On the Dialectics of Filmic Colors (In General) and Red (In Particular): Three Colors: Red, Red Desert, Cries and Whispers, And the Double Life of Veronique‪.‬

One of the most powerful theorizations of color, as one might expect, stems from Sergei Eisenstein, and appears in his late-1930s drafts of Towards a Theory of Montage (Eisenstein 254-67). The theory is proleptic of Eisenstein's actual acquisition of color film, which occurred when the Red Army's capture of German Agfa stock permitted the filming of portions of Ivan the Terrible Part II (1958) in color. Rather than lamenting his lack of access to color stock, however, Eisenstein surprises readers by classifying black-and-white as colors, though he later parenthetically admits their status as tones (Eisenstein 264). His initial description of them as colors may reflect his undoubted impatience to incorporate reflections on color into his montage-based theory, and may even indicate a desire to maintain--fearfully, belligerently, or both--that nothing any filmmaker might need could be lacking in the Soviet Union. Moreover, black, white, and red all figure in Battleship Potemkin (1925), the flag flying at its end being tinted a triumphant red. With those three colors at his disposal (the black and white of melodramatic political confrontation, and the red of the blood flowing from them uplifted--sublated?--into the sacredness of the flag), Eisenstein may have felt he had all he needed. Whatever its motivation, his theoretical move may also be salutary for contemporary readers, subverting our entrenched binary of monochrome and color. If there is anything potentially significant at stake in the dissolution of that binary, meanwhile, it may well be the gendering of monochrome as male and "color" as female; after all, with a few exceptions--such as the Roger Corman film mentioned below--it is always "the woman in red". Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964), one of the key films considered below, would be particularly supportive of an argument that destabilizes the color/monochrome opposition, even though its female protagonist--Giuliana--does not wear red. My main interest in the essay that follows will be in films that blur this opposition by pairing a color usually acknowledged as one of the primaries with color schemes that privilege black, white, or both these hues. The frequency of couplings of these three "colors" probably reflects red's customary appearance as the first unequivocal color word in languages, after black and white (Theroux 58-9), whose status as colors remains controversial. There are obvious reasons for this near-primacy and for these juxtapositions: as the Old Testament asserts, "the blood is the life," its emergence often preceding either the symbolic blackness of death or the pallor of the blood-drained body--or else staining the whiteness of a sheet with the menstrual marker of virginity, fertility. In all these cases, red gains power from its status as a hidden principle. Moreover, its concealment is not just within the human body but within that of earth itself, from which emerged the "Adam" whose name means "red": as Theroux points out, "[t]here is in nature a hidden palate of reds. (...) It is found in soils everywhere" (162). Because one may be startled to realize that so visually arresting a color should somehow have remained out of sight, the moment of its appearance has the eclat of a potentially dramatic turning point (as in Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death [1964]).