British Colour Cinematography
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright material – 9781844574131 © British Film Institute 2013 Introduction and editorial arrangement © Simon Brown, Sarah Street, Liz Watkins 2013 Interviews © the respective interviewers and interviewees 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Cover image: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images Designed by couch Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–413–1 (pb) ISBN 978–1–84457–414–8 (hb) Copyright material – 9781844574131 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII PERMISSIONS VIII ABOUT THE EDITORS IX INTRODUCTION 1 PART I – COLOUR AND THE CAMERA: CINEMATOGRAPHERS INTRODUCTION 7 INTERVIEW: Christopher Challis 10 INTERVIEW: Pat Jackson 32 DOCUMENT: Jack Cardiff, ‘Shooting “Western Approaches”’, Cine-Technician, November–December 1944 48 INTERVIEW: Oswald Morris 54 INTERVIEW: Guy Green 84 INTERVIEW: Erwin Hillier 88 INTERVIEW: Douglas Slocombe 90 INTERVIEW: Paul Beeson 94 INTERVIEW: Stan Sayer 98 DOCUMENT: Ronald Neame, ‘A Talk on Technicolor’, Cine-Technician, May–June 1944 104 PART II – POST-PRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 111 INTERVIEW: Syd Wilson 114 INTERVIEW: Dave Davis 124 INTERVIEW: Bernard Happé 132 INTERVIEW: Frank Littlejohn 140 INTERVIEW: Les Ostinelli 148 Copyright material – 9781844574131 PART III – RESTORATION/PRESERVATION INTRODUCTION 153 INTERVIEW: Paul de Burgh 158 DOCUMENT: ‘Preservation of Films’, Kinematograph Weekly, 13 March 1952 172 INTERVIEW: João S. de Oliveira 174 INTERVIEW: Kieron Webb 186 INTERVIEW: Sonia Genaitay 200 DOCUMENT: Robert M. Fanstone, ‘Experiences with Dufaycolor Film’, British Journal of Photography, 7 June 1935 208 DOCUMENT: ‘Gasparcolour Explained to the R.P.S.’, Kinematograph Weekly, 31 January 1935 210 INTERVIEW: Paolo Cherchi Usai 214 INTERVIEW: Ulrich Rüdel and Daniela Currò 220 INTERVIEW: Giovanna Fossati 228 PART IV – ASSESSING COLOUR’S IMPACT: CONTEMPORARY THEORIES INTRODUCTION 239 DOCUMENT: Adrian Cornwell-Clyne, ‘The Future of the Colour Film’, in Colour Cinematography 1951 242 DOCUMENT: E. S. Tompkins, ‘In Defence of “Glorious” Colour’, British Journal of Photography, 3 March 1944 248 DOCUMENT: Paul Nash, ‘The Colour Film’, in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film, 1938 250 INDEX 260 Copyright material – 9781844574131 INTRODUCTION It is significant that a book on the theory and practice of colour should be completed in the year that the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Artist (2011), was black and white, only the second such film to win since The Apartment (1960), the other being Schindler’s List (1993). When reviewing the 2012 ceremony film critic Mark Kermode noted that ‘It’s amazing how quickly everyone got used to, and then bored with, the idea that a black and white, near silent 4 x 3 film … was about to win the Oscar for best picture’.1 In his view, despite the hype that made the awarding of the Oscar to The Artist unsurprising, it was precisely the fact that the film was in black and white which made the win remarkable. Colour in contemporary cinema is so taken for granted that it only becomes a topic of discussion when attention is drawn to it. This, Tom Gunning argues, is part of the processes of modernity, in which the ‘new’ becomes familiar and the wonder which first greeted a new technology, such as colour, ‘becomes subsumed in action, then in habitual action, and ultimately in the diametric opposite of wonder, automatism’.2 However, Gunning argues that wonder does not dis- appear but ‘crouches there beneath a rational cover, ready to spring out again … through aesthetic defamiliarization’.3 In the same way we take an ordinary household object like a television set for granted until it breaks down and we are forced to reassess its significance in our lives, The Artist, at least temporarily, disrupted contemporary complacency with the use of colour in cinema (along with sound) before that same complacency reasserted itself through the predictability of the awards season. What should not be forgotten is that black and white are themselves colours. While the contemporary concept of a film being in black and white connotes the absence or antithesis of colour, black-and-white films are, nevertheless, colour films. They just happen to use only two colours that do not approximate the world as we normally see it. This is noteworthy because colour in contemporary mainstream cinema is, for the most part, perceived to be used not for artistic purposes but purely to approximate the colour of the real world. Thus a blue sky represents what a blue sky looks like, and a red Transformer, even though computer-generated, nevertheless looks like a red Transformer would look like in the imagination of the director. While colour manipulation is now I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 Copyright material – 9781844574131 relatively commonplace in post-production, especially for example in CGI blockbusters such as Transformers (2007) and Avatar (2009) where a large proportion of what is on screen does not actually exist outside an imagined virtual space, nevertheless there is a tacit understanding that the purpose of colour is to replicate the colours of the real (‘reel’ in the case of CGI) world and so part of the ‘disruption’ is the use of colour in ways that are not merely representative, such as the use of black and white in The Artist. But the fact that colour on film is seen to be replicating reality also hides the fact that colour on film is the result of a series of significant creative and technological decisions on the part of filmmakers, technicians and, in the case of restorations, archivists. Decisions about costume and lighting, about grading and the mixing of colour dyes, about photochem- ical or digital restorations of old negatives, all have impact on the colour which we see on the screen. The focus of this book is the creative decision-making which goes into the life cycle of a colour film, from production to post-production, preservation and restoration, con- centrating in particular upon the British contribution to colour. While Technicolor and Eastmancolor were American processes, British artists, craftsmen and technicians have over the years played a substantial role in the ‘look’ of colour, particularly Technicolor, in terms of how it was filmed, printed and, more recently, restored. A case in point is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s two acclaimed post-war Technicolor masterpieces, Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). The vibrant colours on display in recent restored prints and DVD releases were filtered through the eyes of British craftsmen such as cinematographer Jack Cardiff, through lab technicians such as Syd Wilson and Jack Houshold, and through restoration experts like Paul de Burgh. This book aims to illumi- nate the wealth of work, thought and attention to detail which hides behind the seem- ingly known concept of colour. Colour in film is created, not re-created; interpreted, not represented. This book ‘disrupts’ assumptions about the process of putting colour on the screen, and encourages the reader to wonder anew. To fulfil this aim the book presents case studies in three key areas of production, post- production and archiving/restoration. Rather than academic analysis, these chapters are comprised of interviews with key personnel in these areas, some of which are new inter- views conducted by the authors, while others were undertaken as part of the BECTU History Project organised by the trade union which represents those working in film and other entertainment industries. These interviews are contextualised by introductions and by documents contemporary to the production and restoration of each film. Part I highlights the contributions of cinematographers, many of them credited with filming some of the most significant colour films ever made. Their accounts of working with various processes, and of witnessing the arrival of colour in commercial cinema, reveal their pioneering achievements in rising to the demanding challenge of creating colour in the camera. While colour innovation is often credited solely to cinematographers, the interviews and documents show that they were part of a highly collaborative system devis- ing ingenious methods to overcome exacting technical problems.