I recently watched each of the three films in Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. I've been meaning to write about them, but haven't been able to focus my thoughts. (I get like that when I'm stressed. Which is why I never get much writing done when I'm unemployed, despite having so much time. Too worried about running out of money.)
At any rate - I'm sitting down to make my attempt.
Usually, before I write about a film, I read up on it and listen to the commentary. I didn't listen to the commentary on these, because I wanted to simply experience them - all three - as a whole. Eventually I'll buy them and listen to all the commentaries, but for now I'm just going on my own impressions. I have read a little about them, did before watching them. I'd originally heard of them through the commentary on Heaven, which was written by Kieslowski as part of another trilogy, but not made until after his death. It was directed by Twyker, and I found it after watching Twyker's The Princess and the Warrior, which was a wonderful portrayal of the differences in the way men and women communicate and relate to others. I watched Heaven, knowing nothing about its history, which was only alluded to briefly in the commentary.
So I looked up the Three Colors, and found that many people believe Blue is among the most finely crafted, perfect films ever made. When approaching movies these days, I try to learn very little about them in advance. I find that I am more likely to enjoy them if I go in without many expectations of what they should be... and sometimes I end up disliking a film that others I respect are saying is brilliant.
Well, in this case I am in accordance with those who think that Three Colors are brilliant.
I am glad I decided to watch all three films within a few days of each other. Though the stories are not a trilogy in the sense of being three parts of the same story with the same characters, no "part II & III" here, they are thematically related, and there is a definite emotional and spiritual progression across all three.
The theme of Red, the third film, is in fact the theme of all three - though it approaches it more directly: the human need for connection.
Each film uses color thematically, though Kieslowski employs it in different ways in each.
In Blue, it represents her grief. Some people have said it represents her moments of peace, but I think that's wrong. It's her most intense moments of feeling, when she immerses herself in the grief. And in some of those moments she finds a kind of peace. The color is tied to the memories and feelings she's trying to cast away. Ultimately, she's unable to disconnect herself, and it's only through accepting her connections, and through immersing herself in memories that she is able to move forward. The completion of her husband's final work, a piece about unification, is the act by which she
a) remembers her husband on a personal level
b) memorializes him in the public sphere
c) channels her emotions into a creative work
d) uses her connection and memory to move forward into the future and establish herself as her own person
Blue is almost meditative. Powerful and intense, the protagonist spends so much time alone that there is very little dialogue, and the music and the images (including Binoche's superbly subtle acting) tell the story.
Grief is difficult to portray. It can become melodrama so easily. This film, however, perfectly captured something quite close to my own experience of it. Even for those who do not go to such extremes to leave their old life behind, you do feel very much alone. You feel like your grief separates you from the world, from everyone around you (ironic, since it's a universal experience - the loss of loved ones.)
I must confess - as much as I was appreciative of the film and recognize its genius (a word I don't use casually), as much as I love the poetry of its images and deftness of the acting... I did not love Blue. I found it too difficult to watch, too unnerving, too uncomfortable. All of which simply underscore the brilliance, but it was simply too close to home for me.
One of the three screenplays I'm working on now centers around a young widow who is afraid of being touched and who must decide whether to memorialize her husband's legacy as an artist, or to let it go and move on with her life. And it does so, because that is my own story. My own process. And it's one which still continues and is still quite sharp and painful (even after ten years.) So, no - I was not able to really enjoy Blue as much as it deserved.
White uses the thematic color to represent an man's idealized vision of his wife. She is blonde and pale, and he has a bust which reminds him of her white skin. He remembers, over and over, her in her wedding dress. It's a little harder to spot the use of color in white. It doesn't saturate the way that Blue and Red do, but it's still a frequent presence.
Of the three, White has the most external story. It's funny - and makes light of dark subjects. The protagonist spends the film trying to get back home, make himself a "better" man, and re-capture the love of his cruel but beautiful wife. If this were an American film, we'd spend the movie psychoanalyzing why he would want to win back such a bitch, but Kieslowski never bothers to ask - because the answer is obvious. What man doesn't want the love of a beautiful woman? To impress her with his success and make her belong to him?
Her cruelty and capriciousness is no different from the cruelty of the world itself. She is a force of nature, an ideal which he strives for. She doesn't ever become quite real, and this is exactly how she is meant to be.
Whereas the protagonist in Blue goes to great lengths to run away from her connection with others, the protagonist in White goes to great (even absurd) lengths to assert his connection to one specific other...but his path to her ends up creating and strengthening his connections to the rest of the people in his life.
In Red, there's no mistaking the presence of the color. It's there in almost every shot, sometimes a spot of color, an accent, and often in great washes of red that take up most of the screen.
I found myself puzzling over the specific thematic correlation. In the other films, the titular color was used in very specific ways, to represent the emotion at the core of the story. In Red, it's so pervasive, I wasn't able to find any common thread. But by the end of the movie, I realized that was precisely the point.
Red is about connections. Chance, or purposeful. The ways that we brush up against one another, and suddenly find ourselves looking into another person's eyes and really seeing them, listening to another person's words and really hearing them. It's almost a shock when it happens, and yet it has a pleasant warmth - much like the color red.
Of the three, though I can recognize Blue as more finely crafted, I personally enjoyed Red the most. It is a story driven by chance. The characters seem buffeted about by fate or some other mysterious force. They do not make their most meaningful connections by choice... but it is by their choices that they are taken to them, and by choice that they recognize and nurture them.
All three films employ chance in a way that could easily ruin a story in lesser hands. Coincidence is tricky. It usually feels too convenient, too pat. It feels forced. Three Colors, however, are a study of what happens to people in the face of the random (or is it) whims of fate. It is through random chance that we find our most meaningful moments. The protagonist in Red seems to embrace this fully, and in the end is led to the possibility of love.
I could go on more about the symbolism in this last film... the seven puppies, the seven stones, the seven survivors. Several specific instances of chance, the similarity to Amelie... but I just noticed it's 3:55am. I really ought to go to bed.
Perhaps I'll further amend this in the future, but not likely.
One more word, though... I found Red to be one of the most romantic movies I've ever seen, and I'm such a sucker for that.
Showing posts with label color in film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label color in film. Show all posts
Communicating with Color
I am among the minority who figured out the "twist" in Sixth Sense well before it was revealed. Now, to be fair, I did go into it looking for clues - because I knew there was a surprise - but people had done a remarkable job of keeping silent about the nature if that surprise and I had not been given the slightest hint.
I believe I figured it out because I'm very attuned to color. I tend to link my memories to the color someone was wearing, or the color of a room. I noticed all those little bits of red Shyamalan placed at key moments.
Now, red does not inherently have a meaning that would associate it with the dead, but by using it consistently, the filmmaker imbued it with his own meaning. He does the same again in other films: red and yellow in The Village (where it was explained explicitly - and thus became too heavy-handed), in Unbreakable it was green and purple (which really gave me the sense of the comic-book world of the movie.)
Shyamalan uses it almost like a blog tag. Every time we see X we see color A.
I'm wishing I had sat down to re-watch Kurosawa's Ran before writing this blog. People comment all the time on how visually striking the color is, how it made the battle scenes so powerful, with the movements of the armies swirling against one another. But I would be interested to see whether the colors assigned to each son were purposeful. For instance, the faithful son was blue. (I have no idea whether there is a similar Japanese association as in the west - "true blue.")
Many directors use is to help set a mood.
American Beauty is an excellent example. Using the emotional associations we already have with red, the color is used to accent passion and sensuality. The red rose posy that is so tightly arranged is like Carolyn's restrained and controlled sexuality. Lester fantasizes about those red rose petals falling, coming loose, slipping wetly from a mouth...
David Lynch uses color in heightened ways to create his exaggerated moods and often a sense of uneasiness or surrealism...
But the director who comes to my mind most when I think of the intentional use of color as a storytelling element is Peter Greenaway.
Greenaway is a former painter, and his films show a strong visual sense, shots carefully framed. He exemplifies film as a visual storytelling medium better than any director I can think of - using the images themselves to convey meaning as much as any character or plot element. Nearly all of his movies use color in interesting ways. The film that most exemplifies this is probably The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
The Cook, The Thief is a rich and intense film of social and political criticism. (Among other things.) Each of the four characters represents a strata of society, and their relationships are how these strata interact with one another.
The Thief, who bullies them all, is consumerist capitalism - Thatcherist England. He's crass and abusive and greedy. His wife is society - kept tightly bound and dependent, mostly inured to the awful things he says and does to her. She seems icy, and yet yearns for something rich in all the ways her wealthy husband is not. The object of desire between two men. (But don't ever confuse one of Greenaway's women for a victim. They are vicious in their own way.) The cook is the working class and/or the artist - he's French, an immigrant, humiliated by his employer and yet he needs him in order to have a place to both earn his bread and practice his art... and the lover represents the intellectuals, carefully skirting consumerist society, trying to taste the good things without being destroyed by the greed. It's no accident that he reads about the French Revolution, and the chef whose art inspires him, who ultimately defies the Thief, is French.
(Greenaway himself likes to leave his work open to interpretation and comments little on meaning. The most he's said about this film is that it is about a "claustrophobic European situation" and that he compares to the baroque through visual cues. He wants to force the viewer to be an active participant in the art.)
Color is a major structural element, as much a part of creating the meaning as framing or editing.
The domains of these individuals are each color-coded. The ladies' room is white. All purity. The heavenly escape. The dining room is red and pruple, lurid and oppresively ostentatious (red: the "power color") - hell itself, where the devil reigns. The kitchen, which is the creative and fertile center of the film, is lush greens. The parking lot is in blues, not calm here but dark and otherworldly, almost menacing. This is a borderland between the restaurant and the ordinary world. The book depository (the lover's realm - away from the restaurant) in modest browns, leather and wood - things of true wealth and lasting value as opposed to the flashier and more temporal riches of the dining room.
There is also a brief use of yellow in the hospital, where it is used as a symbol of fertility and healing - as the yolk of an egg.
As the characters pass from one room, one realm to another - their clothing changes color to match. A dress that was red in the dining room is white in the bathroom. They are a product of their environments, changing easily. One exception is that the lover retains his brown clothing while in the restaurant - he is not effected by the lavish surroundings, does not belong to this realm - is only a visitor in hell.
Interestingly, the wife - who is the protagonist of the film, the one who undergoes a transformation in the ladies' room, is the only one who ever changes here. Though her lover meets her here, he is unaffected - and no one else enters. The room is so bright, it's almost a transformative fire.
The other character who retains his own color throughout, though he does not often leave his realm, is the cook (white, though his realm is green.) Despite his circumstances, the artist retains his identity. Perhaps he is already transformed.
I could go on a great deal longer about this movie - but the copy I ordered last week turns out to have been the wrong format, so I can't pop in the DVD and make notes and am relying mostly on my memory and a little research. (Couldn't recall what location was yellow, and whether the parking lot was blues or greys.)
But Greenaway's use of color makes clear that this element can be used not simply to make something pop on screen, or to make dramatic images - but to create meaning and structure in cinema.
(crossposted here)
I believe I figured it out because I'm very attuned to color. I tend to link my memories to the color someone was wearing, or the color of a room. I noticed all those little bits of red Shyamalan placed at key moments.
Now, red does not inherently have a meaning that would associate it with the dead, but by using it consistently, the filmmaker imbued it with his own meaning. He does the same again in other films: red and yellow in The Village (where it was explained explicitly - and thus became too heavy-handed), in Unbreakable it was green and purple (which really gave me the sense of the comic-book world of the movie.)
Shyamalan uses it almost like a blog tag. Every time we see X we see color A.
I'm wishing I had sat down to re-watch Kurosawa's Ran before writing this blog. People comment all the time on how visually striking the color is, how it made the battle scenes so powerful, with the movements of the armies swirling against one another. But I would be interested to see whether the colors assigned to each son were purposeful. For instance, the faithful son was blue. (I have no idea whether there is a similar Japanese association as in the west - "true blue.")
Many directors use is to help set a mood.
American Beauty is an excellent example. Using the emotional associations we already have with red, the color is used to accent passion and sensuality. The red rose posy that is so tightly arranged is like Carolyn's restrained and controlled sexuality. Lester fantasizes about those red rose petals falling, coming loose, slipping wetly from a mouth...
David Lynch uses color in heightened ways to create his exaggerated moods and often a sense of uneasiness or surrealism...
But the director who comes to my mind most when I think of the intentional use of color as a storytelling element is Peter Greenaway.
Greenaway is a former painter, and his films show a strong visual sense, shots carefully framed. He exemplifies film as a visual storytelling medium better than any director I can think of - using the images themselves to convey meaning as much as any character or plot element. Nearly all of his movies use color in interesting ways. The film that most exemplifies this is probably The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
The Cook, The Thief is a rich and intense film of social and political criticism. (Among other things.) Each of the four characters represents a strata of society, and their relationships are how these strata interact with one another.
The Thief, who bullies them all, is consumerist capitalism - Thatcherist England. He's crass and abusive and greedy. His wife is society - kept tightly bound and dependent, mostly inured to the awful things he says and does to her. She seems icy, and yet yearns for something rich in all the ways her wealthy husband is not. The object of desire between two men. (But don't ever confuse one of Greenaway's women for a victim. They are vicious in their own way.) The cook is the working class and/or the artist - he's French, an immigrant, humiliated by his employer and yet he needs him in order to have a place to both earn his bread and practice his art... and the lover represents the intellectuals, carefully skirting consumerist society, trying to taste the good things without being destroyed by the greed. It's no accident that he reads about the French Revolution, and the chef whose art inspires him, who ultimately defies the Thief, is French.
(Greenaway himself likes to leave his work open to interpretation and comments little on meaning. The most he's said about this film is that it is about a "claustrophobic European situation" and that he compares to the baroque through visual cues. He wants to force the viewer to be an active participant in the art.)
Color is a major structural element, as much a part of creating the meaning as framing or editing.
The domains of these individuals are each color-coded. The ladies' room is white. All purity. The heavenly escape. The dining room is red and pruple, lurid and oppresively ostentatious (red: the "power color") - hell itself, where the devil reigns. The kitchen, which is the creative and fertile center of the film, is lush greens. The parking lot is in blues, not calm here but dark and otherworldly, almost menacing. This is a borderland between the restaurant and the ordinary world. The book depository (the lover's realm - away from the restaurant) in modest browns, leather and wood - things of true wealth and lasting value as opposed to the flashier and more temporal riches of the dining room.
There is also a brief use of yellow in the hospital, where it is used as a symbol of fertility and healing - as the yolk of an egg.
As the characters pass from one room, one realm to another - their clothing changes color to match. A dress that was red in the dining room is white in the bathroom. They are a product of their environments, changing easily. One exception is that the lover retains his brown clothing while in the restaurant - he is not effected by the lavish surroundings, does not belong to this realm - is only a visitor in hell.
Interestingly, the wife - who is the protagonist of the film, the one who undergoes a transformation in the ladies' room, is the only one who ever changes here. Though her lover meets her here, he is unaffected - and no one else enters. The room is so bright, it's almost a transformative fire.
The other character who retains his own color throughout, though he does not often leave his realm, is the cook (white, though his realm is green.) Despite his circumstances, the artist retains his identity. Perhaps he is already transformed.
I could go on a great deal longer about this movie - but the copy I ordered last week turns out to have been the wrong format, so I can't pop in the DVD and make notes and am relying mostly on my memory and a little research. (Couldn't recall what location was yellow, and whether the parking lot was blues or greys.)
But Greenaway's use of color makes clear that this element can be used not simply to make something pop on screen, or to make dramatic images - but to create meaning and structure in cinema.
(crossposted here)
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