# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Movies are a wonderful medium for both entertainment and art, and examining them closely only enhances their magic. If you're writing a review for a newspaper or a paper for class, you'll have to break down the elements of a film and...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the first part in an eight-part series on how to analyse movies.

The language of film (or video or TV) can only be detected by analysing the "moving image texts". The idea is that every image conveys a meaning, like a photograph would convey a feeling or a message. For instance, consider the photograph below.

Photograph by World Photography Finalist Alessandro Grassani/LUZphoto

With a picture, it's a little easier (compared to film) to distil its meaning. There is just one frame or scene to analyse, the "image text" being the message it is trying to convey.

The photograph above was taken by Alessandro Grassani, an Italian photographer, in Mongolia in 2011. The person in the picture is a young woman. The photo could be interpreted as conveying desperation, sadness and poverty, illustrating the woman's circumstances. It illustrates the people's circumstances in the area or situation the woman is living in, if you would want to generalise the photo's meaning. An additional reading could be embarrassment, implied by how the woman is holding her hands to cover her face.

As you can see, there's already a lot to interpret from just this one photograph - or shot. A film exists out of thousands of shots, which is why it's so much harder to read. Just like one would read a book, one can "read" a movie. Though instead of reading an actual text, you have to distil the "text", its meaning, from the (moving) images. It's like they say: a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's certainly the case with film.

Meaning of Film and Decoding It

The film language is how a film "speaks" to its audience. Filmmakers tell a certain story, transfer a certain idea. Even when they aim to just entertain their audience, without consciously adding a layer of meaning to their film, their film will still likely carry some meaning. That's because the audience can create meaning, even when it's not there purposefully.

This is called decoding. The audience "decodes" a story's meaning, just like one would interpret spoken language or written texts. When watching a film, the viewer takes all their own previous experiences and knowledge and subconsciously apply it to what they see. People always interpret a film with pre-existing expectations.

It's impossible to watch film in a vacuum; people will always relate what happens in a film to things they have experienced in their own lives. For example, they can relate to parents who are having their first child, a couple going through a divorce, a teen going to school, a death in the family, et cetera. The film doesn't even need to show the full extent of what the characters are going through, because the audience can fill it in for themselves.

Then, how does one relate to murderers if they have never killed, or to extreme poverty depicted in a film if they have never experienced poverty themselves? In those cases, they take the knowledge of other films they've seen, or even other media depictions, like news items, which will help them understand and interpret a film's meaning.

On the one hand, film often reflects how people think about, for instance, political, social or even economic issues. On the other hand, film also moulds the way the audience thinks about those issues. It's a dynamic process.

An example of a film without purposeful meaning would be Transformers ( Michael Bay, 2007). It is a film mostly void of meaning, but a distinct meaning that has been assigned to Transformers and its sequels is how it objectifies and sexualises its female characters (foremost, Megan Fox). It's a meaning that's been assigned to the film by its viewers, but was, debatably, not consciously inserted by the filmmakers.

A film with a lot of purposefully inserted meaning would be Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak. Del Toro is one of those directors who loves to play with the audience's mind by assigning meaning to every element in every shot. While at first glance, Crimson Peak may just be a ghost story with disappointingly few scares, it is instead a story about the evil of humans, and the ghosts are merely there to underline the evil of the living characters of the story (listen to this great podcast where Del Toro tells more about his ideas).

It's a classic, gothic horror tale of the sort that were popular from the late 19 th century to the 1960's. Crimson Peak is frequently misunderstood due to the audience's understanding of modern horror. Modern horror is relatively unsubtle, with lots of gore and jump scares. The film's marketing also contributed to this misunderstanding: it was presented to the audiences as a modern horror, emphasising on the few ghost scares in the film's trailers.

The Window on the World

What makes a movie so infinitely compelling to us - curious creatures as we are - is that it offers a "window on the world". It creates an appearance of reality. It's like peering through your bedroom window when there's noise coming from outside, or when the entire highway gets jammed because of rubbernecking, watching the crash that happened on the highway going the other way. It's morbid curiosity. People love seeing drama, and fantasising about what the drama or commotion leads to, or means.

In the 1920s and 30s, movies were considered "truth machines", able to reveal certain social and political truths. In the 1960s, famous French philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that fiction as well as non-fiction are merely simulations.

Today, though, it's understood that film should not be compared to reality, whether it is to measure the gap between reality and depiction, or to measure the accuracy of the depiction. Instead, we should look at how movie and reality are related to each other, how they are interlinked. Film draws from real life, but also influences it. It's not so much about the gap between movie and reality, but the interaction between them. Lines between reality and fiction have blurred (and not just in film!).

No depiction in film is objective or neutral. This is why one can't speak about a film's "truth", "reality" or "authenticity": film (as well as reality) is in the eye of the beholder.

Not only does film entertain, it also informs and educates people about the world around them. Most importantly, film persuades them to see the world in a certain way. Most are not aware of this persuasion or influence, but if you are, trust me, it's so much fun to recognise, analyse and criticise the way films persuade its audience into thinking about things in a certain way. It greatly adds to the experience of watching a film, and it is what I enjoy about film most of all.

Surely, you will encounter films that convey meaning and persuade its audience in ways you don't agree with at all, which can be frustrating sometimes. Especially when you realise that the casual audience member has no idea of what's being inserted into their subconscious. Nonetheless, film analysis and delving into the hidden depths and meanings of film will be revelatory, and totally worth it.

See Also

Next in this series is How To Analyse Movies: Signs, Codes & Conventions. I'll discuss semiotics, the study of meaning in a film through decoding symbols and conventions.
Do you enjoy thinking about or discussing the meanings of a movie after you've watching it? How do you go about "reading" a movie's meaning? Can you think about any movies that have made you understand the world better, even fiction?
Film Analysis For Beginners: How To Analyse Movies

Next in How To Analyse Movies...

Part 2: Signs, Codes & Conventions
Part 3: Mise-en-Scene & Editing
Part 4: Considering the Camera
Part 5: Lighting, Sound & Score
Part 6: Story & Genre
Part 7: Iconography & Realisticness
Part 8: Putting it into Practice

Only part 1 and part 2 are available to non-members, the How To Analyse Movies series is part of our premium content. Become a member to unlock the articles, or buy Film Analysis For Beginners: How To Analyse Movies

Does content like this matter to you?

Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Analyse Movies #1: The Introduction | Film Inquiry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the first part in an eight-part series on how to analyse movies. The language of film (or video or TV) can only be detected by analysing the "moving image texts". The idea is that every image conveys a meaning, like a photograph would convey a feeling or a message.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I want to do the color timing for each of these episodes where you sit with the colorist and make sure that the color of each individual scene is just the way you want it."

―Vince Gilligan, IndieWire interview, July 2012

Colors are a recurring theme in Breaking Bad. The clothing colors that characters wear represent various themes and their relationships to each other in each scene.

Below is a summary of the colors worn by the Breaking Bad characters and the colors' symbolism.

The symbolism of colors was taken up in Better Call Saul, sometimes also called 'Ice and Fire' theory : blue for the good guys, red for the bad guys.

The Color Wheel

The relationships between the central Breaking Bad characters are analogous to the relationships between colors on the red, yellow, and blue painter's color wheel. For example, the color for Walter's alter ego, Heisenberg, which is often green, is created by mixing the colors of his two closest partners, Skyler, who often wears blue, and Jesse, who often wears yellow. Further, Heisenberg is opposed by Hank, who often wears shades of orange, ranging from red to brown, which is located on the opposite side of the color wheel from green. Marie, being the sister of Skyler and wife of Hank, is represented by purple, which sits between blue and red colors on the color wheel.

While Walter's signature product is sky blue in color, the meth made in the show technically should be yellow. The characters' relationships to the drug is represented by their colors' locations relative to yellow on the color wheel. Marie is farthest from the meth drug trade, being neither a user, cook, hired hand, nor narcotics officer, and is represented by purple which is opposite yellow on the color wheel. The characters that are closet to the drug, principally the cooks Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Gale Boetticher, all wear yellow jumpsuits in the meth lab and frequently wear yellow in other scenes of the show. Gustavo Fring, while not a meth cook, wears a yellow shirt when working at his fast-food chicken restaurant Los Pollos Hermanos. Skyler White and Hank Schrader, and their colors, represent two end-member relationships to the drug trade and Walter White. Skyler's blue represents loyalty and peace, while Schrader's red represents violence and anger. Partners who are loyal to Walter White receive money (represented by green, a mixture of blue and yellow), while those who oppose him are met with violence (represented by orange, a mixture of red and yellow).

'Worn by: Walter White, Skyler White, Saul Goodman

Symbolism: Greed, money, growth, envy

Secondary color: Formed by blue + yellow

Examples:

Holly White is named for the evergreen holly plant.

Skyler paints Hollys bedroom a dark green in season one

The maiden name of Skyler and Marie is Lambert, which means "bright land."

Skyler wears green after finding Walter's bag of money in the closet of Holly's bedroom, where he had been sleeping just before he signed the divorce papers and moved out .

Worn by: Skyler White, Walter White, Todd Alquist, Lydia Rodarte-Quayle

Symbolism: Loyalty, power, sadness, purity, water, sky, coldness

Blue is a primary color on the RYB color wheel.

Examples:

Walter White's signature meth formula produces blue crystals known as Blue Sky.

Walter and Skyler White both wear dark blue to the birthday party for Elliott Schwartz. ("Gray Matter")

Sky blue is the color of the ribbons worn by multiple characters in memory of the Wayfarer 515 plane crash.

Huell and Kuby are wearing blue shirts when they go to the storage facility to collect Walter's money. Huell suggests that they run off to Mexico with the money, but Kuby reminds Huell of Walter's hit on Mike's guys in prison as a reason not to cross Walter.

The flashlights equipped by the Albuquerque Police who discover Walter White's corpse within the lab of the nazis illuminate Walt and color him blue in his death.

Worn by: Jesse Pinkman, Gustavo Fring, Gale Boetticher, Walter White, Krazy-8, Don Eladio Vuente

Symbolism: Methamphetamine, optimism, pleasure, caution, cowardice, fear, pseudo-toughness

Yellow is a primary color on the RYB color wheel.

Examples:

When Jane's dad is picking out her burial dress after her overdose, someone on the phone suggests a yellow dress.

Walter White wears a yellow shirt when he confronts teenagers who are making fun of his son in a clothing store.

The color of the bag that Walter was going to suffocate Krazy 8 with was yellow. ("The Cat's in the Bag")

Yellow was the color of the protective jumpsuits worn by Walter, Jesse, and Gail in Gustavo Fring's underground meth lab.

Worn by: Hank Schrader, Walter White

Symbolism: Earth, humility, stability, strength

Composite color: Formed by red + yellow + black

Examples:

Worn by: Marie Schrader, Huell Babineaux

Symbolism: Luxury, royalty, protection, safety, not involved with the meth trade (purple is the polar opposite of yellow after all), and most importantly, self-deception.

Vince Gilligan in an interview with Vulture said, "Well, Marie would say purple is the color of royalty", meaning it isnt.

Secondary color: Formed by red + blue

Examples:

Marie wears purple almost exclusively throughout the show with the exceptions of her white hospital lab coat, and occasionally yellow or black.

While Hank is at home recuperating from being shot by The Cousins, the sheets on his bed are purple.

Marie is wearing a purple hoodie and yellow t-shirt when she suggests to Skyler that she take the kids home to repair the family. ("Gliding Over All")

Hank wears purple as does Gomez in the DEA office. ("Confessions")

Worn by: Hank Schrader, Badger, Saul Goodman

Symbolism: Humor, action, fire, violence

Secondary color: Formed by red + yellow

Examples:

Badger is wearing a large orange hoodie while explaining a made-up Star Trek episode about beaming Chekov's guts into space. ("Blood Money")

Hank wears an orange shirt to the Indian reservation in To'hajiilee. ("To'hajiilee")

Worn by: Holly White, Walter White, Kaylee Ehrmantraut

Symbolism: Naiveté, youth, tragedy

Composite color: Red + white

Examples:

Pinkman is Jesse's last name.

After Jane Margolis' death, her father, Donald, goes to her apt. to find clothes for her funeral. Her bedspread is entirely pink, and we see a mural painted by Jane of a girl who resembles her, with her eyes closed floating between planets in the cosmos. In the corner of the mural is the pink teddy that appears in season 2 teasers foreshadowing the plane crash over ABQ.

Also noteworthy in this scene, Donald Margolis is on the phone and says that there are no yellow clothes, only gray and black. He finally selects a blue dress with long sleeves for her. In the mural the girl is adorned in a gray cloud-like dress, the background mostly blue and gray with some yellow)

Walter White wears pink in the same shade as the Pink Teddy Bear when he meets with doctors for a follow-up appointment after his cancer surgery and later that afternoon while sitting next to his pool at the time of the Wayfarer 515 crash.

Worn by: Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Hank Schrader

Symbolism: Blood, murder, aggression, violence, experience, criminality.

Red is a primary color on the RYB color wheel.

Examples:

Jesse wears a red jacket and hat when he disposes of Emilio's body in his bathtub using hydrochloric acid.

Hank Schrader wears a red shirt when he visits Walter White about finding a gas mask that belongs Walter's high school chemistry lab.

The floor of Gustavo Fring's underground meth lab is painted red.

Jesse wears a red shirt with black pants the night of Jane Margolis' death , when he shoots Gale Boetticher ("Full Measure"), and again when he shoots his way out of the Juárez drug Cartel's hacienda in Mexico .

At Madrigal headquarters, Peter Schuler take off his shirt and [red] tie before he kills himself in a bathroom with a Red door, counter, toilet and toilet paper dispenser. ("Madrigal")

Hank Schrader wears a long-sleeved red shirt when he confronts Walter ("Blood Money") and Skyler White , who both wear beige, about Walter's real identity as Heisenberg.

Lydia Rodarte-Quayle wears Christian Louboutin shoes which feature a red sole, tarnished by the desert sands when she is blindly being guided by Todd Alquist to avoid seeing dead bodies.

Worn by: Walter White, Hank Schrader, Jane Margolis, Mike Ehrmantraut

Symbolism: Death, darkness, evil, power, secrecy, deception

Black is formed by the absence or absorption of all colors of visible light. In the painter's wheel, it is formed by mixing equal parts blue, red, and yellow.

Examples:

Schwartz is the last name of Eliot and Gretchen, Walter White's former business partners. Schwarz is German for black.

The mormons that leave Jesse a pamphlet on his front door while he's hallucinating are wearing black pants.

Tomás Cantillo is wearing a black hoodie when he pretends to playfully ride his black bike in circles around Combo and then shoots Combo in the back multiple times.

Jane is wearing black when she decides to stay at Jesse's apartment, leading to her relapse and death.

Marie, who almost exclusively wears purple, wears black in the two episodes prior to Hank's death.

Worn by: Jesse Pinkman, Hank Schrader, Skinny Pete, The Cousins

Symbolism: Depression, illness, guilt, mourning, revenge, regret

Composite color: Formed by black + white

Examples:

Worn by: Skyler White, Marie Schrader

Symbolism: Innocence, light

White is formed by the reflection or transmission of all colors of visible light. On a painter's canvas, white is the absence of color.

Examples:

Jane's last name, Margolis, in Hebrew for pearl (Margalith), which is often white but may also be black.

Worn by: Walter White, Skyler White

Symbolism: Not quite innocent, a little bit dirty, rich, neutral, not a threat

Composite color: Formed by white + some yellow + possibly some red

Examples:

Multicolor Combinations

Worn by: Walter White Jr., Saul Goodman

Symbolism: Conflicted emotions, mixed feelings, confusion, multiple meanings

Examples:

Walter White Jr. often wears striped shirts with multiple colors.

The stripes on Jesse's RV are yellow, orange, and red.

The colors in the logo of A1A Car Wash, run by Skyler White, are blue and white.

Walter White wears a beige, brown, and sky blue robe soon after Hank inspects his chemistry lab for missing lab equipment ("Crazy Handful of Nothin'") and again when he finds Hank's GPS tracker on his car ("Blood Money").

Worn by: Walter White

Symbolism: Nakedness, transparency, having nothing to hide

Examples:

Production Trivia

Vince Gilligan's name is yellow in the opening credits to Breaking Bad.

Vince Gilligan has been quoted as saying that the last episode will be "polarizing."

Related References

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Colors are a recurring theme in Breaking Bad. The clothing colors that characters wear represent various themes and their relationships to each other in each scene. Below is a summary of the colors worn by the Breaking Bad characters and the colors' symbolism.