Color It True: Impressions of Cinema

Description

This often-startlingly original book introduces a new way of thinking about color in film as distinct from existing approaches which tend to emphasize either technical processes and/or histories of film coloration, or the meaning(s) of color as metaphor or symbol, or else part of a broader signifying system. Murray Pomerance's latest meditation on cinema has the author embed himself in various ways of thinking about color; not ways of framing it as a production trick or a symbolic language but ways of wondering how the color effect onscreen can work in the act of viewing. Pomerance examines many issues, including acuity, dreaming, interrelationships, saturations, color contrasts, color and performance (color as a performance aid or even performance substitute), and more. The lavender of the photographer's seamless in Antonioni's Blow-Up taken in itself as an explosion of color worked into form, and then considered both as part of the story and part of our experience. The 14 chapters of this book each discuss a single primary color as regards to our experience of cinema. After opening the idea of such an exploration in terms of the history of our apperception and the variation in our experience that color germinates, Color it True takes form.

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto, Canada and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the editor of the Techniques of the Moving Image series and the Horizons of Cinema series, and co-editor of the Screen Decades and Star Decades series. Pomerance is a widely published scholar; his works include A Silence from Hitchcock (2023), Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience (Bloomsbury 2022), A Voyage with Hitchcock (2021), The Film Cheat (2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor's Magic (2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), Cinema, If You Please (2018), Moment of Action (2016), Alfred Hitchcock's America (2013), The Horse who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), and two BFI Classics on Marnie (2014) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (2016).

In his multifaceted Color It True, Pomerance, an independent film scholar, takes readers on a dreamlike, surreal, personal journey through how he sees color being used in films internationally. * CHOICE * Through prose as invigorating and engaging as many of the films explored in the pages of Color it True, Murray Pomerance takes us on an unpredictable and edifying journey through the many ways color seduces in film experience. Unhampered by any single critical dogma, and interested in a diverse array of films spanning everything from spectacular epics to intimate dramas, Color it True weaves together impressions of colors in movies with their lingering afterimages, those traces of color residing in memory long after the film has departed from our view. Reading this book is a restorative experience for anyone hungry for writing on film that eschews the usual well-trodden byways of theory and method. Every page is a marvel. * Steven Rybin, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA * A kaleidoscopic jewel-box of a film book. Each chapter a color, each segment a movie, and the specific mobilization of a hue. Together they form a dazzling demonstration of cinema's art and allure. Pomerance deploys his unique approach - lyrical, associative commentary combined with expert production knowledge and cultural command - to stunning effect, finding his way through sensation and resonance to the heart of every film he discusses, never losing sight of the essential question: why this color here? * Alex Clayton, Associate Professor in Film and Television, University of Bristol, UK *