PLAY

I s sue 12 January 2011 Watch, analyze & apprecIate the art of fIlm.

Slovak fIlmS of the 1970S revISIted noteS on SomelImItS of technIcolor

the bloody rISe of South korean cInema

Sneak peek at the 2012 InternationalfIlm festival Screenings

& pros pick top places for filmmaking

IntervIeW WIth dIrector

Terry Gilliam

12 16 24 36in the sceneThe Bloody Rise of South Korean Cinema

a look backSlovak Cinema of the 1970s Revisited

feature Interview with Terry Gilliam

film festivalsWhat’s coming up in 2011

42 60 67 72pros pickBest Places for Filmmaking

up and comingThe New Wave of Actors from Down Under

on dvd nowCriteron’s New Collection

behind the cameraNotes on Some Limits of Technicolor / The Antonioni Case

the bloody rise of south Korean cinemaWhy all the anger? / by / andrew lowry

in the scene

Next month, South Korean director Kim Jee-woon’s new film, I Saw the Devil, is released on these shores. It’s a bloody revenge fable, bulging with 360-degree stab-cams,

decapitations and lines like, “Your nightmare is only beginning.” Tough stuff, to be sure, and aficionados of the rough street justice favoured by a certain strain of Asian cinema are in for a treat.

So why is it that such gory stories of vengeance have become – to western eyes at least – the dominant feature of Korean cinema? Kim himself contributed to the genre in 2005 with A Bittersweet Life, and there’s Park Chan-wook’s phenomenal revenge trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Lady Vengeance and Oldboy); and, though they’re not driven at their cores by revenge, it would be foolish to disregard the baroque bloodletting of films like Lee Myung-se’s Nowhere to Hide and Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser.

It’s tempting to say the massive international success of Park’s Oldboy was what spurred the Korean revenge boom, in the same way that Inception is already casting a shadow over American action movies. When Oldboy

scooped silverware at Cannes and landed on a million student DVD shelves, its plot became a tempting template for enterprising producers to employ. The South Korean film industry – buoyed by the economics of the country’s famed quota system, which compels cinemas to show homegrown movies, and new opportunities for venture capital following the 1997 Asian financial crisis – had a true global hit.

But Oldboy did not itself create the violent revenge trope. It was a major tendency in South Korean cinema well before Oh Dae-su’s 2003 romp around Seoul. Why?

Let’s stay with Oldboy for a second. If you haven’t seen it, the film is about a man kidnapped seemingly without reason, held for 15 years, then released and given five days to find out why. Look at the dates: Oldboy was released in 2003, meaning the original abduction took place in 1988. That was the year South Korea’s first democratic president was inaugurated, after their first elections in December the previous year.

South Korea may look like a lovely place to live these days, but its transition to democracy was not a smooth one. In 1996, two former presidents were indicted for crimes

committed in office, with one even sentenced to death – though both were pardoned the following year. A great deal of social anger was and is directed at business leaders, most of whom stayed quiet and got wealthy while the earlier regime was shooting students in the streets. In 1979, President Park Chung-hee was assassinated after 16 years in power in a failed bid for democracy. Further back, of course, there’s the wounds of the division of the Korean peninsula and the nightmarish war that followed.

With all this suffering, and the ever-present threat just to the north, South Korea’s progress has been a miracle – but it hasn’t been without its cost. The South Koreans may have kept calm and carried on getting rich, but it seems impossible to lug around all that history without some of its brutal energy manifesting itself. Hence, perhaps, these grandly bloody vengeances: you can read Oldboy many ways, but it’s hard not to see protagonist Oh as an incarnation of the fury this history has bequeathed. Imprisoned since a key turning point in the nation’s history, he personifies repressed rage escaping and wreaking grisly havoc.

Most interestingly the ending of Oldboy hinges on an act of forgetting. The damage the past can do has been glimpsed, and even its perpetrator is horrified. Too defeated to confront it, all he can do is make an ambiguously successful attempt to wipe it from his memory. It was a similar act of cultural forgetting that prompted the rise of revenge in South Korean cinema – the genre that, however domestically successful its melodramas and comedies, has built its international reputation.

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“ South Korea may look like a

lovely place to live these days,

but its transition to democracy

was not a smooth one. ”

A B i t t e r swee t L i fe / 2005

Old Boy / 2010

“ With all this suffering, and the

ever-present threat just to the

north, South Korea's progress

has been a miracle – but it

hasn't been without its cost. The

South Koreans may have kept

calm and carried on getting

rich, but it seems impossible

to lug around all that history

without some of its brutal energy

manifesting itself. “

At the end of World War I, Slovakia was joined with regions of Bohemia and Moravia to form Czechoslovakia. The next two decades saw more instability until the First Slovak Republic was declared in 1939, under pressure from Nazi Germany. This wartime régime is generally regarded as a puppet one, and after World War II Czechoslovakia

was reconstituted. In 1948, there was a new puppet master, as the country came under the influence of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, Czechoslovaks attempted to resist this domination. In 1968, a period of emerging political and cultural independence under

Prime Minister Alexander Dubek came to an end when Warsaw Pact troops rolled into Prague that August.It was to be another two decades b efore a similar movement, this time popularly known as the Velvet Revolution, would see the end of Communist rule. Then, in 1992, it was obvious that the union of Czechoslovakia was dissolving. At the end of that year, the “Velvet Divorce” came into effect and Slovakia and the Czech Republic peacefully went their ways as separate nations again.

a look back

sloVaK filmsof the 1970sreVisited a case Study / by / peter hourigan

O n 31 December 1992 in Bratislava just before midnight, the air was crisp and cold. It was probably about -6º. Nonetheless, thousands were streaming towards the

main city square, where a stage had been erected at a point where several cobbled streets sweep into the open space. By midnight, it was impossible to move. The throng was pressing so tightly that it was impossible to raise your arms from your side.

At midnight, the euphoria in the crowd erupted as the New Year, 1993, marked the emergence of Slovakia as an independent nation. So many fireworks were let off that the smoke drifted down to the crowd – and some skyrockets that didn’t launch properly looked dangerous as they skimmed not far over the heads of the crowd. The bitter cold meant, however, that the crowds didn’t linger very long – half an hour after midnight the square was visibly emptying as people returned to their warm houses and flats. At that moment, towards the end of the century, many of the people there felt a strong sense of their own nationality, recognised at last.

“ To the rest of the world, for

example, they were simply

Czechs. Their own identity was

wiped from common usage.”

Obchod na ko rze / 1965

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Sedmik rá sky / 1966

known as the Czech (sic) New Wave, produced directors such as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jiěí Menzel. Some of the films included Ostěe sledované vlak (Closely Watched Trains, Menzel, 1967), Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde, 1965) and Hoěí, má panenko (The Firemen’s Ball, 1967), both directed by Miloš Forman, and Sedmikrásky (Daisies, Věra Chytilová, 1966).

But this bloom of creativity was crushed after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. Directors such as Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer emigrated, to continue their careers largely in the US and Canada.

Czech films overshadowed films from Slovakia during this period, taking into account the fact that for many the two regions were one. The reception for The Shop on Main Street is one example of this. Zert (The Joke, Jaromil Jireš, 1969) is another example of how in many ways the two regions were very much intertwined. The director Jireš was born in Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, but this film, adapted from a novel by Milan Kundera, takes on more of the general characteristics of the single country (it is a biting satire on aspects of life under a totalitarian régime) and is usually regarded as an example of Czech filmmaking.

The somewhat patronising attitude towards Slovak cinema is reflected in official publications of the period. Writing in 1970, in a publication for the Czech Film Institute, Stanislav Zvoníěek said,

A highly important trait of our films is their international character, manifested especially in this country by the fraternal assistance Czechs have given to the formation of film culture in Slovakia. This help has shortened the apprentice years of Slovak films to a minimum – Czech film production helped train Slovak actors and supplied the necessary prerequisites for filmmaking, so that since the middle of the fifties we can boast of a truly Czechoslovak cinematography, fed from the sources of both nations. [2]

Creative Slovak filmmaking was dominated, certainly at the end of this period, by Juraj Jakubisko. In 1968, he completed his second film, Zbehovia a pútnici (The Deserter and the Nomads). This is a fascinating surrealist (it draws comparisons with Federico Fellini, Miklos Jancso, Emir Kusturica) view of three different historical eras in the country. The film, almost inevitably, incurred the wrath of the country’s rulers with its critical views. Its local audience clearly understood many of the references that a non-Slovak audience would miss. For

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Slovaks have always had a sense of their own identity. There were many aspects of the Czechoslovakian periods that rankled. They were sensitive to the fact that the rest of the world had very little concept of this identity. To the rest of the world, for example, they were simply Czechs. Their own identity was wiped from common usage.The Slovaks being a totally unknown nation was not simply […] so. It was the result of the state policy. Once, being in Paris, the ambassador came to welcome our group. He approached us with the words: “I suppose you are the Czech group.” It made me think to myself, “This is a man who represents myself. Moreover, I participate in paying him his salary!!!” There were hardly any Slovak in the embassies in the countries of some importance. They were mostly drivers or were in similar functions. They mostly spoke Czech not to be fired.

These irritations or tensions can be seen in attitudes towards the first film from this region to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ján Kadár’s and Elmar Klos’ Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street, 1965). Many Slovaks saw this as culturally a Slovakian film. Its themes are Slovakian; one of its two directors, Ján Kadár, is Slovakian; it was filmed in Slovakia; and its language is Slovakian. But, to the rest of the world, it was a Czech film. (And, yes, it did have Czech elements, including use of film studios in Prague and a Moravian-Czech co-director.) Slovakia was invisible.

The early 1960s, in particular, were a rich time for Czechoslovak filmmaking. The movement, universally

“ Martinček found some

magnificent people living in

conditions that seemed remote

from the 20th Century, but

people who had seen more of

that century than many of us

can imagine.”

a look back

example, in the sequence at the end of the war, some foreign soldiers are seen wearing four or five wristwatches at once – for the Slovaks a reminder of the way the

“liberating” Soviet soldiers had helped themselves when they arrived in the country.

The film did have some screenings in the west (including at the London Film Festival in 1969), largely because it had been a Slovak-Italian co-production and

the Italian co-producers did have copies. But it was practically the last time that Jakubisko would have that degree of freedom in his filmmaking and he did not get a chance to make

another theatrical feature until the end of the 1970s.But, in this environment, filmmaking continued in

Slovakia. More than 100 titles are listed as having been produced in Slovakia in the 1970s. (3) Some of these films have now been released on DVD through the Slovak Film Insitute. (4) This article explores a small sample of these titles. It cannot claim to be a thorough overview of filmmaking in Slovakia during the 1970s, but it can serve as an introduction.

The régimes of Eastern Europe were well known for the ultra sensitivity of the bureaucrats in charge of cultural matters. The filmmakers of Slovakia always faced the possibility of never getting approval for a project. Or, if a project was actually financed, the finished product might languish for years on a shelf because in some way it had offended officials.

Obrazy Starého Sveta (Pictures of the Old World), made by Dušan Hanák in 1972, is hardly the kind of film that could be expected to incur the wrath of the authorities. Yet, after a few screenings, it was banned and withdrawn until 1988. It is a documentary inspired by the photogr aphy of Martin Martiněek (born 1913) who had travelled into some of most remote areas of the Tatra Mountains area, in the north of the country, near the border with Poland.

Martiněek found some magnificent people living in conditions that seemed remote from the 20th Century, but people who had seen more of that century than many of us can imagine. His photographs have earned a special place in Slovak culture, a well-deserved place to judge from the photos used in Hanák’s film.

Hanák visited the region seeking out many of the subjects of Martiněek’s photographs. His film becomes both an extension and a celebration of Martiněek’s work. The film is shot in beautiful black and white, and the original photographs are almost seamlessly integrated

a look back

into the new material. As he says at the head of the film, “These are stories of people rooted in the soil they came from. They cannot be replanted, they would perish.”

There are many beautiful, moving moments and images. A peasant couple don’t know what a microphone is or how to react to it. An old man has taken eggs to town and dropped them. The village has the most wonderful handcarved automaton toy that the camera delights in crawling over. A peasant had built a house for his wife and family but she threw him out of it on the day that Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space. Now, he just wants to talk about space flight with the interviewer. Here the intercutting of the stock footage of the first men on the moon with the so down-to-earth (and down-to-Earth) lives of the peasants has a special resonance.

Their way of life may be simple, it may even be primitive, but they are people with such a rich experience of life. They may not be very articulate when they are asked to talk about Life (with a capital L) or death, but in their faces, their demeanour, their very breathing, they embody so much about living and being human.

Hanák does not privilege the original photographs; nor does he have his own camera prowl over them restlessly in the way that many documentary filmmakers use in the mistaken idea that this will animate still photographs. Instead, his camera style integrates with the still photos to the extent that at times we don’t really recognise which it is we are watching. The dialogue on the soundtrack is limited to the words of these people. Sometimes they are speaking on camera; sometimes their voices are only on the soundtrack. But, when he only has their words and not their voices, he has these simply read, with no attempt at having an actor impersonate the real person. This aural integrity is augmented with interesting music choices, ranging from a solo voice with a folk song to elegant George Frideric Handel, its very sophistication coming as a perfect foil for these well-lived lives.

“ More than 100 titles are listed

as having been produced in

Slovakia in the 1970s. ”

Obrazy S ta rého Sve ta / 1965

continued on page 122

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This is such a beautiful, non-political, non-polemical film that its official banning is just so mysterious. What kind of threat did the authorities see in this film? Were they afraid that people might read this as saying that the Socialist State could not properly look after its old people?

Hanák was able to make one other feature film in the 1970s, Ružové sny (Pink Dreams, 1976). Interestingly, this was the only Czechoslovak film of the 1970s to earn distribution abroad. (5) This is surely a reflection of the impact of the situation in the whole of Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion and increased repression after 1968. During the 1960s, many Czechoslovak (though mainly Czech) films had been distributed in the West, as discussed above. Now, several of its major filmmakers had

fled abroad; those still at home were more constrained in what they could film.

In ways, Pink Dreams seems a throwback to that brief golden era, with its bitter-sweet romance against a bucolic village setting. It is certainly an entertaining film, with an amiable charm. But this categorisation also does it a disservice. The romance is a variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme, with Jolanka (Iva Bittová) belonging to the Gypsies living outside the village community – both physically and metaphorically. Her people are just as aghast at her interest in Jakub (Juraj Nvota), a “white”, as Jakub’s people frown on his interest in a Gypsy.

Hanák’s picture of the Romanies is quietly significant. This is one of a rare and small number of

S lnko v s i e t i / 1962

zbehov ia a pu t n i c i / 1968

“ Their way of life may be simple,

it may even be primitive, but

they are people with such a rich

experience of life. ”

T he subject of 2 books and a pair of feature-length documentaries, Terry Gilliam inspires a greater fascination with his process than any working director. It isn’t just that no one else makes the kind of movies he makes, but that no one makes them the way he does. A native Minnesotan who has lived the last four decades in England (although he only recently renounced

his U.S. citizenship), Gilliam is a determined outlier, making movies outside (or, early on, against) the studio system without compromising the scale or scope of his vision. It’s a method with more than the usual amount of risk, as anyone knows after watching Gilliam’s collapse under an avalanche of misfortune in the documentary . His latest film, ,was struck a similarly catastrophic blow when star Heath Ledger died midway through production, after shooting the movie’s framing sequence, but before beginning the series of fanciful encounters that make up its substance. But Gilliam eventually devised an ingenious solution, using Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law as Ledger ’s alter egos inside the world of Dr. Parnassus’ magic mirror.

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By Sam Adams

The av club You’ve always had a fondness for handmade visual effects, of the kind used by the traveling players in both Imaginarium and The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. But Imaginarium uses a lot more CGI than anything you’ve done before. What dictated that decision?

Terry Gilliam It tends to be the most efficient. Whatever works best is what I do A lot of people seem to get carried away that something that’s made out of paper mâché is going to be better than not. And I always thought the original King Kong, that terrible little puppet with its hair going in all directions, was far more magical than Peter Jackson’s incredibly beautifully rendered King Kong. So there’s something to be said for a more primitive version of things. I think it’s because it makes the audience work a little bit more, because you’ve got to invest it with life and reality, so I like doing that. In this instance, the backgrounds are just that—backgrounds. They’re worlds that I wanted to have a painterly feel, and CG worked best for that. Things like the monastery, on the other hand, we use a model for the exterior. That just feels more substantial. I’ve always used CG, the minute one had it available, because I own an effects company, and I’ll just use whatever technique does the most efficiently and cheapest.

avc Was it a matter of waiting for CGI to achieve a certain level before you used it more thoroughly?

TG Not really. It’s more about the cost of things, and as it’s gone on, it’s gone down in cost, because there’s so much software available, where before, everybody had to write their own, so you had to have your own R&D department, like ILM, to create your own proprietary software. Now you just buy it off the shelf. That’s why it’s come down in price. And obviously, within the kind of budgets I’ve got, it works.

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TGThe business is trying to push me out of the business. I work in that middle ground, where we do this thing and it ends up being around $30 million. And that’s a terrible number. It’s just the kind of number that is really hard to raise. I’d do better just asking for $100 million. I’d probably get the money more easily.

avc In the last couple of decades, the movie industry has evolved into producing big, dumb, expensive movies and cheap independent movies, where the directors give up money and time to have more freedom. But your movies don’t fit into that model, because you can’t create the kind of worlds you envision on a shoestring budget.

avc There are now romantic comedies that cost twice that, somehow.

TG I don’t know how that happens, but it does. Because they’re good Hollywood movies, and a lot of people need to be paid well. Agents need their money, and business managers—all these people need to live well, otherwise it’s not fair. [Laughs.]

avc Have you just accepted or embraced that industry is just separate from what you do?

TG Yeah, I think so. I don’t even have a Hollywood agent anymore. I finally gave him up this last year. More and more, what’s happening is that studios are making the choice for us. They’re almost all just going into the distribution business of five tentpoles a year—that sort of thing. The money has got to be got together from outside sources, outside the studios. You still need them, ultimately, to distribute the movie, and hopefully they’ll come in and give you X amount of money for the American rights. Actually, that didn’t happen in the case of Parnassus, because we went out to L.A. trying to raise money and got nothing out of them. So we made the film with no American money, and just sold it after it was done.

avcLooking at the lineup for Sundance this year, it’s a bit shocking how few films have distribution. Even Joel Schumacher, who’s hardly the model of an independent director, has a title up for acquisition. The studios aren’t placing bets with their own money any morea.

TGI think that’s really it, so the pressure is on. Even now, the studios need for everything to be together before they’re even interested, so they can just be a minor investor in it. At Toronto this year, the lack of sales was incredible, the number of films that didn’t get picked up. Or, in fact, got picked up for a fraction of what they needed.

avcDo you have any thoughts on where the business is going at this point?

TGThat’s one reason I keep trying to keep up my European contacts a lot, or Japan. These are the places where there’s still money. The local distributors there need films. They need, hopefully, Hollywood-esque films that have American stars and are fairly big. So that’s, in a sense, what I’m relying on now.

avc The flipside to that is a lot of movies getting picked up and going straight to video on demand, which again is not a model that is kind to movies like yours, which really need to be seen on the big screen.

TGI agree, and that’s what’s really sad. Avatar is probably the last of the really big ones. I mean, not everybody can pull it off like Cameron does every 10 years, or whenever he does it. But you see other things. I actually just watched Sherlock Holmes last night, and I don’t know what the budget on that one was, but it was expensive. It was a very lush movie. And it’s pretty good—it was much better than I expected, to be honest, and I love watching [Robert Downey Jr.], always. I thought it was well-mounted, put it that way. It’s not any less stupid than most things that are being made. [Laughs.] I’ve always had this problem. My strength, if it’s anything, is that I can lure some big-name actors in. That’s probably the strength of almost any director now. On your own, as a director, you’ve only got so much weight. James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay… that’s about it. Everybody else depends on the star power that they can draw.

2010

2000

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1970

1960

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notes on some of the limits oftechnicolorthe antonioni case / by / murray pomerance

P erhaps all understanding begins in reminiscence.I watched Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952; shot by George Barnes, with Technicolor equipment) at the

age of six, some ten or twelve times on successive Saturday afternoons, in the company of an elderly babysitter who must eventually have thought I was crazy. What I needed to see over and over—and still find myself needing to see over and over today as I watch this masterpiece—was the haunting iridescent colour of the train wreck scene, set in the wilds of the countryside at night: the sparks, the flashing lights, the escaping beasts, the gay costumes of the afflicted circus personnel, the peculiarly magnificent visceral colours of mangled painted steel by starlight.

I can understand now—what I could never have imagined then—that a strange Romantic yearning for a long-gone agrarian past, for the predictable if demanding relations of bucolic life, for a world still innocently hungered for by those who looked around to see its forms and colours, charged my vision of

Greatest Show, though I could never explain precisely how this could be the case. The colour drew me out, and back, into a kind of dream memory. Therefore, it is also necessary to acknowledge that Technicolor, this supreme technology for rendering colour in motion pictures, never did promise, nor ever did deliver, what anybody could call an accurate picture of our colourful world.

Conceived around 1915, and then developed rigorously through the 1930s and 1940s – Scott Higgins claims that “the basic methods for handling colour and assigning it functions – i.e., the terms under which filmmakers engaged with three-colour – were set in place during the 1930s” (1) – and coming to its peak of usage between 1945 and 1955, Technicolor exaggerated, warped, intensified, indeed romanticized everything it showed. Soon enough, I was goggling the borscht red hair of the carrot-topped puppet, as he jabbered away at impetuous Leslie Caron in Lili (1953; shot by Robert Planck),and swooning at copper-skinned Abraham Sofaer as he marched around Fiji in His Majesty O’Keefe (1954; shot by Otto Heller).

behind the camera

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The paralysing spangly colours of Dan Dailey, Ethel Merman, Mitzi Gaylor, Donald O’Connor, Johnnie Ray, and Marilyn Monroe stepping out onto the stage of the Palladium in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954; shot by Leon Shamroy) worked on me, too, and came almost to the level of a Technicolor dye transfer extravaganza, except that in this case the colour was by De Luxe, which was on the verge in 1953 of setting up a dye transfer facility of its own but decided against it (2). Yet as a child, one knew none of these “technical” details, thinking instead only of that magical thing, that all-embracing epithet, “Technicolor,” at once a label and a formula and a password that all pointed to an overwhelming feast. “Technicolor” as one imagined it, further, was an indicator of, and was responsible for, every smashing colour moment one saw, because one thought of “Technicolor” as being the colour of the screen (notwithstanding that other

the red Slippers / 1954

Michelangelo Antonioni

“ Technicolor exaggerated, warped, intensified, indeed

romanticized everything it showed...”

red desert / 1954

Michelangelo Antonioni

behind the camera

processes existed). And it was all a waking dream, which is to say, a domain that both existed and did not exist, that affected me intimately yet worked from an incalculable distance.

Technicolor tended to offer the intensely saturated, yet also slightly unreflective, and thus seductive, colour that we can see in what photographers call “the magic hour,” that period before sunset on a clear day, when every hue is cast with a little red and the contrast between hues appears to heighten, with the effect that objects stand out from one another with augmented crispness and vitality. If not always its ruddiness, yet Technicolor did systematically manage to capture the colour contrast and powerful saturation, the vivid blacks, of this

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continued on page 154

desire and intimation; and the city of Basra is all a garden of pinks, the perfectly decadent province of a childish ruler.

Some of the films I have mentioned here, along with The Drum (1938; shot by Osmond Borradaile and Georges Périnal), Gone with the Wind (1939; shot by Ernest Haller and Lee Garmes), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944; shot by George Folsey) ,

Incendiary Blonde (1945; shot by Ray Rennahan), The Pirate (1948; shot by Harry Stradling), An American in Paris (1951; shot by Alfred Gilks and John Alton), Rancho Notorious (1952; shot by Hal Mohr), Shane (1953; shot by Loyal Griggs), The Band Wagon (1953; shot by Harry Jackson),

The Robe (1953; shot by Leon Shamroy), Botany Bay (1953; shot by John F. Seitz), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954; shot by Milton Krasner), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953; shot by Edward Cronjager), and legions more, beginning with Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp in 1935 (shot by Ray Rennahan),were made from start to finish through Technicolor’s patented three-strip process, “the best colour that’s ever been done,” according to Gene Kelly (3) and “a different kind of process,” as Ray Bolger put it,

“which is a whole story in itself, a technical story” (4).In Technicolor three-strip, a scene is recorded

simultaneously on three rolls of special black-and-white film, all loaded (two of them sandwiched together in bi-pack) into a single, rather bulky, Technicolor camera that is equipped with a prism and filter system for dividing the incoming light into its red, green, and blue components. Viewfinding on this camera was through a supplementary apparatus, not in a conventional “through-the-lens” operation, and so, as Barry Salt observes, one might well have seen “less precisely composed images in Technicolor when compared with the best black and white photography of the ‘thirties’ and ‘forties’ (5). In Technicolor three-strip work, once the three “colour records” are developed (each evidencing the amount and distribution of its primary in the photographed scene), they are used for contact printing three corresponding “colour matrices,” each of which is a kind of “hard” record since it is constituted by a strip of film stock coated with a special impressionable

Zabriskie Point / 1964

“Technicolor tended to offer the intensely saturated, yet also slightly unreflective, and thus seductive, colour that we can

see in what photographers call ‘the magic hour’...”

aching light. In British Technicolor films, printed at the London laboratory using iron-rich water from the Thames, one very often does see a slight reddish cast, a certain metallic flamboyance and sharp shimmer: The Thief of Bagdad (1940; shot by Georges Périnal with Robert Krasker, Henty Henty-Creer, and Cliff Shirpser), Jungle Book (1942; shot by Lee Garmes and W. Howard Greene), A Matter of Life and Death (US title, Stairway to Hevean, 1946; shot by Jack Cardiff ), Black Narcissus (1947; shot by Jack Cardiff ), The Red Shoes (1948; shot by Jack Cardiff ) :so that their diegeses appear to unfold in a kind of mythical, yet also burnished sunset of the imagination. In Thief, just for one example, the amethyst purples of the receding hills of Bagdad invoke a virtual mist of sweet