Felt Through the Eyes: Color as Sensory Event by Rebecca Nguyen

Artifact 3: New technology, making emotion visible.

haydenf7 — 2025-07-03 01:19:45 UTC

La Cucaracha, the first live-action film to use three-strip Technicolor, introduced a groundbreaking way to use color not for realism (what Bazin argued can be created by the “irrational power of photography”), but to express emotional truth. With this new technology, filmmakers could use bold, artificial hues to externalize internal states. In a climactic backstage scene [18:42–18:47], Pancho threatens to kill Chatita, and the entire screen turns into an unnatural red tint. The lighting isn’t realistic, and it doesn’t represent the color of any actual wall or light. But it feels right. This is what Pomerance calls “deep color”: color that shocks, strikes, and forces us to feel. The red makes Pancho’s fury visible, emotionally unmistakable. Another moment [12:00–12:10], when Pancho first calls Chaquita a “cockroach,” supports this approach: as their argument escalates, the lighting turns increasingly red, culminating in a close-up with a deep red tint. These moments exemplify the exhibit’s thesis: color here is not meant to imitate reality, but to communicate raw emotion. Higgins describes the use of red here as "bizarre in its literalness" to dramatize rage and tension. This strategy echoes Blade Runner 2049, where stylized color—like its unnatural blue haze—blurs reality and guides us to emotional states like desolation and longing, not visual accuracy.

Bibliography:

Corrigan, Lloyd, dir. La Cucaracha. 1934; Hollywood, CA: RKO Pictures. Film.

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What Is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, 2-7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Gunning, Tom. “Applying Color: Creating Fantasy of Cinema.” In Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, edited by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen, 15–27. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/EYE Filmmuseum, 2015.

Higgins, Scott. “Forging a New Aesthetic: From Opera to Color Consciousness.” In Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s, 29-30. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/716278.5.

Pomerance, Murray. “Introduction: The Color of Our Eyes.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 1 (2017): 5-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1265428.

Artifact 4: Defying the expectations of color to blur the lines of real and fake, human and artificial.

haydenf7 — 2025-07-03 01:20:46 UTC

In Blade Runner 2049, color is used to challenge visual realism and create genuine sentiment. The film’s neon reflections and deep shadows create a sensory overload that looks a little off, creating an unsettling feeling. Pomerance calls this “deep colors,” —hues that defy realism but “strike” the viewer emotionally, triggering “memory and aspiration” At 2:17, Officer K’s car floats across a desolate landscape, and the entire screen is washed in an exaggerated, foggy blue. The scene’s vastness and muted palette blur the line between reality and dream, making us feel the emotional emptiness of the futuristic world. Supporting this example, at 21:49 a neon green light covers Officer K’s virtual girlfriend, creating a contrast between the overall blue tint Officer K is in. While this contrast of color isn’t necessarily realistic, we feel longing for real connection. The color isn’t believable in a literal sense, but it’s emotionally believable. It illustrates the exhibit’s central idea: artificial color can evoke an emotional truth that feels more honest than visual accuracy ever could.

Bibliography

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What Is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, 2–7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Villeneuve, Denis, dir. Blade Runner 2049. 2017; Hollywood, CA: Warner Bros. Film.

Pomerance, Murray. “Introduction: The Color of Our Eyes.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 1 (2017): 5-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1265428.

Artifact 2

yge29 — 2025-07-03 01:49:33 UTC

In The Shining, the blood-gushing scene first emerged as Danny’s imaginary friend "Tony" warns him that the Overlook Hotel is a "dangerous place." Unlike Bigger than life, The Shining’s intense, unnatural hue functions as a supernatural element, reinforcing the sense of fantasy which evokes a surreal atmosphere. This hyper-real, saturated color defies physical laws; as Gunning explains, early filmmakers used unrealistic color to signal "transformations or sudden appearances" (Gunning 24), a technique Kubrick employs to make terror “tangible” beyond the bounds of reality.

While movement typically anchors realism on screen by creating a sense of physical presence, or "corporality" (Metz 8), Kubrick subverts this convention by framing the blood flood from a static perspective (the camera stays still). As viewers, we can only passively face the surging tide of blood, powerless to intervene. The blood’s glossy, paint-like texture heightens its artificiality, yet its visual impact integrates so convincingly into the place, allowing the hallucination to gradually engulf what was once a "real" space.

Bibliography:

“The Shining.” n.d. Microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/the-shining/8d6kgwzl58p8.

Gunning, Tom. n.d. “APPLYING COLOR: Creating Fantasy of Cinema.”

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

Artifact 1

yge29 — 2025-07-03 03:08:52 UTC

In this significant moment of the film, Ed Avery, overwhelmed by his mental breakdown, raises a pair of scissors and tries to stab his son. Nicholas Ray vividly captures his desperation through bold use of saturated colors. The screen floods with an unnatural, almost chemical red, staining the surrounding walls and the “camera”. Technicolor, a technology designed to replicate "lifelike" color, is employed here in a way that paradoxically undermines realism. This is through exaggerating colors beyond natural perception. As Gunning notes, these hues artificially "hover over the object rather than inhere in it" (Gunning 8). In other words, colors are deliberately and abruptly imposed onto the film rather than captured organically, creating a dissonance between illusion and physical reality.

Building on this, Pomerance’s "deep color" theory also challenges the notion of realism. Unlike "shallow" color, where it passively "states but does not affect," deep color actively intrudes upon the perception of the audience by dominating the frame with striking intensity. It triggers what Pomerance terms a "prickling point of affective contact" (Pomerance 5). The red’s suffocating spread and bleeding beyond spatial boundaries create a tangible sense of madness, using Technicolor’s “artificialness” to reveal the illusionary characteristic of realism. Color thus is no longer representational, but emotional as people can really empathize with the feeling of suffocation under “illusion”.

Bibliography:

“Bigger Than Life.” 2025. Archive.org. 2025. https://archive.org/details/bigger-than-life-1956-nicholas-ray.

Gunning, Tom. n.d. “APPLYING COLOR: Creating Fantasy of Cinema.”

Pomerance, Murray. 2017. “Introduction: The Color of Our Eyes.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15 (1): 2-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1265428.

Artifact 5: First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (Stan Brakhage, 1994, USA)

rn777n — 2025-07-04 03:39:41 UTC

First Hymn to the Night by Stan Brakhage is an experimental short film that immerses viewers in a sensory and almost overwhelming experience through quick movement of abstract imagery, shifting textures, and tonal color blending. This artifact relates to the exhibit’s theme of color, realism, and sensory reorientation by challenging conventional modes of visual perception. Brakhage made First Hymn to the Night using a tactile and labor-intensive process: he painted and scratched directly onto clear film stock, bypassing the camera entirely. This handmade approach results in a cinema that is intensely physical and intimate. Color here is not photographed reality—it is crafted light, pulsing across the frame in flickering intervals. Drawing on Béla Balázs’s theory of the “visible speech” of cinema, where meaning emerges through visual rhythm and affective form rather than narrative, the film resists straightforward interpretation. Instead, it invites viewers to engage with the entire frame (peripherals as much as the center), heightening the physical and mental demand of viewing and thus making it more exhausting to consume. The seamless blending of color tones intensifies the experience, creating an uninterrupted visual flow that deepens the viewer’s immersion but also their disorientation. The film exemplifies where perception itself is both the subject and the medium.

Additionally, Scott Higgins’s ideas on color in cinema offer a further dimension. Higgins writes that color “hovers over the eyes,” meaning that it doesn’t simply represent objects but creates a surface effect that can overwhelm or diffuse attention. In First Hymn to the Night, the blended and vibrant palette works in precisely this way – its seamless transitions between various colors and hues contribute not to clarify a straightforward narrative, but to a dreamlike drift of perception. Color here, through Brakhage’s unique methods of filmmaking, is not used to cue realism, but rather reveals its own artificiality.

Bibliography:

Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Translated by Edith Bone. New York: Dover Publications, 1970. [Excerpt: “Sound.”]

Higgins, Scott. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.

Brakhage, Stan. First Hymn to the Night—Novalis. 1994. 16mm film. Canyon Cinema.

Introduction

yge29 — 2025-07-04 03:44:21 UTC

It is a common assumption that color in cinema serves to capture reality more faithfully. Yet, as this exhibit explores, the most powerful cinematic colors frequently defy realism, achieving emotional truths and sensory experiences far beyond mere imitation. Drawing on key theories from our course, we see how color has consistently functioned less as a mirror to the world and more as a key to unlocking fantasy, emotion, and meaning.

André Bazin, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” argued that cinema’s power lies in its indexical connection to the real—that film records the world as it is, preserving a trace of presence. Yet Bazin also recognized that cinema is never neutral or completely natural—it’s shaped by framing, light, and now, color. Christian Metz later built on this with his theory of the “impression of reality,” noting that cinema feels real not because it replicates life, but because it employs expressive codes such as sound, movement, and color that trigger our belief. Color, then, becomes a paradoxical tool: its artificiality can heighten the illusion of realism by activating emotional cues. In this sense, “realistic color” is not always naturalistic, but emotionally convincing. Color in cinema often offers not the world as it is, but as it feels.

The very first movie colors weren't about copying reality. Filmmakers hand-painted film strips or dyed whole scenes single colors. Gunning explains that these artificial colors created fantasy worlds and intense feelings (such as excitement, fear, romance) that felt more real emotionally than simple black and white ever could — “less to simple realism than to evoking a vivid and sensual world of fantasy”. For instance, in La Cucaracha (1934), when a character gets furious, the entire screen floods with a deep, unnatural red. It is not merely “red lighting”, but made pure “rage” visible. This "fake" color instantly tells you exactly how explosive the anger is inside the character.

Pomerance gives us a simple but powerful way to think about movie color. "Shallow color" is the everyday stuff: red simply means red, green is green. It tells you what things are, but doesn't make you feel much. "Deep color" is different. It hits you. It might be strangely intense, unexpected, or dreamlike; It’s about creating a strong emotional punch or a lasting memory of the moment. To illustrate, Stan Brakhage's First Hymn to the Night isn't filmed at all! He painted and scratched colors directly onto clear film. The swirling, blending color don't represent real objects. Rather, they create an overwhelming sensory experience —– like being inside a feeling or a dream. The artificiality turns out to facilitate the creation of the emotional “truth”.

When Technicolor (those super vibrant old Hollywood colors) emerged, some wanted to just splash color everywhere to show it off. But Higgins explains how experts like Natalie Kalmus pushed for "Color Consciousness." This meant using color strategically to support the story and emotions, even if it meant making colors bolder or more coordinated than real life. In The Shining, the famous flood of blood from the elevators is impossibly bright, thick, and shiny (like red paint). It's not realistic gore. Its artificial, surreal quality makes the horror feel even bigger, more overwhelming, and supernatural. The fake color is the feeling of dread. They realized artificial control of color, which could subtly guide the audience’s feelings.

These filmmakers and artists embrace the artificiality of color: making it brighter, stranger, bolder, or more symbolic than real life, which go straight for our hearts and guts. Artificiality of color is used not to create visual realism, but to achieve emotional truth.

Bibliography:

Higgins, Scott. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow:

Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. (Pages 22-47.)

Pomerance, Murray. "The Color of Our Eyes." In Color, the Film Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 127-135. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Metz, Christian. “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.” In Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, translated by Michael Taylor, 3–15. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Gunning, Tom. "Applying Color: Creating Fantasy of Cinema." In Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, edited by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen, 15-27.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press/EYE Filmmuseum, 2015.

Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." In What Is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, 2-7. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1967.

Artifact 6: HUMBLE. (Dir. Dave Meyers & the Little Homies, 2017)

rn777n — 2025-07-04 04:13:37 UTC

Kendrick Lamar’s HUMBLE., directed by Dave Meyers & the Little Homies, is a bold visual statement that uses color not just decoratively, but also exemplifies how color can be wielded as both a symbolic force and a stylistic statement. Within the context of this exhibit’s theme of color and realism, the video stands out for its manipulation of color, redefining how we engage with images, identity, and meaning. Drawing on Pommerance’s theory of “deep color” versus “shallow color,” HUMBLE. exemplifies deep color that insists on interpretation from viewers. In sequences like the golden-haloed Lamar posed as a hip-hop Christ figure, or the grayscale scenes of surveillance and spectacle, color is not just an aesthetic layer but a symbolic force. It’s tied to cultural narratives, visual authority, and the tension between humility and power in modern society.

Pommerance argues that deep color “presses on the viewer”—it demands awareness of the image as constructed, yet emotionally resonant. This aligns with Scott Higgins’s claim that color “hovers over the eyes”—not guiding us naturally into realism, but creating a surface experience that can be felt as much as seen. Although the visuals in HUMBLE. are hyper-stylized, even digitally manipulated, the emotional realism they convey is very strong. The artifice doesn’t dilute meaning for viewers, nor does it push us into believing the themes embodied in the song and video; instead, it sharpens it.

The video also reorients visual perception by disrupting classical cinematic hierarchy. In the “Last Supper” sequence, for example, the deep brown and muted gold palette invites the viewer to scan the entire table, each figure lit up and posed with compositional precision, rather than focusing solely on Lamar at the center. Similarly, the overhead shot of Lamar lying on a pool table surrounded by swirling currency and vibrant red velvet pulls the eye across every surface. These choices make sure the viewer is engaged, not as a passive observer, but as someone forced to interrogate and confront spectacle, power, and perspective presented in the song.

Bibliography:

Higgins, Scott. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. (Pages 22–47.)

Lamar, Kendrick. HUMBLE. Directed by Dave Meyers and the Little Homies. Top Dawg Entertainment/Interscope Records, 2017. Music video.

Pomerance, Murray. “The Color of Our Eyes.” In Color, the Film Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 127–135. New York: Routledge, 2006.