L'Amérique vue par un australien / Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993)

When the Cat Comes (Vojtech Jasný, 1963; photographed by Jaroslav Kucera)

Simone Barbès, or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980; photographed by Jean-Yves Escoffier)

“We have just screened Il deserto Rosso, would you please let us know if Technicolor desaturated the film. Also we would like any information that you can get regarding types of filters used, etc. One of the credits on this picture reads: 'I colori ‘TINTAL’ sono stati forniti dal COLORIFICIO ITALIANO MAX MEYER' I think the translation of this credit is: 'The colors ‘TINTAL’ were provided by MAX MEYER ITALIAN COLOR INDUSTRY' What exactly is 'TINTAL'? Did the MAX MEYER Company supply the prints for the sets or did they work in conjunction with Mr. Antonioni and Mr. di Palma to design the colors of the sets, or what?"

--Letter from Alfred Hitchcock's assistant, Peggy Robertson, to Giulio Ascarelli of Universal Films in Rome, April 1965, as quoted in "Notes on Some Limits of Technicolor: The Antonioni Case". The "we" refers to herself and Hitchcock.

[Farzana Wahidy / AP Photo]

The Red Pallets

One of the most beautiful colors I've seen in any movie made in the last few years is the red of the pallets in Dernier Maquis. It isn't a deep red, but a brilliant crabshell color, one that looks equally good in bright sunlight and under electric lights. The stacks of pallets form winding red mazes for the characters to make their way through and ersatz backdrops for the action of Ameur-Zaïmeche's little drama. Men lift them, lean against them, sit on them. In their ordinariness, they're better than any stage.

Two in Red

Franscope and American Color

One tradition we've sadly lost: the "first film in color." That second debut that usually marked the moment a director became more commercially viable (though nowadays we have a new tradition, exclusive to older filmmakers--the "first film on video"--that usually marks the beginning of a looser, less commercially-minded period). As The Red Desert, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, so in L’Aîné des Ferchaux (sometimes called Magnet of Doom in English), Jean-Pierre Melville's first film in color, a film set largely (and largely unknown) in America. Melville's other color films are designed in this sort of funeral parlor hue that gives everything a sense of twilight. A haze, a prolonged decay that permeates the image and brings out the green in a person's skin.

The images all have exclamation points, as if Melville's thinking "America! New York!" The excited way street signs and motels are framed gives it a sort of home movie quality: a little movie and a big one, at the same time. That sort of mad love for American culture only a foreigner (usually a Frenchman) can have, the kind that leads Jean-Paul Belmondo, in the scene above, to punch out two GIs for calling Frank Sinatra a "wop." Melville is a man of symbols, but they tend to be symbols of a fairly minute nature: clothing, cars, the way objects (cigarettes, pistols, hats) are held and handled. L’Aîné des Ferchaux seems to be working on the largest level of any Melville movie--the symbols it works with are fairly large: cities, popular references, thousands of dollar bills raining down into a canyon. The landscape shots look like sketches for the Western Melville always hoped to make; the project was never realized, but with L’Aîné des Ferchaux we get little glimpses of, like in the sequence where Belmondo kisses a beautiful hitch-hiker against the backdrop of a stern blue sky and imposing rocks, a river rushing along nearby.

The Color Green

An Affair to Remember and Police Beat

Would anyone remember Lee Marvin's scarf in Seven Men from Now so well if it was the usual red or yellow instead of that fertile green that stands out against the dusty brown of Lone Pine?

Why does the color green always stand out so vividly in movies? Is it because we see it so rarely? It's like the George Harrison of the movie palett: an essential (and underrated) element, and it's always a pleasure to see it take the lead.

It seems like filmmakers' passions always lie with red or blue, never with green. Maybe Technicolor is to blame: it was so good and vivid with those colors and green was more the domain of Agfacolor (also known as Ansocolor). Jacques Tourneur's Stranger on Horseback has some of the sharpest greens in cinema, thanks to the Anscocolor, but they say the director was never happy with it.

Blue was fashionable for a while. I hope green will be all the rage some time soon.