FILMOSOPHY: COLOUR (1996)

Filmosophy: Colour

(1996)

in Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie, eds, _New Scholarship from BFI Research_ (London: British Film Institute, 1996), pp. 86-110.

[p. 86:]

In the history of film studies philosophy has not played much of a part. Disciplines such as literature, sociology and psychoanalysis have sped away with 'cinema', and a significant, philosophical reassessment of the ground of moving images has been continuously passed over (usually in fear), and placed in the margins of film studies. The sense in which I am sliding in 'philosophy' here is for a more ruminative thinking about film, with a healthy distrust of inherited terms and concepts, and the setting about, where necessary, of forming new words and concepts to open up and reveal the workings of film.

The reason for introducing a new term, filmosophy, is that while the ideas of this essay skirt around some recognisable theoretical areas, the whole, loose and contingent as it is, cannot be constrained by any single one of them. Furthermore, the neologism signals an important concern of the project as a whole, that is: film study must progress conceptually to survive (how else does film art move on but with new sounds and images). The work-in-progress that is filmosophy encompasses a variety of components: the understanding of film composition as steered by a 'film-mind' -- how film decides and considers its own objects; a type of meditative, open thinking by the experiencer onto the film (partially gained by understanding, and thus unconsciously utilising, filmosophical terms and indicators); the coining of those filmosophical terms using words, regular or invented, that fulfil filmosophy's aim to get as near as possible to linguistically revealing the experience of film; the performative, poetical writing of analyses that attempt to feel the (sometimes philosophical) power of moving images; the use by the films themselves (as intentional, willing film-minds) of all types of thinking in their composition (a standard conventionally constructed film can be studied for its thinkings, while the films of, say, Antonioni and Kieslowski might be wrote about as *being* 'filmosophical'). Filmosophy also covers the philosophical im- [p. 87:] portance of moving image thinking, and the possibilities of utilising this non-conceptual thinking for philosophy and the teaching of both visual literacy and the new home cinema of the camcorder.

First, *our* thinking. We mix life to our own production quality, taking in certain things in favour of others available, continually interpreting. Simple experience is always a thinking action -- conscious or unconscious. Thinking is the fact that we do anything at all. As Martin Heidegger noted, 'the field of vision is something open, but its openness is not due to our looking' [1] -- our eyes don't work on their own, our thinking is what reveals things to us. (We might say that an awareness of these 'interpretations' is a philosophical extension of those experiences.) From my sound world I can similarly focus on particular sources, can think in or out certain noises. I can think out the traffic noise down in the street below, usually unconsciously, but always significantly. I can steer my hearing to a sound that I want to identify -- like a squeak in a car.

Then, we *do* thinking; we engage and practice thinking at certain times when we feel the need. I sit at my desk and I go over certain key words around 'thinking' such that I may elucidate on the subject in my writing. I work things out. Abstractly, in this case, but at other times I may call up images to help my train of thought, but images that are in every way 'referenced', that is, linguistically understood. These images can themselves move in to a sort of day-dreaming, a non-localised mode of thinking, free-ish, and creative. Imagination can be part of this thinking, trying out situations or images that have not come to me before, testing how they would fit in my current thought. Remembering, attentiveness, concentration, belief (what do you think about it?), reasoning, reflection, pondering -- all these are types of thinking, thinkings which we do daily.

Gilles Deleuze, in his two volume _Cinema_, argued that a certain type of contemporary cinema gives birth to 'mental-images'. Deleuze sees in the mental-image an attempt to make the mental

'the proper object of the image, a specific, explicit image, with its own figures . . . which takes as objects of thought, objects which have their existence outside thought, just as the objects of perception have their own existence outside perception. *It is an image which takes as its object, relations*, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings.' [2]

This is not to say that this image represents some person's thoughts, but that the image links directly *with* thought. For Deleuze an image is defined as being a mental-image if it makes *relation* its object, that is if it requires of us the act of *interpretation*, to work out what the [p. 88:] image relates *to*. Deleuze means his mental-image to embody the two 'faces' of the image, 'one turned towards the characters, the objects and the actions in movement, the other turned towards a whole which changes progressively as the film goes on'. [3] A thinking steering our knowledge of what is happening, while also being in full control of the film's overall concerns. According to Deleuze, this new image, this new mutation of cinema, strove to become 'truly thought and thinking, even if it had to become 'difficult' in order to do this'. [4] But the real importance of Deleuze's new situations (images or sequences) is their power, the power of pure image and sound, to 'replace, obliterate and re-create the object itself . . . to give rise to a seeing function'. [5] Here Deleuze is at his most incisive in realising that the image can direct our attitude toward the object, in the image, in effect subordinating any independent reference to the object. In this new thought-cinema Deleuze finds

'a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into. And it becomes questioning, responding, objecting, provoking, theoramatizing, experimenting, in accordance with the open list of logical conjunctions ('or', 'therefore', 'if', 'because', 'actually', 'although . . .').' [6]

Filmosophy, rather, reveals the *whole* of film as (exhibitionist) thinking, which also, unlike Deleuze's thesis, does not include any semiotic linkage to the spectator's thought. This is thinking constantly out loud, never covert or secret. When we are watching and listening to a film what exactly is it doing? Is it not making its *own* decisions? Switching to a different scene here, focusing away from a character there, moving up the side of a building, framing a room from a low angle -- thoughts of a film-mind (but not one phenomenologically analogous to our minds). *Once you see a film as thinking, nothing is wasted, everything achieves the same, significant level of importance*.

This is not to belittle the role of the creators of cinema -- the director, writer, cameraman -- but to allow for a more fluid and poetical understanding of film. The words and opinions of the creators *are* of importance, in that they may be *translated* into our more poetical talk about film, and thus onto the experience of film. If in talk we say the film 'does' this, or 'does' that, then the talk will elicit less obstructive language than if we were talking of the director, or the 'camera', where you end up just seeing what the director was supposed to have 'done', or how the 'camera' moved, and the film will be lost either to authorship or technology. Also, filmosophy is not a value claim.

[p. 89:] *All* films think, whether quietly, boringly, excitingly or confusingly. A film that thinks out loud -- a 'flashy' De Palma film, say -- is not inherently better than one that thinks in a less 'up front' way -- _A Winter's Tale_ (Eric Rohmer, 1991) for example. A film can think suitably and intelligently, namely, with its subject and interestingly. Or it can stop trying and just be (namely, be boring) -- a staid film is just one which has almost given up the capacity to think, and merely thinks on convention-autodrive. Heidegger's handling of 'thinking' is pertinent here, as he gave it as large a role as I do. 'Man is a *thinking*, that is, a *meditating* being' he wrote. [7] Thinking is not the summation of film, but its constituting means. An actor can act without being in a film, but a film can't be without thinking. *Film* is a thinking. *Thinking is the ground of the world of film, and the ground of the life of filmosophy*.

Fernand Leger once wrote, 'color is a vital necessity. It is raw material indispensable to life, like water and fire. Man's existence is inconceivable without an ambience of color.' [8] There are three main aspects to descriptions of colour: 'hue' is the variety or shade of a colour; 'tone' is how light or dark the hue is; and 'saturation' is how close the particular colour comes to its deepest and most vivid type. Seeing is part of thinking, they are never divorced, and thus, in a very simple sense, colour is thought by us. A red book, let's say, is *interpreted* by us. Not that it is worthwhile saying the book has a true 'ontological' colour that we only produce a response to. The book is the colour we feel it to be. And it is not worth saying much more than this -- the 'epistemological' questions get boring and die before us.

There are different primary colours for light, paint, and vision, but all revolve around red, blue and green. Primary ones are dominant in impression -- beating the rest to our senses. Thus red is 'advancing', while blue is 'receding' -- trouble is you may like blue more than red, or it may simply be brighter, and thus you spot it first in a crowd of colours. (I am led to think of the blue of the documentary _Atlantis_ (Besson, 1991), a blue that strikes deep, in a film that is like cinematic oxygen, and eventually provides every natural shade of watery blue.) Under differing conditions the same object will still be thought as having the same colour, even though it is perceived as slightly off the 'original' colour. It is only in controlled tests that red is found to be focused in front of the retina, blue behind, and green right on the retina (thus its 'calming' quality). And as Deleuze notes, 'according to Goethe, blazing red is not merely the frightful colour in which we burn, but the noblest colour, which contains all the others, [p. 90:] and engenders a superior harmony as the whole chromatic circle'. [9]

How does colour in life affect us? How different is the 'effect' under the conditions of experiencing a film, i.e., aesthetically? Colours are seen as stimulants by psychologists, and are thus so used in packaging and fashion, in offices and playgrounds. Culture, situation, expectation, prior knowledge, all play their part. Associations must play an important part so any colour could mean anything to anybody -- depending on their previous experience -- but in analysing film this cannot be accounted for and should not be given voice -- what we can't tell, we shouldn't attempt to say. Red, blue, green -- hot, cool, calm? But in the cinema we must ask: what type of red, what depth of blue, what are they 'on' -- clothes, walls -- when do we see them and in what order? It is not so much what colour but 'what and when and where and how colour'. Seeing a colour where it's not really supposed to be can elicit a completely different response than the usual one to the object. In _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory_ (Mel Stuart, 1971) virtually all the colours in the factory are disjointed in their object relations -- such as the blue chewing-gum that one of the children takes, and which tastes of a whole meal, including dessert.

All the main colours, abstracted, eternal -- the colours of the rainbow -- have historical and social associations. Some examples: red, along with black and white, has the longest history, stretching from its Roman indication of class, to today's sexy abundance of meanings: lust, heat, sin, sacrifice, blood (consider the reds of _Bram Stoker's Dracula_ (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)). Blue is the best liked colour in Europe, being a modest medium between dark and colourful. Its historical links began with moral and religious codes, moving through hierarchical and royal denotation, to a simple, functional, stable meaning epitomised in work clothes. Yellow has the most powerful history, solidly indicating madness and illness, folly and stupidity, fear and envy, defamation and cowardice. White was seen by Isaac Newton as the true base element of the universe, and as such should be the guiding colour of life -- civilised, natural and pure. While black remains linked with negativity and death. But, as Sergei Eisenstein notes, 'to this day attempts continue to be made to arrange the subjective and largely personal sensations into meaningful relationships, that are, frankly, just as vague and remote'. [10] And here, in his essay 'Colour and Meaning', Eisenstein goes on to provide an encyclopaedia of colour meanings in poetry and art, finding consonance as well as opposites in associations. It becomes a beautifully indirect exercise in passion about *film* colour. Colour meanings are evolved in cultures, but never remain set for very long, if we can say they do at all. The problem here is one that John Gage has noted, that is, 'the definition of culture itself. Which sector of a given society is in question, which profession, which [p. 91:] class, which gender, which age group?' [11] The only way to interpret colour seems to be in actual situations -- taking account of where and on what they occur, namely, as Eisenstein realises, '*the sole source for the attendant complex of concepts and associations*', with meanings '*dependent only upon the general system of imagery that has been decided upon for the particular film*'. [12]

Before colour celluloid was perfected films were sometimes hand-painted (in some early films as many as six colours were added to each frame), or tinting and toning was used to get that added overall effect. [13] William Johnson notes the 'impressive red-tinted night scene of Babylon under attack by fire in Griffith's _Intolerance_ (D. W. Griffith, 1916)'. [14] _The Lodger_ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1926) decides on a creamy indoors and cool blue for night, while a club is thought yellow, and the lodger leaves the house in a pinky light. But all ends in red and love. In the history of colour film technology 'accuracy' has been the guiding aim. Technicolor was 'truer' than Eastmancolor, and better for studio shooting than Agfacolor. With Technicolor the balance of colour could be fine tuned in the processing stage. Colours were thick and bright, dark scenes were weighty, like black on black. Like a landscape produced in felt-tip, Technicolor really was a new window on the world. (But, within filmosophy, it becomes a certain historico-thought, a place in movie history, instantly recognisable and thus 'reusable'.) The first colour films tended to connote magic, luxury, fantasy, because people, after the first shocks of cinema, still saw filmic reality in black and white -- that was their convention. For some, colour diverted attention away from the story, and thus had to be subdued for serious pictures. (Nowadays we might see something as being more 'real' if it is presented on suitably amateur shaky video rather than black and white or colour celluloid.)

For filmosophers what matters is what we see, not what we are told is the name behind the technique. The amount of technological innovation in the history of the development of colour film is astounding. It almost seems that weekly there was some advance or addition to film stock's capacities and dispositions. Thus we come to the question of how much this possible knowledge, these available facts, could affect our sense of how (especially early) films are thinking. A film of burnt out whites -- that was a common problem at that time; a film in degraded colour -- a problem with stock longevity (do we restore a painting to *truly* understand it?). *In filmosophy the technology is only interesting in so far as it tells all that is aesthetically possible* -- knowledge of just what can be done with cranes and steadicam to move the camera *can* help us formulate poetical translations (of image flight and fluidity), but the sole discussion of technology can kill a film stone dead -- I'd much rather see what the film is doing, than how the [p. 92:] 'camera' created what we see. Knowing how celluloid works and acts is helpful, but the decision to discuss those facts in film talk is a question of audience and style. Often talk of a film's degradation or technical mistakes leaves it closed off to the sort of analysis you may have been *enticed* to submit after a first naïve viewing. *Those naïve thoughts, and attendant film talk, must not be lost to the rules and foibles of technology*.

Film thinking can *be* more than our thinking, and the decisions a film makes about colour is a prime example of its difference. *We* cannot suddenly become colour blind, nor flip in completely monochrome vision, and only tone a scene by perhaps whipping out some tinted spectacles. *Film has the thoughtful freedom to enter into any colour*. Film has its own *will* as regards colour use -- and can give a scene a hue at the drop of a Stetson. If the most distinctive aspect of film among the arts is time/duration, then possibly a temporal thinking/evolving of colour[s] in a single film can be seen as the most cinematic. It's fine having striking scenes, designs, and lighting -- but if they remain static and individual then a certain flow is lost. A film can so easily be picturesque or 'photographic' (think of the quirky framings of _Sweetie_ (Jane Campion, 1989)) instead of *cinematic*. Filmosophy is less concerned to research the effect of colours, than with the way film *has* colour, *uses* colour, and how we should *approach* that use in talk about film.

Sergei Eisenstein stands out in his writings on colour:

'Before we can learn to distinguish three oranges on a patch of lawn both as three objects in the grass *and* as three orange patches against a green background, we dare not think of colour composition . . . the first condition for the use of colour in a film is that it must be, first and foremost, a dramatic factor.' [15]

He argues that it is best used when it, and only it

'can most fully express or explain what must be conveyed, said, or elucidated at the given moment of the development of the action. . . . In its own place, at a given moment, each is the protagonist for the moment, occupying the leading place in the general chorus of expressive elements which yield it this place -- for the moment.' [16]

Eisenstein recognises that colour can be an independent role player -- that it can move the action on as well as, or even better than, an actor's words.

Victor Perkins makes the distinction between lighting and colour that is *naturally* within the diegesis, and that which is more intellectual [p. 93:] in its obviousness. In the 'chicken run' scene from _Rebel Without a Cause_ (Nicholas Ray, 1955) lighting forces the stage-managed sense of the contest, but in a completely natural sense: 'The illumination is traced to a quite credible source: the head lamps of the cars which other gang members, spectators, have drawn up along the sides of the course.' [17] For Perkins, cutting from one natural colour to another and giving a scene a meaning is better than 'those which, by rejecting credibility, encourage a purely cerebral recognition . . . We are so busy *noticing* that we respond rather to our awareness of the device than to the state of mind it sets out to evoke', citing _Red Desert_ (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964). [18] Rather, 'it is just because we are not given reason to question the credibility of the colour [in _Bigger Than Life_ (Nicholas Ray, 1956)] that we can give the full emotional response that the arrangement of colour requires'. [19] Perkins is not completely right in linking cerebral and emotional effects with, respectively, 'obvious' and natural lighting. There can of course be 'cerebral' natural colour (as in Godard), as well as emotional 'obvious' colour use (as in _The Sheltering Sky_ (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1991), red filtered early on, and blue washed from when the female protagonist takes over the story). Perkins at one point makes a reference to 'the most literal-minded spectator', [20] and thus gives away part of the reason he raises natural devices: they can be understood by plebeians, by the man on the Camden Hoppa. '[C]redibly motivated . . . credible purpose' chime in his prose, [21] as if all we ever wanted from the cinema was subtlety. Here I might even let Eisenstein reply, from a letter to Lev Kuleshov:

'this viewpoint holds that in a good colour film you are not conscious of colour. To my mind, this viewpoint, raised to the level of a principle, is the reflection of a creative impotence, of inability to master the complex of cinematic expressive means needed to make an organic film.' [22]

On the thoughtfulness of colour use we may come back to Heidegger. He made the distinction between 'meditative' and 'calculative' thinking -- and we might do the same for colour thinking. Meditative being 'thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is', [23] a thinking that is an ever interplay of thought and argument, a slow, and deep mode of attention. Calculative thinking is a mode that merely *computes* possibilities economically; a *thoughtlessness* that 'never stops, never collects itself', [24] that takes in and then forgets. The analogy with colour thinking is not as simple though. I would distinguish between the kind of colour thinking in _Dick Tracy_ (Warren Beatty, 1991), and that in _A Short Film About Killing_ (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1990). The latter pulls us in with its thinking, [p. 94:] meditatively colouring the film with the mind of its protagonist, sick with his world, and looking for a victim. The former can be seen to employ calculative thinking -- where the film brings in primary colours as signals of a very simplistic presence, of evil or love or danger. (Of course that is how the film intends its thinking -- calculating emotions like a comic book.) We might distance this with films that have almost given up the capacity to think with colour, that shy from in any way intervening in the sacred narrative to bring forward a colour, or alter a light, or, god forbid, use a filter. Heidegger noted that 'man today is in *flight from thinking*', [25] and we could say that the majority of popular film today has taken a similar flight, with a similar denial of its thoughtlessness, opining that their inquiry is full with possibilities. It is but a planning, researching and organising towards those oh-so important *results* (emotions, thrills), but, without much thinking.

Edward Branigan finds that most colour theorists 'maintain that color has neither an absolute perceptual base, nor an absolute meaning (emotional or intellectual): color depends on relationships and comparisons'. [26] The only trouble is that Branigan never really moves on from this assertion. Like most theorists he comes to a theoretical dead end -- he wants to say more, but finds he can't. Again like most, he ends up just listing certain uses of colour. Some seem to think it's like adding them up to work out their 'meaning'. Filmosophy asks that we move on from inventorying the occurrence of colours in a film towards finding words that might even partially translate their *presence*. The experience of them is important, and we do not experience a listing, a role call of colours -- the effects are much less calculable. The possibilities of talk about colour lie not so much in 'what colour where', but in realising what we are doing when we approach colour, and more importantly *how* film works in colour[s].

Filmosophy brings us to the use of *any* colour rather than the use of *a* colour in a situation. If we can offer possibilities of colour use then the weight will be taken off the pinning down of colour meaning. Blue is more *easily* used in a cold or melancholy way, red more easily in a hot and dangerous way, etc. -- because of convention *and* of physiological reasons? But blue has not always been associated with coldness. Think of a room, painted floor to ceiling -- in red, what would we feel; in blue, what? Branigan rightly asserts that 'we see only after we have acquired the cultural categories for seeing', [27] we see only *with* language. Does our physiological experience of blue hold the same throughout different cultural meanings, or does a deeply imbedded meaning alter our physical reactions? What matters for filmosophers is the power and forcefulness of colour use in particular films. Eisenstein again: 'In general the 'psychological' interpretation of color is a very [p. 95:] slippery business. . . . In art it is not the *absolute* relationships [associations] that are decisive, but those *arbitrary* relationships within a system of images dictated by the particular work of art.' [28]

The cinematographer Vittorio Storaro suggests that colours have identifiable meanings: 'Cinema is a language of images, formed by light and darkness, and by the internal elements of colours, through which stories must be interpreted.' [29] Black is the unconscious, red the greatest symbol of vital energy, orange the family and warmth, yellow the arrival of consciousness, green is knowledge, blue our intelligence as a human being, indigo our power, violet the last stage of human life, and white is the sum of all these: balance, equilibrium. This simplistic colour coding when applied to film lessens the impact. On stage at the National Film Theatre Storaro asserted that he doesn't 'paint' with light, but sees himself as 'writing' with colours and light. Here he elevates definite, controlled, precise *meaning* over beauty. His cinematography *is* amazing, but his desire for reason closes down the possibilities of aesthetic pleasure, and we find him working in a similar vein to the project of Newton himself, that is, to classify, close, and reduce the experience of colour to a set of numbers -- such that the metaphoric might become retrievable, reusable (dead). Film is under the context of an aesthetic experience, not a laboratory one, and even if 'tests showed' occurences in the laboratory, in the cinema, in the film itself, the thinking attention is a wholly different one. Black is aligned with negation and evil. Whether it 'means' those things is no matter, whether it is *used* those ways *is* important. In _Blue Velvet_ (David Lynch, 1986), Dorothy's apartment, its colour, doesn't just make us *feel* something, but also gives birth to a thought: a relation of colour to character to story to film *to thinking*.

So let us look at examples, from black and white to contemporary colour films. (What is important for the moment is explaining through film examples just how films think with colour, including all shades and image grains, and in the film discussions that follow I shall be primarily concerned with pulling from the films their colour use, simply feeling *how* they think their colours, while only attempting some of the poetical, ruminative talk that I call for in the latter part of this essay -- where 'thinking', as a term, would be much less used -- in some of the longer examples. The films discussed are also fairly randomly chosen and certainly not a listing of great colour films, such that the idea of 'colour thinking' should be shown to be applicable to any and all.)

We never saw in black and white before celluloid came along, and even then it seems we 'add' colour to our experience of it, filling in the [p. 96:] colours we think are 'actually' there. Black and white film gets its degrees of light and dark from colour just like colour film. We can thus see that shading of black and white can behave like colours, where shade is actively used to give an immediacy of meaning in and around characters, or indeed without them. Early grainy, contrasty emulsions (orthochromatic) recognised blue, green and ultraviolet -- red would just come out black. Panchromatic stocks rectified that, recognising red, and having a finer grain. Now it is almost possible to follow snooker on a caravan's 10 inch portable black and white (as I remember from some of my family holidays). But also 'black and white' is just what the tiny amount of writings about that form call into dramatic usage. The bad guy and the good guy, that is, conflict, dramatic contrast, counterpoint. And it is never less than well intended, but usually less than engaging. Yet Deleuze has called Expressionism 'the precursor of real colourism in the cinema', [30] and Eisenstein talks of utilizing 'the outlines and tonal 'sounds' of grey photography'. [31]

_The Lodger_ simply, effectively, casts aspersions and shadows on the mystery tenant, while _Knife in the Water_ (Roman Polanski, 1962) has the monochrome cling like fog to the edges of the characters, smudging and claustrophobic (the film *understanding* the drama). _Sunrise_ (F. W. Murnau, 1927) knows that the man's wife is his real true love from the beginning, bathing her in fresh cool light, while leaving him and his mistress in half shadow, before ending with them back together and brilliant light. _Nosferatu_ (F. W. Murnau, 1922) thinks a grey twilight world (somewhere between the natural and the unnatural, pushing a certain 'undecidability' or 'uncannyness') with heavy shadows, such as the one that crosses the face of the innocent Nina at the beginning. With Jonathan over the bridge on the way to the Count's castle, the 'other side' is thought as just that, in negative, and the flipping of light to dark rebounds in the opposition that the film thinks of Nina's light to the Count's dark. In the end its is 'shadow' that becomes evil, creeping up on Jonathan, and gripping Nina's heart. The film has made it literally into a contest of dark against light, with light filling the climax, but fought in a moral and spiritual twilight of indistinguishability and drowned (thought *out*) contours. _Wild Strawberries_ (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) thinks (reveals) Isak's innermost thoughts, feeling the thick black and white dream that replaces detail (in the image) with emotional force (whiteness to the left, receding black to the right -- the future?), and recognising his previous life in blemish-free white, while putting him against black, watching, inventing, imagining. A film that also decides its ending with whiteness.

Both _Virgin Machine_ (Monika Treut, 1992) and _Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole_ (Amos Poe, 1991) announce their *decision* to use [p. 97:] monochrome by having colour titles over their opening shots. The latter then amplifies the memories of the home movies the main character shows by leaving them in colour, while even the monochrome is thought bluey for exteriors, and greeny for inside scenes. Most colour films use black and white to refer back in time -- for example, to the blissful marriage of the hero of _Passenger 57_ (Kevin Hooks, 1993), or the previous murderous events of _Dead Again_ (Kenneth Branagh, 1991). While in _Leon the Pig Farmer_ (Gary Sinyor and Vadim Jean, 1992) it is used to denote a camcorder in action. _Being at Home with Claude_ (Jean Baudin, 1992) decides on monochrome for its opening sex and death scene between the two guys, letting the blood, when it comes, splash colourfully, significantly, across the kitchen. _Spellbound_ (Hitchcock, 1945) blasts us with fleeting red as the doctor shoots himself at the end (a few frames were hand-tinted red in each print of the time). The film-maker Norman McLaren finds that it is possible, 'to sort out an image more quickly, grasp it sooner in color than black-and-white, especially if the image is at all complex and moving fast'. [32] McLaren seems to find that, in being nearer to ordinary experience, colour film has no delay in its effect, and that black and white is seen more as a 'fiction', in another world. It is this level of seriousness that colour films can engage with when they call in the thinking that black and white brings.

Filmosophy gives film an autonomy that we feel but previous film talk has failed to reveal. The film chooses to be somewhere -- in a room of the protagonist say. It can decide the time of year, hour of the day, the weather. The film then can choose to show us certain colours -- pointing, colliding -- lessening one, arcing to another, using movement to force colour, to bring it to our attention. _Delicatessen_ (Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1991), _Leolo_ (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992), _Les Parapluies de Cherbourg_ (Jacques Demy, 1964), _Jamon, Jamon_ (Bigas Luna, 1992). Their colours provide a visual holiday from our humdrum days -- kaleidoscopic films, pushing variety and versatility, [33] profuse and scattered colours, messy and cluttered sets. In a similar sense Leger talked of the explosion of colour after the first world war, and asked: 'Where are we going? Quite simply we are going toward a rapid evolution in external plastic life, which will develop logically until its means are exhausted, until something else is discovered.' [34] And this is how these films are thinking in a way -- they are filling up with colour to think their moral and socio-political gaudiness. They are at the end of something (modernism is the usual candidate) and are pushing such that something else must come along to replace it.

Branigan refers to Godard's 'colour strategies', and to Eisenstein's 'textual system of color', like they were precise army moves. [35] [p. 98:] To talk of 'horizontal and vertical lines . . . blocks and regular shapes' [36] that colours mark out is to *sound* like you're advancing knowledge, but really you're just collating forms. One can notate colours and characters, but the point is whether that thinking provokes anything in us -- is it intellectual and after the fact, or emotional and simultaneous with the experience? Theorists often say that the director probably used this colour here, on these people, to say this, or to mean that, and it's possible they are right to an extent. What these analyses lack is fluency of expression, and thus a certain sprouting of interest and importance: the use of colour in the films Branigan refers to -- _Alexander Nevsky_ (Eisenstein, 1938), _Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle_ (Godard, 1967) is much more powerful than these types of talking can *cope* with. Branigan is *almost* barking up the right tree when he notes that 'a textual system of colour -- as a 'discourse' involving repetition, variation, permutation -- may actually propose new ways of reading color and color organizations, and so may recast cultural formulations', [37] that is, films can create their own colour meanings and references. But mainly his analysis of _Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle_ hides behind monotonous descriptions of the film's 'blocks' and 'stripes' of colour.

Film can bring our *attention* to clothes or decor, it can think them important by montage or movement. The film _Wittgenstein_ (Derek Jarman, 1993) thinks its colours against pure blackness, thus realising and heightening their force and depth. This is not so much colour coding as use of 'colour'. If we cannot ever completely define colours, as Wittgenstein himself found, then the thought of _Wittgenstein_ is one that plays with their apparentness and yet elusiveness -- something that is obvious to us, but requires of us the attempt to leap over language to really get to them. Again, we find colour's resistance to meaning as its beingness. It is as Wittgenstein's work becomes more rounded that the film will move from that blackness onto the setting of where he is thinking, a move like Wittgenstein himself made from ideas to physical language. _Vertigo_ (Hitchcock, 1958) thinks the powerful self-deception of Scottie with a sickly green light that covers the body of Judy after he has completed her transformation, a light that is brought in by the film from the neon sign outside, and thought over the whole image, such that Scottie's obsession brings the image to his control. Think of _Raising Cain_ (Brian DePalma, 1992), bringing in the simple thought of a distorting orange light on the evil father of the twins; _Bad Lieutenent_ (Abel Ferrara, 1992) reddening its central rape scene, colouring (feeling) the horror; or the lime green thought of the hospital in _Blind Chance_ (Kieslowski, 1982), feeling the painful memory of the young man. _Yellow Earth_ (Chen Kaige, 1984) is a paean to earth, water and sky, thinking long on their colours of dusk red, brown-blue, [p. 99:] and white. It thinks a sense of respect for these tones that mark daily life for the characters.

_Passion_ (Godard, 1981) begins by studying a blue sky and a plane's white trail across it (a light that will put Isabelle's face in darkness later on), and rocks back and forth from this natural light to the 'artistic' lighting of the studio set-up: 'something separated from the real world by calculated approximations of probabilities' we hear. What is studied within the aura of the set -- a lit subject in between darkness, is simply given to us in the outside scenario. Room lamps are moved about as much as the studio blondes. Darkness often comes with thought -- ideas discussed, as with Jerzy typing in his hotel room, or talking on the pitch black set. Lightness -- as in the factory -- arrives with the ordinary beauty of living. 'What bursts into light is the echo of what the night submerges. What night submerges prolongs in the invisible what bursts into light' we hear -- what the artist attempts is what happens anyway, you just have to see it around you. _Prenom Carmen_ (Godard, 1982) also gives us unlit interiors looking out to the brightness, faces and bodies masked by natural back light, human umbras, straining our eyes for the information we thought we were to get, while the film is thinking somewhat differently. _Je vous salue Marie_ (Godard, 1983) decides on similarly precise natural images, adding more spiritual montage, with a blue/white moon brought alongside a warm yellow sun, brought alongside a Mary searching for understanding. In a suitably coloured cafe in _Prenom Carmen_ Godard himself says: 'Van Gogh looked for yellow at sunset. You have to keep looking' -- we still have to find out how to see and understand colour.

_The Long Day Closes_ (Terence Davies, 1992) realises its protagonist's journey, and gives us a sense of its place and force. The boy is in need of light, whether from a fire, a torch, the circus, or the cinema, and thinks his future as one of creeping darkness as he moves schools. The film decides this against its own background of subdued colours, a memory of England, a memory by the boy of his own life, calmingly brown, like the bricks that make his home. The film will travel to the right, moving from the boy's house into a lump of dark night, unlit by street lamps. [38] With his solitude the film brings him down to his cellar, and next to blackness, again to the right, dropping in from the street, and the final thought of his childhood is that of the last wisps of cloud edged with the soft light of a setting sun. A setting of his future, set, prescribed, in the memory of the thought of the boy of the film.

Darkness can also be thought to blot out others, to match the concentration or exclusion in the mind of a character -- the darkness in _The Long Day Closes_ which closes in around the boy when he imagines the force of the old ship while sitting in class, or in _Wild Strawberries_, when Isak is in the car surrounded by his fellow travel- [p. 100:] lers and again returns in mind to his earlier life and loves. In another way both _Bad Lieutenent_ and _The Double Life of Veronique_ (Kieslowski, 1991) bring a dark border to their look, a soft blurring of the frame thought when the Lieutenent and Veronique are reeling from their experiences (a thinking of their perception), one from drugs, the other from an inner pain.

But inside the film-mind any colour can be thought. In _L.627_ (Bertrand Tavernier, 1992) it is a thinking of tone, the harshness of the image is *with* the work of the Parisian cops. Just as _The Story of Qui Ju_ (Zhang Yimou, 1992) is *with* the journey of the woman seeking her justice. _Apocalypse Now_ (Coppola, 1979) marks a journey of another by thinking a difference in light, a movement from the artifice of war's brightness to the serene natural light of the inner jungle -- the film *is* Kurtz. In another way focusing can give us colour: _Vacas_ (Julio Medem, 1992) brings us the wood where most of the magical events takes place by thinking its *whole* colour, that is, by pulling back such that the many greens and browns merge as a single freckled hue -- the wood itself from a magical thought. Some films think in calm bleak colour such that a significant colour may stand out -- the red of Marnie's dreams in _Marnie_ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), or the revolutionary red flags of both _The Fall of Berlin_ (Mikhail Chiaureli, 1949), and _The Hunters_ (Theo Angelopoulos, 1977), floating in against dull grey mountains.

_The Double Life of Veronique_ thinks like no other film I know. It is a film that spreads it beauty across all the elements of cinematic form. While experiencing it everything works with and for the feeling you come out with, but even remotely describing it afterwards remains problematic. Its world denies words, even as they struggle to the surface of your mind as you leave the cinema. Colour and light are essential parts of its mood and perception, and enhance for us the lives of the unknowing twins. Central to this colour thinking is a sharp lime that floods in through windows when we are inside, and an ochre light that, as in the fateful concert, cuts its hue across faces and figures. It is the light that wakes the French Veronique from her slumber, and also from her malaise over feeling her other self. In _Three Colours: Blue_ (Kieslowski, 1993) it is the power of Julie's memories that the film feels through colour, blushing blue with her as the past surges up to the present.

Intensely thoughtful are both _Goodfellas_ (Martin Scorcese, 1991) and _Malcolm X_ (Spike Lee, 1992), thinking their histories as they proceed -- both are a thinking through history with colour image -- *a thinking that takes its concepts from cinema's history* -- both begin with hazy morals and images -- the films flushing and softening all colours into oranges and browns. Filmosophically they are feeling [p. 101:] how the past is forever a diffused memory, a happening that is thought uncertainly as any act of remembering is. But distinctly a film-memory, taking its thought-processes from how cinema has itself decided to view history -- a plastic past remembered through cine-images. (_Orlando_ (Sally Potter, 1992) is a much more direct account of the grain and colour of the image being a history of the cinema -- here virtually a history of film melodrama.) While _Goodfellas_ moves into sharpness with the rush of cocaine, _Malcolm X_ feels the harshness of the prison into which Malcolm goes, blackening his surroundings, bringing the light into a cutting forcefulness. A cool blueness is this film's measure of his entry into knowledge via a dictionary, and on his release a preciseness of light fills the frame. Only when the film fills with the yellow-green of a stage curtain does his life end.

_Zabriskie Point_ (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969) taints its opening heated discussion by students with a yellow that moves into red, the film quickening and closing in on gestures and faces. The film is then washed of this colour until one of the students kills a cop and it brings in a green with his bus journey. Only after his girlfriend has mentally exploded 'civilisation' does the film move up to the sun and bring back its opening colour. _The Ox_ (Sven Nykvist, 1992) emotively moves its desperate husband through a colour thought world. In a cold blunt light, dying of hunger he kills the ox of his master. The film feels their temporary warmth, but as quickly reveals the colour-sucked prison that he ends up in. There no brightness or colour is let through the film's blue/grey thought, the cold further thought through the brittle surface. Released into the same world as before his deed, the film pushes his new eyes, and sky and grass are made to bloom in his mind, and for us.

A distinctive, if calculative filmosophy is that of _Tetsuo II: Body Hammer_ (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992) and _Basic Instinct_ (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Both films feel their subjects with a steely grey, a colour in between life and death. _Tetsuo II_ thinks it in concert with the mechanisation of its future-industrial characters (who in the end turn into full blown Lister engines), while showing their earlier life in warm orange to make things bluntly clear. _Basic Instinct_ provides no comparison, perhaps believing there to *be* no rosy way of existing -- added to the fact that it is set in present day America, the chrome thinking of even the most simple of scenes seems to breed a disgust in its attendant amorality. Paul Virilio has called this sort of colour 'our post-historic, or post-modern colour, the colour of transparency, of the gleam or brilliance of metal . . . and in the future it may be the colour of the stealth bomber, that is, an absorbent colour that has no reflection . . . a colour in reverse'. [39]

[p. 102:] 4

What is important for filmosophy is how we are thinking while experiencing film, how the thoughts of film are 'translated' into words, and how those words are arranged in filmosophical talk. Film viewing is always a little different to our daily sensations, with different expectations, and needs. We are attentive in the cinema, we are thinking with and against it, but we are thinking towards it, not passively positioned (in life we usually think *from* our experiences). Meaning does not come via interpretation, but directly from experience. Meaning is what we *feel* when watching the thing, and that immediate feeling is our useful (and hopefully interesting) truth of the film. The film has no defence, it cannot shout 'hey, you, you got me all wrong, I never said anything like that'.

For filmosophers the most fruitful attitude to film comes from meditative thinking in the experience, onto the film (out to talk). Feeling along with *its* (thoughtful) feeling. [40] Attending to a film with our whole self we might think with it, instead of via stuttering terminology and against it. To achieve an [un]thought, intuitative, flexible, original experience, some new tools are needed. In our thinking upon the film's thinking, we select a mix of *its* thoughts as the film proceeds. We mix (selectively attend to) the colours thought by film, and *how* we mix them depends on the language we have (the experience is a thinking), and thus the language we employ when writing or chatting about the experience of the film. For filmosophers this language is best derived from realising film as an autonomous film mind.

Where interesting talk about film lies is in the *unachievable* attempt to equal the film in power and precision and feeling (a call for experience to come forward and take a bow). [41] It is the *journey* towards that goal that is important, not any idea of getting there. Listening to the film's thinking, and *pointing* to the power that a film has. There is no implicit/explicit distinction -- everything is see/hearable and thus there. In effect this works as a *continuance* of the film in words, a *prolonging* via a *resonating* excursion of talk about film. Here the performance of a certain filmic rhetoric is constitutive; it needs to be just like colour in fact, living on past its immediate experience, growing and thickening as it comes back into contact with the film it talks of. What reads better than fluid flowers of printed marks hanging on to the cliff-edge of sense, of knowledge, of that oh-so boring city of logocentrism, with its narrow push to find the ends of theoretical roads.

Take _Blue Velvet_. There are plenty of analyses that talk of its colour, perhaps saying something like: 'Lynch contrasts the bland colours in Jeffrey's home life with the thick colours in the world of Dorothy and Frank'. But who is this analysis for? Where is it coming from? What it points out is fairly true -- there *is* a sort of contrast of [p. 103:] colour. However the language of the writing leaves something to be lusted after. It seems to die on being uttered. The origin the reading gives for the colour use is in the director -- he did this -- so we go back to the film and its form becomes synonymous with author direction. You might say, 'what's wrong with that?'. Well, why put the director between us and the film? So you're watching a film and you notice an interesting use of colour, you get home to write, and just plop down what the colour did for you, and you rest easy that you've provoked new knowledge about that film, and about film in general. Well no, I don't think you have.

Contemporary film writing is lumpish, bulky, as well as grabbing wildly at the so-called deeper meaning of a film (cancelling out our learning curve of intellectual adoption in the process). It employs descriptions straight from the film-making manual such as 'tracking-shot', 'close-up', two-shot', and 'deep-focus'. There are also reams of film analysis that take great pride in noticing *so* much in the image, and force everything to have a meaning, locatable, understandable. These 'close' (read: definitive) readings move into the film like train spotters, noticing, and then giving raw to us: blotches of red, shafts of light, diagonal framings, which move left or up or off-frame. Yet classical aesthetic terms are hardly any better, second hand and faintly obnoxious in their 'high-art' aspirations, they must go the way of old art historians, and float silently up to heaven.

What is needed is a sort of training in film talk, and, as regards colour, it should be talk that very much *leaves* the colour for the audience to experience, directing their attention *to* the colours, situating them, revealing them. Terms such as contrast, counterpoint -- what do these really do for our experience? Even saying that something is 'lit' in such a way brings us back to forces outside the film -- why bother? Because that is how our 'film studies' language has so far been constructed -- to bother is *not* to use those words: to find a better way, to find a filmosophy. _The Long Day Closes_, we are told, was put through 'the bleach by-pass process, in which colour is desaturated in the final wash of the printing [. . . this] in combination with coral filters, Eastmancolor, and 'old Cooke lenses . . .''. [42] *Where* does one want to say this, and to what possible audience -- to film buffs, to film-makers, to media students? Where does the experience of film go when its technical make-up is explored as though by a cine-scientist? All we would ever see is technique, technology, authorship, a plethora of 'inbetweens'. That is, *experience is stunted, like a child's mind given the secrets it was intellectually, imaginatively feasting on*. It is this language which builds a structure that in the end denies thinking, repressing our experience by steering our language into a brick wall. Instead of uncovering it in fact covers up.

[p. 104:] The drive in filmosophy is to renew the language of film talk, to provide words that *feel* the workings of film, and prolong the experience, both aesthetic and intellectual. Filmosophy recognises that how we watch a film is creatively tempered by the thinking framework of previous knowledge. Seeing a film as the immediate work of creators and their technology ('cameras', 'split screens', 'shots', 'edits') is to produce a certain mode of attention. A mode that is continually *delayed* at every point by the translation of film into an immediately created work of people and technology. This continual delayedness to our attention works against the possible poetic nature of film. People and technology *are* important outside the viewing experience as knowledge. But direct film analysis can do the translating before we watch the film. *Filmosophy is a translation of technology and people towards the thoughtful poetics of film*.

_The Element of Crime_ (Lars von Trier, 1984) thinks not only its protagonist's memory, but also a beyond point of interpretation of that memory, knowing more than he, Fisher, can yet think himself -- his guilt. For him the film provides a reliving that is suitably hazy -- not all is recognisable at once, but dark, itself receding into the background. The skin of the image is jaune[diced], thought by the film in concert with Fisher's obstructed and disordered v[i/er]sion of criminal events. A colour to the events that Fisher can't keep from rising to the surface (is it any wonder that the film only shows us Fisher viewing himself in dirty puddles, or tarnished mirrors). Puncturing this pallidness are lights from elsewhere -- thought in from holes of understanding: television, surgery lamps, flashing police lights, fresh blue 'bulbs' sprouting from a piece of rare dry earth; and hot Cairo, the place from which he remembers the story, is now felt cool blue-grey (as is a church half way through).

The depth of _Europa_ (Lars von Trier, 1991), its complete world-life-mind, is most beautifully realised when the concentration and attention of the characters is thought by the film. Early on, when Leo is listening to his uncle, the setting of the train yard is seen subtlely divorced, faded and distant -- the instructions of his masters taking up the whole of his concentration, and the film matching his mind. The first thought of colour occurs when the film feels Leo's idealistic reaction to the sight of Zentropa's cars (and this layered thinking by the film unsettles our brain, as though we were seeing through two sets of eyes at once -- and this is what the film does -- and should be doing -- *letting us view what ordinarily we just physically couldn't*, the narrow *with* the expanse, catching detail *along* with a wider scene). Colour is then introduced in what will become a gorgeous rhythm of images throughout the film between Leo and Katrinna. When Leo sees her on the train the film thinks his feeling of her with soft, dark colours. With [p. 105:] her then taking him in the film reverses the effect (the thought) and he almost appears as one big blush, being both infused with the colour he 'caught' from her, and in being coloured by the film thinking *her* attention this time. The film then brings them both into colour against a faded grey compartment (the film *knows* their perceptions -- just of each other), before Leo again takes up his role of gazer in the background. Later, when he sees her from a car, he again 'catches' or receives her colour as the film cuts between them. The film thinks for all though, it can *colour* that which is important; the bullet that drops to the floor, *for* the Werewolf kid; the kid in turn, *for* the old man (the kid who safely divorces the old man into a large greying head -- such that it becomes only a 'target' that he has been ordered to shoot), the old man's blood for us, and the younger boy for the soldiers. Leo too is realising things, about innocence and involvement, and the film reddens him thus so. The death of Lawrence; the bomb package; the lovers' parting hands, all decided by the film to be relieved of their grey origins and brought closer to our minds. For Max the questionaire is not simply black and white, and the Jew's list no small matter. In his bath, about to shave, the razor takes precedence, and, from below, blood could never have been brighter. And then, when the rest find him dead in the bathroom, like the moment when Leo discovers Katrinna to be a Werewolf, _Europa_ gives us full colour, thinking for us the full impression made on all.

Part of filmosophy's idea of *embracing* the film is the resultant action on the reader. If they feel the film has changed the writer, then they too will be sincere to the writing's subject. In seeing a film with its attendant writing, that writing, that talk, must rejuvenate the film for the person. This force again comes from the initial experience -- when we step from the cinema are our eyes oiled or glassed over, do we act or feel differently?

Richard Rorty's paper 'The Pragmatist's Progress' is a minor *tour de force* within his relatively recent engagement with critical ideas. [43] Here Rorty explains his post-Nietzschean no plans, no code of codes, no keys to codes, no great dualisms, anti-logocentric, YES to sensation and the use-fulness of texts, where descriptions 'are evaluated according to their efficacy as instruments for purposes'. [44] He sees no distinction between interpreting and using texts, as 'all anybody ever does with anything is use it [... by] putting it to work'. [45] For Rorty reading texts, 'is a matter of reading them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens'. [46] My experience of a film can be picked up by another writer if it provides interest, maybe if I've led the reader to feel that the film has changed me, has made me see something I didn't know I could.

[p. 106:] Filmosophy attempts to elucidate both our thinking and the film's thinking. The resultant talk is one that would be a poetic translation of those joined 'thinkings'. No sign of technological terms but chat that leaves the film purer -- not hidden behind a mass of industrial workings -- but out in the open as a world-mind-life-thought. *Filmosophies should point back to the film to let its whole voice be heard*. The study of film needs these new concepts, and in one sense to do that it needs to become philosophical. That is (within my sense of philosophy) to consider (to mistrust) inherited concepts and terms, to analyse their referential 'basis', and to experiment with compounds and neologisms that might better redraw the lines of our inquiry. (Philosophy can also reorganise interpretive arguments concerning truth and interpretation, and the possibilities or horizons of meaning in film, forcing a sceptical eye on hard teleological theoretics.) This move itself requires the sort of mood of thought that Heidegger was trying to elucidate -- a thinking that flows into the task, and towards a more *human* understanding. *An understanding that relates to us, rather than to any logistics or mechanics*.

These new concepts, these new filmosophies -- even if youthfully shaky in their applicability and persuasiveness -- are needed to provide voices that speak to be heard, and thus challenged, in halls of learning, in journals of research, and in homes of media bombardment. As Deleuze and Felix Guattari write,

'the concept is not given, it is created; it is to be created. It is not formed but posits itself in itself -- it is a self-positing. Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other because what is truly created, from the living being to the work of art, thereby enjoys a self-positing of itself, or *an autopoetic characteristic by which it is recognized*.' [47]

A new, or newly applied, word in filmosophy is an act of creation, and as such *decides a way of being/attending that only came about when it did*. A miraculous birth that immediately sets itself apart from others -- leading all spotlights on to it, from no matter how far away. For example, colours have simple names, but they are deep in reference with earth or cloth or chemicals or fluids, and the original naming of some colours gives an idea of the creative possibilities of our talk about them in film. That browns came from earth and bark, and how a certain grey-brown got the name London Smoke. Also, with celluloid colour the image may actually be grainy fast stock, but is it really not 'brittle', 'harsh', or perhaps 'alive with its surface'. Which *reveals* the film? Which *revels* in the film?

We have seen that film, as a 'Mind', as a *World*, as a *Life*, handles [p. 107:] its own images and sounds. It can consider possibilities (film with a pipe in an easy chair, thinking). But uniquely, film can think without recourse to language to immediately interpret what it thinks (while we of course largely translate the experience back into language-ideas). It is a pre-reflective action (*film-intentionality*), with no 'brain' actually behind it, even though film, like ourselves, can engage in independent reflective action (*film-will*). A film may collide images, or situate a character such that an understanding is subtly arrived at, while never needing linguistic tools. It is, in a sense, freed of concepts, to meet the world head on. Its ideas, thoughts and concepts are not distinct and exact, but indicative, aesthetic, and emotional. Of course *we* automatically interpret its thoughts -- we reduce its thinking to our thinking. This philosophical way of approaching film may give us clues to the possibilities of our thinking, beyond language (film as another kind of Artificial Intelligence?). How were people 'thinking' before language was formed? Philosophers have searched for 'the mind' via 'mental states', have attempted intellectual, theoretical constructs in relation to the physical brain. But the idea that somehow 'beneath' language our minds work in images seems redundant, and the 'mind' remains as hypothetical and fictional as the brain is soft tissue. In a sense the brain is the 'word', while the 'mind' has remained the a picture, unlocateable in set meaning. Film is the mind, is the meta-physical thinking that can, philosophically, *helpfully*, mirror our own ways of thinking. Film can stand in for the world in a metaphysical game, can be the new metaphysics, with its own abstract universal truths, a mind freed to conceive anything, whether pure colour as in _Blue_ (Derek Jarman, 1993) or living dinosaurs as in _Jurassic Park_ (Steven Spielberg, 1993), thus helping us understand the limits of *our* thinking. In being thinking, film can thus also become interpreting, and we can see some film as being as intellectually creative as anything philosophically can be, only not having to build strict concepts as philosophy does (while I also admit the possibility of a philosophical disenfranchisement of film).

In filmosophy our thinking upon film thinking is an action that also parallels our coping with existence. That is, it requires of us an act of reduction (although not from an understandable, ontological 'whole'), of subsuming the experience to copable language. Filmosophy can here link with the struggle to find adequate ways of teaching visual literacy, by providing education with proper words to help children and adults breath a critical mode of attention into their viewing habits. It may also provide words for thought for the creators of the burgeoning home cinema of the camcorder, providing them with similar tools that enable them to use film to help them [p. 108:] understand, interpret and possibly transfigure their surroundings, their lives and their actions. And it is *how* we formulate the language of filmosophy that decides our involvement with the world (of film), that marks our *capacities* of knowledge, understanding, and communication. Filmosophy is not just the contemplation of film, but the correspondence with film via talk, and against a background, in a circular sense, of meditative thinking upon the film. It is a stylistic, performative, cognitising of our experiences of film. Colourful film thinking (a place of meaning creation) demands colourful filmosophies. These writings can only come from an attempt to say the ineffable (the effort to attend poetically). If images and colours are a surpassing of our thinking (a picture paints a zillion words), then how we 'translate' is a measure of our philosophical maturity within the cinema house. Film works as though our present thought had never come. In filmosophy, film is the *beginning* of our thought, and colour is its most persuasive mood.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, _Discourse on Thinking_, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 64.

2. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 198.

3. Ibid., p. 203.

4. Ibid., p. 215.

5. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 12 & 19.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

7. Heidegger, _Discourse on Thinking_, p. 47.

8. Fernand Leger, _Functions of Painting_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 119.

9. Deleuze, _Cinema 1_, pp. 53-4.

10. Sergei Eisenstein, _The Film Sense_, trans. Jay Leyda (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 90.

11. John Gage, 'The Spectrum's Shades of Meaning', _The Times Higher Education Supplement_, no. 1083, 6 August 1993, p. 15.

12. Eisenstein, _The Film Sense_, pp. 104 & 112.

13. Toning is the printing of black and white film on to colour stock through a filter, with the grey gradations taking on the varying degrees of the filter colour, but with white areas remaining white, and was usually done with yellow for sunlight, and blue for night. Tinting involved dyeing black and white film, with all gradations taking in the dye to different strengths, and white areas taking on the dye colour itself. In the twenties 80-90% of films were tinted, but the chemical baths reduced sound quality, and so were phased out with the talkies -- see Edward Branigan, 'Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History', _Film Reader_, no. 4, 1979, p. 20.

14. William Johnson, 'Coming to Terms with Color', _Film Quarterly_, vol. 20 no. 1, Fall 1966, p. 3.

[p. 109:]

15. Sergei Eisenstein, _Notes of a Film Director_ (New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 127 & 121.

16. Ibid., pp. 121 & 122.

17. V. F. Perkins, _Film as Film_ (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972), p. 84.

18. Ibid., p. 85.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 86.

21. Ibid.

22. Eisenstein, _Notes of a Film Director_, p. 119.

23. Heidegger, _Discourse on Thinking_, p. 46.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 45.

26. Edward Branigan, 'The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle', _Wide Angle_, vol. 1 no. 3, 1976, p. 21.

27. Ibid.

28. Eisenstein, _The Film Sense_, pp. 106 & 112.

29. Vittorio Storaro, in _Writing with Light_, directed by David Thompson (Happy Valley Films, 1992).

30. Deleuze, _Cinema 1_, p. 52.

31. Eisenstein, _Notes of a Film Director_, p. 128.

32. Norman McLaren, quoted in Johnson, 'Coming to Terms with Color', p. 8.

33. Pace, Johnson, 'Coming to Terms with Color', p. 18.

34. Leger, _Functions of Painting_, p. 120.

35. Branigan, 'The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System', pp. 20 & 21.

36. Ibid., p. 20.

37. Ibid., p. 21.

38. A left-to-right movement that perhaps gets its association with moving forward to the future from our Western style of writing. How are right-to-left movements understood in Arabic writing countries? How are top-down movements regarded in Eastern societies which write from top to bottom?

39. From an interview in _A Question of Colour_, director/writer Henry Colomer (Europimages/ Les films d'ici le sept, 1992).

40. 'The feeling is the immediate *welcoming* of what is given.' Jean-Francois Lyotard, _The Inhuman_ (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), p. 111.

41. Stanley Cavell ponders this: 'It is as if we and the world had a joint stake in keeping ourselves stupid, that is dumb, inarticulate', _Pursuits of Happiness_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 42.

42. Pat Kirkham and Mike O'Shaughnessy, 'Designing Desire', _Sight and Sound_, vol. 2 no. 1 (NS), May 1992, p. 14.

43. Richard Rorty, 'The Pragmatist's Progress', in _Interpretation and Overinterpretation_, edited by Stefan Collini (Cambridge University Press,1992), p. 92. It's so lovely the way that the older a philosopher gets, the shorter his writings become, and thus the clearer the ideas -- Quine now only ever seems to publish a few pages at a time -- and this essay of Rorty's is so relaxed in tone I'm sure he's writing it while reclining on a chaise longue listening to Mahler's 4th on a hot drunk summer's day in Virginia.

[p. 110:]

44. Richard Rorty, 'The Pragmatists Progress', p. 92.

45. Ibid., p. 93.

46. Ibid., p. 105.

47. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _What is Philosophy?_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), p. 11, my italics.

Daniel Frampton, 'Filmosophy: Colour', in Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie, eds, _New Scholarship from BFI Research_ (London: British Film Institute, 1996), pp. 86-110; available online at <http://www.filmosophy.org/articles/colour>.

Home

Comments & Questions: author@filmosophy.org

Discuss Filmosophy at Film-Philosophy