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Vertigo (1958)- Scottie's Nightmare Sequence 0:00 - 1:26 (Alfred Hitchcock)

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In this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) released by Hollywood Studio Paramount Pictures, protagonist John “Scottie” Ferguson has a nightmare. This comes just after his love Madeleine has fallen from the belltower to what we are led to believe is her death. The clip starts with a dull and typical grey bedroom accented by a yellow blanket that focuses us toward Scottie. Then, the frame flashes bright blues and purples as the world departs from reality into an elaborate dream sequence that gives us a window into his interior self. This sequence highlights the power of color as the bearer of reality: the flashing hues hint at the world’s truthfulness changing. Higgins and Belton understand the “lack of strong diegetic motivation for the colored illumination” fractures the perception of reality¹⁶. Vertigo is a film centered in reality that utilizes the jolt such vibrant colors can have on perception of reality to build its story. Hitchcock disturbs us from Scottie’s plain room to enhance the story’s narrative and emotion while showing the viewer an emotion that cannot be perceived externally. Without color, this scene would lack impact and coherency to an audience.

¹⁶Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 26.

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Vertigo (9/11) Movie CLIP - Scottie's Nightmare (1958) HD

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Still image from Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)

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Psycho (1960)- Marion Crane in Bates Motel Parlor Still Image (Alfred Hitchcock)

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This still image comes from another Alfred Hitchcock film: Psycho (1960). Although released after Vertigo, Hitchcock shot Psycho in black and white. This image in particular has a striking vitality: diegetic lighting from the lamp, a complex mise-en-scène, and Marion’s expression assist its indisputable truth. Here, Marion converses with Norman Bates, whom she just met, as she eats a slice of bread. Hitchcock connects with the viewer by portraying such universal experiences. But the necessary aspect that secures realism comes from the movement and perception of time passing that unfolds during this scene: “[m]otion imparts corporality to objects and gives them an autonomy their still representations could not have”¹⁷. The fact that a black and white film can feel real helps one understand why color did not instantaneously become standard in the industry; however, no real human is shades of grey. No real human requires light to separate them from the rest of their world. These are the shortcomings of black and white that color can fill. Authentic colors can almost entirely immerse the viewer into the film–if used masterfully can remove a degree of separation between film and life.

¹⁷Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 7.

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Still image from Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)

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In Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), yellow is repeatedly presented throughout the film, especially in scenes depicting memories of combat. Towards the end of the film, after Ari relives his memory of Palestinian women returning to their destroyed homes after the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, the audience sees the first clip of the film that isn’t animated. In contrast to the animated scene, the documentary footage of the crowd’s return isn’t shown as a suffocating yellow color, but instead, retains a muted palette grounded in reality. In the case of Waltz with Bashir (2008), “deep color triggers memory”¹⁵ not only for the audience, to whom the color is shocking and eye-catching, but for the protagonist Ari himself, in representing his memories of combat. When comparing these two stills, color is both representative in the animation- the oppressive yellow implies the fogginess of memory and the equalizing nature of tragedy- and, perhaps, realistic- mimicking dust kickup from the crowd and the torrid sun beating down. Thus, the color yellow in Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) not only emphasizes its narrative of skewed memory but also confronts the viewer directly with its subjective retelling in comparison with the documentary footage.

¹³ Pomerance, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5.

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Lyman H. Howe’s Ride on a Runaway Train (1921)- Film Tinting

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Lyman H. Howe’s Ride on a Runaway Train (1921) used film tinting to enhance its visual storytelling. At the beginning of the film, the train’s interior and the station scenes are tinted red, conveying the sense of industrialized machines–associated with rust, metal, and a reddish tone. As the perspective shifts to the outside view from the train, the film’s tint transitions to green, reflecting the abundance of trees in the landscape. The rocky mountain scenes were tinted yellow, which continues to use the dominant color in reality; however, when the train bumped into a group of workers on a small movable platform, the tint remained yellow even though their background was clearly a green forest. In this case, the color serves a different purpose: it reflects a sense of oppression and urgency that intensifies the mood. Therefore, although tinting is used to mirror the dominant natural colors within each scene for most of the time, it is also used to enhance tension, creating a sense of suspense. As the famous Broadway designer Robert Edmond Jones had said, “light bright colors make us feel gay. Dark somber colors make us feel sad…”⁹. The monochromatic tinting doesn’t necessarily replicate real-life color, but it establishes tone and mood. Thus, tinting enriches the visual and emotional appeal of the film, contributing to the storytelling.

9 Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 29.

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Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train 1921 with full score

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William Heise’s Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895)- Film Painting

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William Heise’s Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) is an example of hand-painted film. The dancer appears light and lively with the vivid colors of her dress, enhancing the joyful mood of the scene. The vibrant colors draw the audience’s attention to her smooth motions and lead to imagination by “trigger[ing] memory and aspiration…[and sparking] sentimental connection"¹⁰. However, one issue arises in hand painted-films as the colors feel like being suspended above the objects rather than inherent¹¹. In addition, the constant change in color of the same object (the dancer’s dress) makes the effect surreal and fantastical. However, even though the colors add a layer of visual abstraction that distances the viewer from a naturalistic feeling for the film, the vibrancy of the scene still makes hand-painted films more realistic than black-and-white films as they “offer us a version of the world congruent with what the normal (non-colorblind) eye sees in looking at ‘reality,’ thus a view that indexes and substantiates ‘real life’”¹². Therefore, even when colors are artificially created, they still create a greater sense of reality than black and white.

10 Pomerance, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5.

11 Gunning, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, 22.

12 Pomerance, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2.

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Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) Annabelle Serpentine Dance, no. 3 (Edison)

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Reference this document if writing is not legible in the Padlet format.

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[CONTENT WARNING] Scene from Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon)

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Satoshi Kon made his directorial debut with the unsettling classic Perfect Blue (1997). Perfect Blue (1997) follows former pop star Mimarin as Mamoru Uchida begins stalking her and she falls into psychosis, constantly being tormented by her past self. From 34:07-37:31, Mima acts in a rape scene for her new show, Double-Bind. She is cast in a variety of purple tones with red accents, reflecting the staged and oversaturated nature of the scene while portraying a deep sense of danger. Later, Mima loses consciousness and is confronted by a looming, dark audience, cheering her name as she waves at them in her bright pink, girl-group outfit, only to later wake up in a bleak backstage chair. In this scene, color represents the flashy, eye-catching lifestyle that Mima tries to pursue while facing the intimidating gaze of the public eye and the bland reality of her own life. Following the model of Technicolor design, this scene’s color scheme is “harmonized around the lead female character”¹⁶. Here, the colors not only contrast Mima’s on and off-screen identities, but also “match [...] to the ‘dominant mood[s] or emotion[s]’”¹⁷, such as stress, trauma, and disorientation.

14 Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 37.

15 Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 40.

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Color is a formidable tool in cinema that allows filmmakers to add vitality to images, direct viewer attention, enforce the central plot of a film, and convey emotional tone, thus affirming or altering the film’s projected reality. While concepts like time, segregation of spaces, and movement, are paramount to a film’s presented reality and can be shown in black and white, “to shoot in color [is] to show the world”¹.

Color is “representational and [...] evocative”², with the ability to “act signally, thus intentionally”³ and still represent our perception of objects in the natural world. In this way, red could represent both Mima’s lipstick and looming danger in Perfect Blue. In Applying Color and Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, color is implied to expand both reality and fantasy; color’s unique ability to be simultaneously representational and concrete allows it to serve as a vehicle for narrative, emotional content, and drawing attention, all of which assert a film’s sense of reality.

Techniques like tinting, toning, and hand painting were major ways that filmmakers incorporated color on films in the early 1900s⁴. Tinting and toning are processes of soaking sections of black-and-white film in dye and staining the emulsion⁵. Although monochromatic tinting/toning produces images with a single overall color, it aids realism by suggesting mood and atmosphere. Hand-painted films like Annabelle Serpentine Dance, on the other hand, should appear more realistic since individual frames are painted in a way that allows for multiple colors within a single shot; the realistic feeling is also conveyed through the translucent dye that allows the background color of black and white to cause shades.

With the introduction of three-strip technicolor, a complete spectrum of light became available for filmmakers, which, at first, many saw as less realistic than black and white films wherein filmmakers focused on the contrast between dark and light shades on the screen to create realism. For example, Psycho can be seen as a pinnacle of realism and was by many in its time, yet color would have unlocked realistic and thematic opportunities impossible with black and white. Filmmakers in this transitional time realized “technicolor did not automatically confer a sense of realism on cinema” and that “conventions had to be developed”⁶. Technicolor’s vibrance could only promote higher degrees of realism if filmmakers could find “ways to let color cooperate with established and respected techniques, not dominate them”⁷. Many films failed in this respect because the film’s overuse of color took away from the narrative and themes, yet Vertigo was able to use vibrancy’s shock to create fantasy purposefully. Higgins understood that “[i]f color were to become a legitimate tool, [Huggins and Jones] suggest, filmmakers must avoid simple decoration and carefully tailor color to a film’s dramatic needs”⁸. Until this happened, black and white ruled as the victor of realism in cinema, but with this aforementioned tailorship, films could begin consciously using color to dictate the degree of reality they were presenting.

Therefore, although color may not have been properly expressed at its time, without a doubt it unlocks possibilities for realism that black and white simply cannot achieve. Regardless of its form, color has and will continue to enable filmmakers to express their artistic reality through a variety of modes.

1 Murray Pomerance. New Review of Film and Television Studies. (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 5.

2 Murray Pomerance, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2

3 Muray Pomerance, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5

4 Barbara Flueckiger, “Tinting ” Timeline of Historical Film Colors, 2012. https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/1216/.

5 Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, Martin Scorsese, Elif Kaynakçı, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, (Eye Filmmuseum; Amsterdam, 2015), 22.

6 Scott Higgins. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, (University of Texas Press, 2007), 36.

7 Higgins. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 36.

8 Higgins. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 36.

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Feller, Nili, ed. 2008. Waltz with Bashir. Animated Documentary. Directed by Ari Folman. New York City, U.S.: Sony Pictures Classics.

Flueckiger, Barbara. 2012. “Tinting.” Timeline of Historical Film Colors. 2012. https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/1216/.

Gunning, Tom, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, Martin Scorsese, Elif Kaynakçı, and Eye (Amsterdam) . 2015. Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema. Amsterdam: Eye Filmmuseum ; Amsterdam.

Heise, William . 1895. “Annabelle Serpentine Dance (Highlights).” 1895. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiOmmb-i-cE.

Higgins, Scott. 2007. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. University of Texas Press.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo. Film. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1960. Psycho. Film. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures.

Howe, Lyman H. 1921. “Ride on a Runaway Train .” Panopto. 1921. https://uchicago.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c4620cb7-2a16-43a0-ae23-b2f7010b193a.

Metz, Christian. (1974) 2007. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. Chicago, Ill. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Ogata, Harutoshi, ed. 1997. Perfect Blue. Animation. Directed by Satoshi Kon. Rex Entertainment.

Pomerance, Murray. 2017. New Review of Film and Television Studies. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Wikipedia Contributors. 2025. “Christian Metz (Theorist).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. May 24, 2025. en.wikipedia.org.