’s charge. The rhythm of color bursts accelerates. Sir Guy’s colors prompt attention away from the men-at-arms as soon as he enters. With other portions of the frame dominated by gray and brown, color quickly accumulates around Robin and Sir Guy. Two knights in red capes join the clash from the rear while a third, in a green cape, cuts across the foreground. Then knights in blue, green, and blue-gray capes rush from the foreground, piling on top of Robin and creating a wash of cool hues. The capes overwhelm the frame and present color as a near abstraction. A perceptual jolt, like a sting on the music track, lays stress on the moment.

Robin sneaks out of the huddle unnoticed, and color contrast again dips momentarily as he brushes aside a single guard in a light blue cape. This sets up another explosion of color with a cut back to the huddle of knights. The medium shot is inundated with blue and gray tones as knights begin to back away from the center. They clear an opening to reveal Sir Guy, his red and gold breaking through the field of blue. Enraged, he glowers in Robin’s direction. Color once more punctuates the series of actions, pulsing in a quickening rhythm. Sir Guy’s spectacular red and yellow emergence from within a field of blue climaxes the succession of events.

The final stage of Robin’s escape simplifies the dominant palette and employs very brief bursts of color to underscore discrete actions. Shots of Robin climbing up to a balcony and firing arrows into the crowd below are given over to the set’s brown and gray tones. Extreme long shots of the hall reduce the individual costume colors to a muted array. But when, in long shot, one of Robin’s arrows topples a soldier, a rush of extras in red robes and capes bring a dash of color to the foreground. Another arrow cuts down a guard, and as he falls, knights in purple and blue capes streak by. The tactic is repeated when soldiers and knights stream toward the hall’s great door after Robin slips from the room. Into a low-angle shot of the door sweeps a crowd of knights in blue and red capes. Color flares just before a cut returns to Robin, framed against the gray stone walls of the castle. The dashes of color highlight quick actions, many of which are undercranked (sped up during filming). In this final stage, shots have been trimmed so that flashes of color stress the cuts.

Robin’s daring escape from the banquet at Nottingham is somewhat reminiscent of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Becky Sharp. In both cases, color is arrayed for a spectacular opening, modulated to provide visual interest during the scene’s development, and then marshaled into a series of swift contrasts and vivid displays at the climax. But a key difference between the scenes is informative. Becky Sharp overtly arranges color as guests flee the ball, alternating reds and blues and building to a chromatic climax in which the redcoats, under red light, sweep past the camera. Robin Hood likewise uses color to embellish the sequence’s climactic action, but it does not attempt obvious or rigid color scoring. Rather than impose a pattern of color upon the action, Robin’s escape draws fluidly on the palette for a series of independent effects. Color is at once less obtrusively patterned and more freely manipulated. As in the film as a whole, color has found a place among the elements of style that energize the action instead of clumsily subordinating them to achieve a single chromatic effect. Close analysis lets us appreciate an orchestration of color that, during viewing, rushes by. The system works, and we sense a complete and ordered pattern of color that does not try to commandeer our attention.

CONCLUSION

When Warner Bros.’ producers opted to employ three-color on their top-budgeted film of the season, the studio helped move Technicolor into a new phase. Robin Hood was the most ambitious Technicolor production to date, and it was designed to foreground color as a production asset. In this, the film broke with the restrained mode. Robin Hood works to renew spectators’ awareness of color, drawing attention to it as an active element of film style. By contracting and expanding the palette from scene to scene, extending sequences of establishing shots that dwell on and reveal sources of color, and selectively introducing and removing hues within scenes, the film consistently nudges color forward.

But beyond these specific techniques, Robin Hood offers a fundamentally more diverse palette than those found in earlier films. With its emphasis on red, blue, yellow, and green, the film unavoidably deals in more complex harmonies and contrasts. Whereas the restrained mode favored differences in value and saturation, Robin Hood generates texture by varying hues themselves. The design methodically arrays contrasting colors as though to keep Technicolor’s range ceaselessly on display.

Again, Becky Sharp is a good benchmark. In its verve for arraying and revealing color, Robin Hood resembles a demonstration film. Yet, perhaps because it is so easily motivated by the fanciful diegesis, color never appears quite so forced or consciously patterned as in Becky Sharp. Lavish though it is, the film is marked by a concerted effort to manage color so that it guides attention and enhances action. Color is also more thoroughly integrated into the system of style. Though color is prominent, the filmmakers do not as consistently grant it priority when developing effects. The restrained mode developed methods for unobtrusively manipulating color, and Robin Hood successfully brings them to an extravagant palette.

Robin Hood‘s color design also suggests a broadening of Technicolor’s accepted definition of color harmony. As noted earlier, restrained films tended to rely on closely related hues or on different colors shaded and tinted into uniformity. Such decisions followed from Natalie Kalmus’s rather general pronouncements that harmonious composition features the “judicious use of neutrals” and avoids a “super-abundance of color.”²⁶ But Robin Hood presents another option. Assertive colors play off one another to create balanced but varied compositions. This practice points toward a more comprehensive definition of color harmony as the balance of contrasting hues.

Within a historical adventure, color foregrounding ceased to be a critical liability. Even the New York Times applauded the “tale of action” for its “eye-pleasing Technicolor.”²⁸ Warner Bros, had hit upon a basic formula for exploiting the three-color process. Part of the film’s longevity, including its popularity on early color television, may finally rest with its facility for showcasing color. Robin Hood forged a more flexible, dynamic, and compelling color style, an assertive mode of design that Technicolor would continue to develop throughout the 1940s in films such as Blood and Sand (1941), The Black Swan (1942), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1945), to name a few.

NOTES

⁶ Rudy Behlmer, “From Legend to Film,” introduction to The Adventures of Robin Hood, Wisconsin/Warner Bros. Screenplay Series (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 20.

⁷ Lincoln green is not a Pantone color, but is the hue specified by the shooting script for the costumes of Robin and his men. The hue appears to fall somewhere between Pantone’s Parrot Green and Peridot.

⁹ See, for instance, Garau, Color Harmonies, 2-5. Johannes Itten succinctly described the odd nature of complementaries: “They are opposite, they require each other. They incite each other to maximum vividness when adjacent; and they annihilate each other, to gray-black, when mixed – like fire and water” (Art of Color, 78).

¹⁰ A magnificent exercise in balancing complementaries is offered in segment twenty-three when King Richard, in disguise, meets the bishop. Complementary costumes of yellow and lavender assure that king and bishop are the most visually conspicuous characters, and it communicates the tension between them.

¹¹ Behlmer, Adventures of Robin Hood, 214-215.

¹² Jean-Loup Bourget suggests that a general distinction between the aristocrats and the common people is carried by the textures of the costumes they wear. He notes that the peas

Compare

Home

About this Project

News and Blog

Acknowledgements

Experts, scholars, institutions

Sponsors, supporters, patrons of the crowdfunding campaign

ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

Film Colors. Technologies, Cultures, Institutions

Contribute Texts or Media

Budget / Sponsors

Important copyright notice

Contact

Timeline of Historical Film Colors

Donate

Donate

Category

Color System

Inventor

Principle

Filter

Show only

483 Results

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags