On the Color Blue in Cinema

07 BLUE Léa Seydoux’s blue hair might as well be the only thing in the movie; it is responsible THE CINEMATIC for bringing the entire world into color. words eileen townsend on the silver screen, blue is for sadness, for women, for power, for sex. filmmakers use the many shades of blue to reflect the world, revealing its natural poetry and luminous complexity. Some blues wash over you: slate blue, sky blue, cornflower villain and hypnotizes the virgin. When Frank Booth (played Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) by Abdellatif Kechiche archive blue. These shades drift easily, finding the smooth surfaces by Dennis Hopper) tries to stuff Dorothy Vallens’s robe in af of things. Other blues emanate: sapphire blue, azure, Inter- his mouth, tries to consume it, it leaves him whimpering or national Klein Blue — shades that bleed and pool, that trap enraged. Blue evades him. Lynch’s blue is erotic, no doubt, light and refuse to let it go. Hypnotic blue. VCR screen blue. but it isn’t the color of a woman’s sexuality so much as it is DEPTHS OF BLUE In movies, blue is everywhere, and it’s usually a woman’s the color of a woman’s spirit, her inaccessible depths. color, despite the fact that we grew up learning that “pink is Blue movies are sad movies. Is it too obvious to say that for girls” and “blue is for boys.” Putting aside baby-blue, a grief is blue? The word has stood as a metaphor for depres- sleepy-eyed color for pouty blondes (think Christina Ricci sion for so long that it’s a cliché – “blue nights” or “blue in Vincent Gallo’s 1998 film Buffalo ’66), the true woman’s Christmas” or “having the blues.” But a certain kind of blue, blue is the deep, indescribable blue of Isabella Rossellini’s a steel blue, suggests a complicated melancholy. Kandin- blue robe in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986); it’s an adult sky wrote that blue is the most spiritual color. If green is hue, rich and threatening. In Blue Velvet’s credit sequence, the color of life and growth, blue is the color of separation the moving folds of blue velvet are so luminously complex from the world of the living. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s´ 1993 film that they almost resemble something between plant and Blue (one of the director’s Three Colors series), expresses animal, alien and terrestrial — networks of fungi or a lost the complex grief of a young woman (played by Juliette species of coral. Lynch’s blue catches the light in a way that Binoche) who suddenly loses her husband and daughter feels uncanny. In the film’s moral universe, it is the color in an automobile accident. The world of her grief is a gray- that ignites madness and violence; it’s what unhinges the blue wash, neither here nor there, occasionally shaken by 269 MASTERMIND 07 07 BLUE Blue is the color of Nicole Kidman’s dreams and nightmares, the color of the light that bathes her when she confesses her visions to her husband. terrible clouds of cobalt blue. In her late daughter’s room, the 75-minute movie, Jarman and an ensemble narrate his called only “the blue room,” is a bright-blue chandelier of experience going blind from AIDS and losing his friends, glass baubles that catch the light. Blue, in Kieslowski’s´ film, one by one, to the virus. In Jarman’s Blue, blue is not an is the living aspect of the dead. It is a powerful and inviting option; it’s the blue of obliteration, of a state that looks the color – almost too powerful, too inviting. It has to be reck- other way. But still, there’s something to love in blue. “The oned with. blood of sensibility is blue,” says Jarman. “I consecrate In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), blue is the myself to find its most perfect expression.” color of Nicole Kidman’s dreams and nightmares, the color Of course, as with any color, blue depends on what color of the light that bathes her when she confesses her visions you place next to it. Kate Winslet has rockabilly blue hair to her husband. It’s also the color of the dream of marriage – next to a high visibility orange hoodie in Eternal Sunshine of of the wife’s sweater when she eats breakfast with her small the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). The Valhalla blue photo daughter – a safe, consensual reality constantly threatened scene in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) con- stock by temptation. Blue was never more primary than in Eyes trasts strikingly with the dust storm yellows of the rest of Wide Shut. It’s offered only in stark contrast to rich, erotic, the film. In Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color scarlet reds; it’s the color of a wintery, sleepwalking domes- (2013), Léa Seydoux’s blue hair might as well be the only library/alamy ticity. By the end of the film, the characters cling to that blue thing in the movie; it is responsible for bringing the entire Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Stanley Kubrick for dear life. world into color. And then there’s the billowing blue and picture Other blues are sexy in the way that power is sexy. In black carport in Peter Greenaway’s incredible The Cook, Belly, Hype Williams’s 1998 movie starring DMX and Nas, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Greenaway’s blues allstar the first scene shows the blue of the new millennium, a and blacks are hellish, the color of inescapable violence. To cyber-influenced digital blue laced with the authoritarian Greenaway, blue and black form the wretched underside of blue flash of police lights: blue as the color of the law and a Jacobean drama, the colors of putrefaction and rot, of the lawlessness, an emergency blue. It’s rumored that Williams spreading bruise of mankind. (known for directing futuristic rap videos in the early 2000s) These are all just claims about blue – people make lots of spent the majority of the movie’s $3 million budget on the claims about blue. Counterintuitive claims, because blue is initial scene, in which DMX and Nas work their way through naturally poetic. Blue is the warmest color. The white snow a strip club under blue strobes, their pupils glowing white- was never white but was really always blue. Jarman also blue as they ascend a staircase shooting off automatic wrote that “blue is darkness made visible.” Black is blue weapons and looking blankly into the future. but blue is the color of the sky and water, which means it is The bluest movie is a late work by Derek Jarman called also somehow clear. Perhaps it shows up in films so much Blue (1993), with nothing but a pure International Klein Blue because we perceive it as both reflective and transparent, a screen occasionally blistered by scratches and noise. In color to be seen through and to drown inside. 270 271.

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