Nosferatu. A Symphony of Colour

Transcription

1 Nosferatu. A Symphony of Colour One of my interest has always been cinema and its visual language. This is the reason why, from previous researches on the basic forms and colours, my attention focused on the content and the context of colour in the early movies. At the end of the 19th century colour films did not exist. Directors and film producers started using different techniques in order to achieve more realism, inspired by the colourful postcards and advertising posters that began to spread in the same years. At the end of the 19th century, colour was applied by hand with a brush onto the film, frame by frame. It was a very expensive and slow technique. Between 1907 and 1913, film companies used to tinting or toning with emulsion and colouring agents. The resulting images presented an homogenous colour and they were only an abstraction of the real colours of the scene, and the effect were not realistic, for two reasons. Firstly because one colour claimed to summarize all the colours of the scene. For example yellow represented daylight or candlelit interiors. Secondly, colour became only a symbolic reference to the real resemblance of the scenes. Although we can admit that yellow is iconic (Peirce ) for the sun and a sunny day, we can not state that the colour of the night is cyan or blue. Hence, it should be said that a code of the chromatic perception of the physical world was established. It could be also argued that because of the technique, colour in the early cinema was also intrinsically indexical. Furthermore, it was used in order to support the story. It was useful in beating time of the plot and it was functional to the narration. It often was also a symbol for emotionality according to the context. Although to the eyes of the contemporary audience the effect could be estranging, it is clear that for the audience of the early cinema it was not at all. For this reason, I started to think about the estranging effect. One of my first ideas was the analysis the effect that a tinted image would have on a contemporary audience. Consequently, by using Photoshop, I coloured cult image from cult movies such as La Dolce Vita by Fellini. Nevertheless, I discovered that I was more interested in translating time in space. My purpose was to adapt for a book or a poster the recently restored tinted version of the silent movie: Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror, by FW Murnau (1922), that was itself an adaptation of Stoker s Dracula. The first problem I had to face up was how to represent something that works as time-based medium in a space-based medium. I started studying works by Edward Muybridge and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, keeping in mind Futurism and Cubism experiences. My research continued looking at Francis Bacon and David Hockney. I could find only few pieces of work of art and graphic design about cinema: Deanimated by Arnold Martin, who chose to visualize significant images of the scenes of a film by increasing their size on the page of a book according to their duration. I saw a work by Jonathan Puckney, Killing time and I examined a major project by an MA student, Vasilli Mitsiopoulos, who worked on cinema and adaptation with the aim to express the moving images in time. I researched also in video-art. Douglas Gordon worked on Psycho, by Hitchcock, by extending up to 24 hours the duration of one scene. The adaptation I had in mind should have been focused on the colours, also because they are crucial because of their meaning, and functional to the narration. In

2 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour fact, in Nosferatu, colours not only define space and time of the story (diegesis), but they also represent good and evil: the contrast between them and the slight borderline that distinguishes them. I experimented several approaches. I started by investigating potentialities that the sheet of paper offers in order to visualize the duration of the scenes or of the colours of the scenes: length, size, areas, depth, weight, number of page, etc. The first ideas were about superimposition by using frames captured from the movie and covering them with coloured transparent sheets. In a second time, I thought to use frames and increase their colour s saturation according to the duration of the images on the screen. Finally, I considered to layer images upon images. Nevertheless, I concluded that it was impossible to manage in this short time more than 5000 frames. In fact, I wanted to adapt the entire movie, as the only way to visualize the changes of colours. Consequently, I started thinking about a short movie, but it was an abstract synthesis of the movie. One of the latest attempt, was a sort of stripe, but I evaluated it as an obvious repetition of the physical film, although it gives the sense of the colourful flux. As a final result, I designed a book in which each page (the format respects the original aspect ratio of the frame 1.33:1) corresponds to a minute of the movie (which lasts around 93 minutes). I translated the time by covering areas filling 60 gaps for each page according to the duration of each colour on the screen.. I defined the tints by setting an average from the samples I got from the frames and I treated them as a code. I gained an abstract time-line of the images/frames that run on the screen together with the texts (intertitles, inserts, letters, etc.). I decided to separate texts from images by creating a double layer/level of communication, because texts are essential to understanding the movie as demonstrated by their huge number and their persistence on the screen. The book is to me an interesting visual result and it corresponds to what I expected. I found cinema an interesting field that I would like to explore further. It would be interesting study, for example, the angles of the shot or the type of shot on the basis of the distance between the scene and the camera. 2

3 Inspiration A.G. Bragaglia 3

4 Inspiration F. Bacon 4

5 Inspiration D. Hockney M. Galimberti 5

6 Inspiration E. Muybridge E. J. Marey 6

7 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour 7

8 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour 8

9 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour 9

10 Bibliography Abel, R. ed. (2005), Enciclopedia of Early Cinema, New York: Routledge Alovisio, S. (2002): Il cinema delle origini e la nascita del racconto cinematografico, in Bertetto, Paolo (ed. by), Introduzione alla storia del cinema, Torino: UTET Aumont, J. (1991), L occhio interminabile. Cinema e pittura,venezia: Marsilio Aumont, J. (1994), Colori d uomo: la carne, il cosmetico, l immagine, in Dall Asta, M. e Pescatore, G. ed, Il Colore nel Cinema, «Fotogenia», I, n.1, Bologna: CLUEB Berger, J. (1969), Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Bertetto, P. (2002), Il cinema europeo degli anni Venti, in Bertetto, P. ed, Introduzione alla storia del cinema, Torino: UTET Bordwell, D. (1995), Narration in the fiction film, London : Routledge Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. (1997), Film Art: An Introduction, New York: Mc- Graw-Hill Casetti, F., Di Chio F. (1990), Analisi del film, Milano, Bompiani Crow, D. (2003), Visible Signs An introduction to Semiotics, Worthing: Ava Academia Haslam, A. (2006), Book design, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd Kawin, B.F. (1992), How movies work, Berkeley: University of California Press Manzoli, G. (2001), Trenta passi nella storia del cinema, Bologna: Cinemalibero Monaco, J. (2000), How to read a film, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. Noble, I., Bestley, R. (2004), Visual Research. Method for Graphic Designers, Worthing, Ava Academia, 2004 Peirce, C. S. ( ), Semiotica, Torino, Einaudi, (selected texts by BON- FANTINI, Massimo, Grassi, L., Grazia, R., da Collected Papers, 8 voll, Cambridge, Ma: The Belknap press of Harvard University Press). Rose, G. (2001),Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Material Salt, B. (1963), Film Style and Technology: History and analysis, London: Starword Savio, F., (1956) COLORI III, Questioni estetiche, in AA.VV., Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, Roma: Le Maschere 10

11 Bibliography Sega, P. B., Tolomeo, M. G., ed. (2002), Ultime generazioni e new media. L arte europea alla fine del XX secolo, Bologna: CLUEB Stam, R., Burgoyne, R., Flitterman, L.S.(1992), Semiologia del cinema e degli audiovisivi, Milano: Bompiani Websites