Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into New Media

Technologies
http://con.sagepub.com/

A New Colour Consciousness : Colour in the Digital Age

Scott Higgins
Convergence 2003 9: 60
DOI: 10.1177/135485650300900406

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 A New Colour Consciousness
Colour in the Digital Age

Scott Higgins
Abstract: A film’s visual design is increasingly determined digitally, after
principal cinematography. This essay charts the nature of the digital
revolution in relation to digital colour grading. Faced with the new
digital devices, filmmakers are casting about for appropriate,
respectable functions. The paper examines how the first two mainstream
Hollywood releases to feature digital colour designs, Gary Ross’s
Pleasantville (1998), and Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother Where Art
Thou (2000), work as aesthetic prototypes. It argues that digital colour
may not so much entail a revolution as careful and considered
integration, and one role of the early digitally graded film has been to
set out concrete methods for reining the technology to craft norms.
Close formal analysis of colour design in these films also illustrates how
the aesthetic problems of the digital age replay the dynamics of stylistic
development from the classical era.

Introduction Perhaps the arena in which digital technology is having most significant
impact, the first outpost of the digital colonisation of the image, is post-
production. A film’s visual design is increasingly determined after
principal cinematography, in what has been called a ’second stage of
image creation’.’ If we want to begin charting the nature of the ’digital
revolution’ in relation to the film image, we could hardly do better than
considering digital colour grading. This practice involves scanning
footage to create a digital intermediate that can be manipulated and
then scanned back out onto film. The technique promises to replace the
.

photochemical process of colour timing with a more complex level of

visual intervention. Digital grading has helped renew interest in colour
technology as an active formal tool. To borrow the term used by
Technicolor advisor Natalie Kalmus to describe the careful attention to
colour design during the 1930s, it has engendered a new ’colour
consciousness’. This paper examines how the first two mainstream
Hollywood releases to feature digital colour designs, Gary Ross’
Pleasantville (1998), and Joel and Ethan Coen’s 0 Brother Where Art
Thou (~000), work as aesthetic prototypes of this colour consciousness.
While contemporary films often foreground colour design as a mark of
differentiation, by colour consciousnessI refer to not just an awareness
of colour, but to o concerted effort to make a new technology fit with
_ _
contemporary practice. These productions deploy colour in a way that

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 61

is both shaped by and helps to shape the marketing and popularising

of the technfology within the industry, Indeed, they present strong
affinities with the first wave of three-colour Technicolor features of the
1930s, which served scimitar industrial functions. Close formal analysis
of the colour design in these films illustrates how the aesthetic problems
of the digital age can replay the dynamics of stylistic development from
the classical era.

The newfound flexibility of digital colour comes with a built-in aesthetic

question: what formal purposes should it serve? Cinematographer Dean
Semler, discussing his experience with digital intermediate in the film
We Were Soldiers (2002) notes ’the only problem with the process
right now is getting lost in the number of choices you have’.2A
corollary to the breadth of options opened by digital grading is the
need to develop conventions and schemata for channelling the new
technology. Stephen Burum (cinematographer on Mission: Impossible,
1996) sums up the professional response articulated time and again in
the pages of American Cinematographer. He suggests: ’The big
question for the future is not whether film or digital technology will
prevail, but rather how we can tell better stories with more interesting
characters’.’ This rhetoric seeks to set productive limits on the
technology by invoking classical priorities of character and narrative. To
reframe the problem in formal terms, faced with the new devices,
filmmakers are casting about for appropriate, respectable functions.
Digital colour may not so much entail a revolution as careful and
considered integration, and one role of the early digitally graded film
has been to serve as prototype, setting out concrete methods for reining
the technology to craft norms.

This inauguration of new colour technology strongly recalls Technicolor’s

introduction of three-colour in the 1930s. In that case, a single
corporation courted the film industry by offering a strongly defined
aesthetic for binding colour to classical norms. Early Technicolor
features, particularly Becky Sharp (Mamoulian, Sherman, 1935), Trail
of the Lonesome Pine (Hathaway 1936), and A Star is Born (1937),
served as aesthetic prototypes, promoting the new technology and
testing options for integrating colour as an attraction and as a narrative
tool. Colour consciousness was the way of thinking about colour with
an eye toward creating a stable place for the technology in the

industry. The formal changes wrought by digital colour, in particular the

process of functionalising this new technology, can be put in perspective
by recalling the strategies worked out in Hollywood’s first contact with
full colour-reproduction. Technicolor’s historical precedent casts some
light on the current approaches to digital colour.

Digital colour grading for feature films is an extension of the Telecine

technology that went through tremendous advancement during the

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 62

1990s in commercial and music video production. The Telecine suite

and colour software, such as daVinci’s Power Windows, enabled video
producers to isolate and manipulate areas of the frame, change the
colours of particular objects, and dynamically adjust hue and saturation
within a continuous shot. Falling costs and advancements in scanning
and data storage equipment made the digitising of entire feature films
possible by the late 1990s.1 in most instances, digital grading has been
a simple replacement for traditional photochemical colour timing. For

examples, problems with lighting and weather on location were digitally

corrected in sequences from action films like Die Another Day (2002),
and Gone in ~t~ Seconds (2000).5 Effects-heavy productions routinely
incorporate digitally graded sequences into conventionally produced
films. In strategy
a reminiscent of the 1934s practice of interpolating
three-colour sequences into black-and-white films, the thriller The Cell
(2000) featured 50 minutes of digitally graded footage to represent the
hallucinations of a serial murderer.’ Full-scale adoption of digital colour

depends, however, on establishing its value to a wide array of genres

and production trends. One indication of the broad market potential for
the process is the support it has received from major players. Digital
colour grading has been backed with substantial investments from
companies like Kodak which operates Cinesite, Technicolor which
opened Technique, a digital film mastering centre, in 2001, and Rank’s
Deluxe Labs which entered into an alliance with the digital firm Post
Logic in 200~.’ The promise of digital intermediates to provide a single
master for all film and video formats has further helped define the
technology’s market position as a competitor with traditional post-
production.
From a technological standpoint, the most important testing ground for
digital intermediate must be Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The
economies of scale involved in producing three back-to-back features
have effectively turned the Lord of the Rings (2001-20 03) franchise into
a research and development corporation. Jackson and cinematographer
Andrew Lesnie employed a prototype digital system manufactured by
the UK-based 5-D company. In turn, 5-D refined its ’Colossus’ system to
meet the producer’s needs, reasoning that this will make it compatible
with the norms of film production and more appealing for the industry.8
Certainly these films are the most ambitious examples of mixing film
and digital technQlogy, but a series of smaller though high-profile films
in non-effects genres have played an equally important role as aesthetic
prototypes. This is particularly important since a general adoption of the
technology depends on convincing the industry that it is viable for
standard production.

The first American production to rely heavily on digital colour grading

was not an action-fantasy film but Gary Ross’ social satire Pleasantville,
released in 1998. This film strongly demonstrated the technology by

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 63

making colour manipulation part of its narrative premise: two 1990s

teenagers bring colour with them to the black-and-white world of a
1950s sitcom. The colour manipulation was central to the film’s market
identity, with trailers stressing the mix of colour and monochrome and
posters featuring the tagline ’nothing is as simple as black and white’.
Moreover, Pleasantville offered a far-reaching investigation into the
problems of digital colour for several firms in the post-production
industry. Cinesite Digital Imaging developed new software and scanned
over 70 per cent of the film so that the producers could remove and
then selectively reintroduce colour.9 Artists at an in-house post-production
service, Pleasantville Visual Effects, performed much of the colour
grading, but additional work was also commissioned to Cinesite Digital
Studios, The Computer Film Company, and Efilm. Finally, Cinesite
recorded the intermediary back to film, which was then processed by
Deluxe Labs, where the prints were carefully monitored for colour
consistency. Pleasantville catalysed research and development of digital
colour technology and techniques for handling the new medium.

Demonstration The film’s aesthetic strategy bears close resemblance to what I have
elsewhere described as the demonstration mode of Technicolor design
Typified by the first three-colour short La Cucaracha (1934L and the first
feature, Becky Sharp, this design mode employed colour in particularly
forceful ways, displaying Technicolor’s chromatic range through the
juxtaposition of bold hues, and drawing attention to colour’s potential
for carrying drama. Robert Edmund Jones, the famed Broadway
designer hired by Technicolor as a creative consultant, best expressed
the aesthetic exuberance of these early films when he proclaimed: ’the
difference between a black-and-vvhite film and a Technicolor film is very
like the difference between a play and an opera’.&dquo; Jones predicted a
’colour revolution’ akin to the promised ’digital revolution’ of our
generation. The demonstration films of the 1930s conspicuously
manipulate colour for obvious dramatic or emotional effects, making
Technicolor a readily observable, extrusive element. In La Cucaracha,
for instance, Jones played coloured lights on the actors’ faces and
figures to communicate their moods. The colour coding in these films
(red for passion, blue for sadness) was ultimately deemed too literal to
be sustained as a norm, but it did have the benefit of calling attention
to colour’s narrative potentials. Both La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp
have the appearance of catalogues of effects, boldly running through
options for showcasing colour technology. La Cucaracha tests coloured
illumination by varying the hue of the light, its extent within the frame
(from spotlighting to a complete tinting of the image) the number of
figures illuminated, and the coordination of the technique with the
actors’ performances. When a character boils with comic
exasperation, for instance, a red spotlight gradually illuminates his face.
Likewise, Becky Sharp tests methods for introducing and removing
strong colour from the frame. The film relies heavily on dissolves as

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 64

transitions between compositions of muted and assertive hues, pulsing

and renewing colour at the beginnings and conclusions of scenes.
Within ongoing scenes, camera movement, staging, editing, and
changes in lighting are all deployed to dramatically reveal and remove
splashes of colour. One sequence stages the characters behind a white
sheet to render them in silhouette; cutting around the sheet then
alternates between monochrome and full-colour. This mode of design
was short lived and films following Becky Sharp actively distanced
themselves from the approach. Still, it was extremely successful in
promoting the process to the industry. The aesthetic demonstrated that
colour could be functional, and that Technicolor could serve as a mark
of differentiation in feature production. As an aesthetic model, the
demonstration mode offers a set of practices that are particularly
relevant to the introduction of a new colour technology, The
revolutionary approach is probably impossible to sustain, but it seems
an important phase in establishing a new colour technology. It is not

surprising that the first digitally graded feature should find itself
employing similar strategies.
Like its Technicolorpredecessors, Pleasantville strongly showcases the
new technology’s spectacular and dramatic potentials. Where the early
three-colour efforts could present colour as a novelty against blacl~-and-
white industry norms, the producers of Pleasantville create analogous
circumstances within the film. After a brief colour framing story, the
teenage twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon)
are beamed into Pleasantville, an Ozzie and Harrietstyle family

comedy, where they assume the roles of the show’s juvenile leads Bud
and Mary Sue. Colour begins to emerge within the black-and-white
universe as David and Jennifer disturb the complacent sterility of
Pleasantville by introducing sexuality, passion, and free will. The film&dquo;s
visual gimmick is founded on juxtaposing black-and-white and colour
elements within the same frame. Stripped of its ubiquity, colour becomes
newly perceptible and significant. Moreover, the binary opposition
provides colour with a rather crude but well defined set of meanings.
Pleasantville offers a set of tactics for encouraging a high degree of
colour awareness, and in this way it proves a particularly good vehicle
for announcing the power of digital manipulation. Most obviously, the
transition from colour to black-and-white mise-en-scene as the characters
travel into the television narrative pulls attention to the film’s graphic
qualities; an effect reinforced by dialogue, as when Jennifer exclaims
’look at me, I’m pasty!’ Within the early black-and-white sequences,
production design cleverly alerts viewers to the lack of colour through
compositional emphasis. The establishing shot of the high-school
geography class, for instance, frames the teacher from a low angle with
a carefully arranged row of apples conspicuously framing the

foreground. The massing of apples in the classroom comments on

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 65

Pleasantville’s cheery perfection while highlighting the absence of

colour. Calling attention to archetypically colourful objects, including a
fire engine, an American flag, and a barbershop pole, helps prevent
black-and-white from becoming transparent.

When colours begin to emerge in the town of Pleasantville the film

deploys a number of methods, many familiar from Technicolor’s
demonstration mode, for highlighting the new technology. Initially,
colour objects are injected within black-and-white environments. The first
accents are warm hues, broadly associated with budding sexuality.
Jennifer’s boyfriend, Skip, sees a True Red rose against
new
monochrome foliage after their first date. 12 A high school girl flirts with
a boy by blowing a bubble of Candy Pink bubblegum. A red tail light

appears on a parked car at Lover’s Lane. Each instance is a striking

display of the new precise image manipulation made possibly by digital
grading. In principle, the technique seems akin to the opening of Becky
Sharp in which the frame is taken up entirely by a silver gray curtain so
that the image appears monochrome until a young woman peeks
through, bringing the flesh tones of her face into the field of gray. By
citing and then departing from black-and-white, the moment showcases
three-colour’s improved rendition of skin tone and facial features just as
Pleasantville demonstrates the ability to isolate and affect the colours of
discrete objects. More than just an assertive use of colour (as found in
the works of contemporary American auteurs like Scorsese, Soderbergh,
and Haynes, to name a few), these films contrive opportunities to
foreground particular technical capacities of their respective
technologies.
As Ross and Deakins reveal more colours they expand the showcasing
techniques. Camera movements reveal colour within continuous takes,
characters clad in yellow, green, blue, and red interact with black-and-
white figures, and cutting plays on hard graphic contrasts between
monochrome and colour elements. For example, the first full-colour
characters in the town are revealed by a tracking shot that begins by
following Bud as he crosses a black-and-white street. When he comes to
a halt before the diner the camera continues to reframe, introducing a

teenage couple necking in the foreground, the boy clad in a light but
saturated Bachelor Button blue shirt, the girl in a True Red sweater. The
moment is a rather startling revelation; digital colour is foregrounded by
the strong hue contrast, the sudden appearance and prominent framing
of the figures, and their unexpected discovery within a black-and-white
shot. As colour characters begin to multiply, director Gary Ross favours
framings that juxtapose primaries and complementaries. Most notably,
when lines of young people form outside the Pleasantville library, the
camera centers on two young women, one in an Azalea Red sweater
and Lyons Blue skirt, the other in a Cloud Blue sweater and Fairway
Green skirt. As the camera tracks their movements, it reveals a series of

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 66

striking costume accents in the background in various shades of red,

blue, green and, the shot’s climax, yellow. These strong contrasts of
at
hue within a monochrome environment act as visual magnets that
forcefully remind the viewer of the fact of digital manipulation.
Elsewhere editing between black-and-white and color mise-en-scene
further drives attention toward digital interventions. A shot of Bud and
Margaret (Marley Shelton) on their first trip to the now full-colour Lover’s
Lane frames a spray of Aurora Pink roses prominently in the left
foreground. The next image presents a hard cut to a black-and-white
bouquet in the window of Pleasantville’s flower shop. As with Becky
Sharp’s dissolves, graphic similarity between the shots underlines the
film’s game of revealing and removing colour. All of these techniques
have precedents in the early demonstration films, and they function to
keep colour a vibrant presence, and to show off the power of digital
grading.
Clearly the film’s methods for handling colour promote awareness of the
new technology. Pleasantville also serves as a test of the process by

conspicuously working through a set of options for intervening in the

image. While most of the digital manipulation favours the injection of
colour elements into monochrome frames, Bud and Margaret’s trip to
Lover’s Lane motivates a reversal. In this sequence the two black-and-
white characters interact with a fully saturated mise-en-sc6ne, effectively
showcasing the digital grading system’s ability to selectively remove
colour. In a more systematic manner, the film steps through variations on
the effect of altering flesh tones within a shot. After turning colour, Bud’s
mother (Joan Allen) enlists her son’s help in covering her skin with gray
makeup in a scene that offers the spectacular removal of skin tone
within a continuous take. The process is then reversed when she visits
Bill Johnson Ueff Daniels) who removes her makeup in an act of
lavemaking.’3 A third variant on the technique occurs when the film’s
villain, the anti-colour mayor of Pleasantville (J.T. Walsh) bursts into a
passionate rage during the climactic courtroom scene. In this final
visible transformation, colour surges into the actor’s black-and-white
visage as he yells at Bud. Historically, the ability to render skin tone has
been a litmus test for the success of a colour process. In Pleasantville the
narrative thus offers three opportunities for the digital artists to
dramatically alter flesh tones, taking a different approach in each case.
Colour consciousness entails an effort to carve a place for the new
technology by showing it can perform in such test situations. In this
sense, the film methodically demonstrates digital colour’s potential in an
especially important area.
Though Pleasantville runs through the possibilities of digital colour
manipulation, few of its effects are well suited to more conventional
production. Colour, reduced to a code of presence and absence, and

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 67

infflrmed by very broad cultural associations, is installed at the top of

the text’s forrnal hierarchy. Digital colour has been harnessed to
narrative, but in an extremely obvious manner. The manipulations can
be so pronounced because they are recognised within the diegesis;
indeed they are part of the main character arcs. Bud’s conversion to
colour, for example, signals his empathy for his television mother and
his newfound commitment to social activism. The boldness of the film&dquo;s
digital work is justified by its rather narrow and specific high-concept
premise. The film does little to suggest that digital colour grading can
cooperate with, rather than dominate, a film’s formal system; that it can
be profitably subordinated to the more routine chores of film style. This
is not necessarily a failing, however. The demonstration mode fulfils the
goal of colour consciousness by drawing industry attention to the new
technology and suggesting its spectacular and narrative potentials. The
very obviousness with which Pleasantville attaches significance to colour
serves this project well. Having defamiliarised colour, and raised
awareness of the technological possibilities through a ’revolutionary’
approach, Pleasantville, like La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp, leaves to
subsequent productions the job of integrating the device and developing
sustainable paradigmatic conventions.

The demonstration was successful enough that two years later Kodak
and Cinesite began offering their intermediate process to the open
market, stressing its very broad applications. Speaking on behalf of
Cinesite, cinematographer Allen Daviau proclaimed:

The growth of Digital Intermediate work is going to get the

attention of everyone who shoots motion pictures.... It’s going
to mean a lot more than a digital intermediary for effects work.
It’s going to work exactly as it does in lab procedures, except
that now we’re going to have a wonderful digital tool
Prototype A number of celebrated non-effects films have subsequently made
extensive use of digital grading, including Amelie (2001) and Frida
(2003). But 0 Brother Where Art Thou, directed by Joel and Ethan
Coen, remains the film most recognised within the Hollywood industry
for its ambitious use of colour grading.

The film’s importance as a prototype seems clear. 0 Brother was the

first major Hollywood non-effects film to be scanned and manipulated in
its entirety: the only prior film was The Phantom Menace (1999), which
used digital grading to integrate effects work. During the film’s
promotion, cinematographer Roger Deakins became a veritable
spokesman for Cinesite and the potentials of digital grading. Critical
reaction to the film’s look garnered him an Academy Award nomination
for best cinematography, a nomination for Outstanding Achievement in
Cinematography from the ASC and the award for Best Cinematography

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 68

from the British Society of Cinematographers. The film played an

important role in legitimising digital colour grading. Furthermore, it
helped Cinesite make the case that the process could be an extension of
traditional cinematography, rather than a narrowly applicable post-
production novelty. Work on the intermediate was organised as a
collaboration between Deakins and colourist Julius Freide, and Deakins
shot the film in a manner that would give him options in the post-
production phase. 15 This working arrangement helped to address the
professional cinematographers’ fears that digital post-production will
usurp their creative control over the image. 0 Brother Where Art Thou,
then, stands as a pivotal film for validating digital grading for non-
effects production, and for providing a model for integrating the process
into Hollywood’s prevailing creative hierarchy. Discourse in the critical
and creative communities positions the film as an exemplar of successful
digital colour design.
0 Brother also forges an aesthetic suited to exploiting and controlling
the possibilities of digital colour. Where Pleasantville brashly displays
digital manipulation 0 Brother consciously strives to assimilate the
technology into reigning norms. Once again, a comparison to early
Technicolor design brings the film’s formal strategies into relief. After the
novelty-based exploitation of colour offered by Becky Sharp, producers
and designers quickly reacted against the perceived formal excesses of
the demonstration films. Beginning with Paramount’s Trail of the
Lonesome Pine, the first three-colour feature produced by a major
Hollywood studio, filmmakers developed a restrained mode of colour
design.&dquo; Restraint was an important way of putting into practice the
principles of colour design that Natalie Kalmus, head of Technicolor’s
colour advisory service, articulated in her famous essay ’Color
Consciousness’. Kalmus exhorted the film industry to think in colour
terms; to become aware of the way that colour ’amplifies the picture’,
while avoiding what she termed an unnatural ’superabundance of
color’.&dquo; Colour consciousness meant conforming the technology to
industry standards of narrative clarity and subtlety.
Restrained designs generally favoured a constricted palette, based heavily
onneutrals and browns, from which filmmakers could strategically
diverge. Restraint was a practical solution to the problem of obtrusiveness
posed by the demonstration films. By limiting colour contrast, the
filmmakers avoided strong, potentially distracting juxtapositions. This
strategy helped designers obey Kalmus’ dictum that background colours
cooperate with directing attention. In ’Color Consciousness’ she pointedly
warned that ’if, for example, a bright red ornament were shown behind
an actor’s head, the bright color would detract from the character and the
action’.&dquo; Restraint also encouraged quieter colour effects, which did not
so boldly command attention. More generally, in relying on low-profile

designs, the restrained mode helped colour blend with a mode of film

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 69
~ ~
~~ ~
practice that favoured unobtrusive form. Unlike the demonstration mode,
restrained films favoured colour contrasts that emphasised differences of
saturation and value, rather than hue.
Put roughly, this was a ’less-is-more’ approach in which subtle changes
in colour could become more powerful, and more easily tied to
expressive and directive functions. The rural melodrama Trail of the
Lonesome Pine, for example, is designed almost entirely in brown, gray,
and earth tones. Within suchpared-down palette, occasional
a

departures stand Orange highlights offered by autumnal foliage

out.
create a pictorial motif that gathers associations with pastoral tranquility
across the film. When the warm orange accents reappear during the
funeral of a main character, they recall earlier compositions and help
accentuate the contrasting emotional tone. Colour is thus subtly
harnessed to narrative. This mode is attuned to helping establish new
colour technologies. Once the novelty-based demonstration films have
gained the attention of the industry, restrained designs emphasise that
the technology can recede from attention, not simply provide a
distracting gimmick. It also helps filmmakers make claims for the subtle
expressive possibilities of colour.

In adopting a similar mode design for 0 Brother, the Coens and

Deakins made a bid for the importance of colour digital grading. Their
attention to colour design can be seen within a context of existing
practices. Since the 1960s, desaturation has become a mark of
virtuosity in colour filmmaking (supported by lab techniques like Bleach
Bypass, Flashing, and Silver Retention - all of which were considered
by the filmmakers before turning to Cinesite). The depression of colour
is a contemporary sign of taste and differentiation. More generally,
conscious intervention in a film’s colour design forms something of an
auteurist mark for the Coens and other contemporary American
directors. In addition, just as in the 193~s, restraint helps foreground
departures from the palette, drawing attention to colour as a
compositional element and highlighting its dramatic functions. Digital
colour could be shown as an extension of respected techniques at the
same time that it was accented, not as novelty, but as contributing to the
fulfilment of fairly classical stylistic goals. Deakins confirms this
understanding of the film’s strategy when he notes:
The technology enabled us to create a look that supported the
mood of the story.... I wish there was more discussion about
how we can tell more compelling stories and less hype implying
that different techniques and uses of technology will replace or
diminish the cinematographer’s role in telling stories.’9

An analysis of the film’s colour design readily reveals the strategy of

highlighting the new digital tools while assigning them well-established

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 70

functions; anintegrative rather than revolutionary approach. Eoosely

modelled The Odyssey, the film follows the journey of three escaped
on
convicts in the American south during the 1930s. The film’s look is
partly motivated by its dust-bowl era setting. Deakins and Freide
removed green from footage that was shot in Mississippi during its
verdant summer months, desaturated the palette, and worked in a rather
narrow range of warm browns and earth tones .20 This stylised
environment helped the filmmakers establish that digital tools could
handle routine formal tasks without commanding undue attention.

For instance, the digitally desaturated backgrounds direct attention by

giving figures greater prominence. When convicts Ulysses (George
Clooney) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) drift into town during a
political rally, Deakins desaturates and removes colour from background
mise-en-sc6ne. Early establishing shots show that the street is lined with
shops featuring green and red awnings. Upon cutting in to medium
shots of Ulysses and Delmar entering the scene, these colour highlights
have been flattened to a range of browns and blacks. Similarly, when
gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) is unmasked as
a klan leader during a musical performance by the convicts’ band, the

stage behind him is voided of hue contrast and washed in a warm,

brown sepia tint. As with the awnings, this background detail had
previously been rendered in a broader palette with Ulysses’s denim
overalls carrying a strong blue note. Elsewhere in the film, Deakins
recalls toning down the colour of an extra’s orange-yellow dress so that
she would blend into a crowd.21 Digital work, in these cases, stands in
for or accentuates conventional lighting or mise-en-sc6ne cues for
directing the eye; it performs tasks of colour control that had previously
been the domain of production design and cinematography. Deakins’
and Freide’s restrained palette places unusual weight on these effects.

In a related manner, within the generally desaturated environment, the

decision to leave particular colours untouched helps to graphically
underline motifs. For instance, the introduction of Ulysses’ can of
Dapper Dan Pomade presents the only strong red note in an otherwise
warm-brown sequence. More pointedly, when Ulysses discovers his
infant son in a department store, the Faded Rose red blanket
enwrapping the child stands out on the desaturated sepia Woolworth’s
set. Where Technicolor consultants made mise-en-scene colour a vehicle
for organising attention, the digital colourist employs analogous
techniques to shape composition in post-production. In a more
flamboyant manner, digital mise-en-scene combines with colour grading
to accent Pete’s (John Tuturro) reappearance in a chain gang as his
friends, having given him up for dead, ride past in the back of a
pickup. Here, digitally generated dust on the road swirls around Pete, I

the whites briefly framing him against the brown surroundings. Then the
highlights overtake the image, rendering the frame brilliant white and

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setting up the dissolve to the next sequence. The play of digital

highlights both directs attention to the briefly glimpsed character, and
renews awareness of colour by obliterating and then reintroducing it.
As is typical of films in the restrained mode, 0 Brother presents methods
for integrating the new technology, proving that it can carry mundane
but fundamental tasks of directing attention. At the same time, the
design occasionally refreshes digital colour as a perceptible and vital
component of the image.

As Roger Deakins noted, the central reason for relying on digital colour

grading was ’to support the mood of the story’. 22 Arguably, claims of
narrative expressiveness remain the ultimate aesthetic defence of any
new device in Hollywood cinema. From La Cucaracha onward, this has

certainly been the case for colour. In 0 Brother, digital grading carries
out expressive assignments, primarily through shifts in saturation. On
exteriors, the film’s design places great emphasis on the Beige Brown
foliage, which was green in the original footage. Since the foliage
received the most invasive digital alteration, it was a prime candidate
for expressive manipulation. At key moments Deakins and Freide vary
saturation and value in the foliage, usually shifting it toward warmer
tones, to parallel and emphasise dramatic turning points.

The technique is most pronounced during the trio’s somewhat mystical

encounter with a baptism ritual, and their seduction by three sirens. In
the first case, saturation20 shots as the three convicts,
shifts across

sharing dinner in the forest,

overtaken by the members of a
are

congregation, clad in white

robes, who lead them to the river’s edge.
There, Delmar rushes into the water to be redeemed by the preacher.
When the sequence begins, Ulysses, Pete, and Delmar are framed
against the slightly warm Beige background of sun-dappled foliage. In
the first shot of the congregation, a long point-of-view shot of several
figures passing through a wooded area, the highlights in the foliage
receive a warmer, more saturated cast, approaching Persimmon
Orange. When framing returns to the three convicts, the background
colour retreats toward Beige. Then colour shifts once again, this time
toward Buckskin, a warmer light brown, as the camera follows the
congregation and cranes upward revealing the convicts among them as
they approach the muddy river. Subsequent compositions of the convicts
and the congregation, presented by a continuously tracking and arcing
camera, translate the background mise-en-scene as varying shades of
Buckskin (in the mid-tones) and Persimmon Orange (in the highlights).
The general impression is of a gradual warming and intensifying of
colour as Delmar heeds his calling to join the baptism. Colour swells
with the appearance of the congregation and their effect on the
protagonists. It is also keyed to the onset of the song ’Down in the River
to Pray’, which overtakes the soundtrack as the congregation moves
toward the river.

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The encounter with the Sirens, singled out by Deakins in his discussions
of the film, is another ethereal, musical passage marked by fluid
camera movement. Once again, the trio finds themselves drawn to a
wooded river. This time, three white-clad women sing to the men, lulling
them into an embrace. When Ulysses and Delmar wake up, the sirens
are gone and Pete has disappeared, leaving only his clothing and a
small horned toad. In this case, digital grading renders the foliage a
luminous, heavily saturated Persimmon Orange during the seduction.
Afterwards, particularly in Ulysses’ close-ups as he discovers Pete’s fate,
this mise-en-scene drops down to the cooler and less-saturated Beige
that predominates in the film. As earlier, the digital technique
cooperates with music and camerawork to lend the passage its
dreamlike character.

One is tempted to view these passages as fulfilling Robert Edmund

Jones’ vision of colour film as an operatic form in which chroma is an
expressive element, an emotional conductor fully responsive to a
drama’s mood. Colour has been freed from the objects that carry it; the
digital artist can manipulate it as an independent variable. Yet both
sequences are marked as lyrical and more open to stylisation, and the
colour shift is subtle, confined to saturation and temperature rather than
a full change of hue. If anything, the play of colour is akin to more
conventional changes in lighting to accentuate a dramatic passage.
Filters or processing techniques might likewise have expressively altered
colour (though with less precision) in a conventional production. Given
the potentials of digital grading to intervene in the image, these
sequences are remarkable for their relative restraint. The digital-
grading suite, these sequences submit, can be a team player with other
elements of style: suiting the story without unduly dominating the
proceedings.
Restraint also helps draw attention to these subtle developments. In 0
Brother, chromatic play forms a rather self-conscious pattern, and the
viewer has been encouraged to watch it from the film’s opening. Strong
digital articulations, approaching Pleasantville in their openness, occur
in three passages. In the first instance, the opening shot bleeds colour
into a black and white image. The film begins with a stark black-and-
white panorama of a sun-bleached field, As the camera pans left the
groundcover gradually shifts from gray to beige; the change is timed
with the shot’s discovery of a warden’s horse and a chain gang. The
effect is surprisingly understated, partly because it avoids rendering
human figures in black-and-white. Still, it primes the viewer to attend to
shifts in the saturation and temperature of background mise-en-scene.

The next conspicuous colour change

emerges in the film’s third
sequence, when the three convicts encounter a blind prophet driving a

railroad handcar. The prophet tells the men their fortunes and the

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scene’s final high-angle extreme long shot of the handcar receding into
the distance tints the previously white sky Pink Seashell, a strong peach
colour. Groundcover on either side of the track approaches the
saturated Persimmon Orange hue, where previously it had been Beige.
The colour change is motivated as a sunset effect, but it amounts to a
brief flexing of the digital palette, foregrounding a sudden shift in
saturation.

The film’s final shot closes off the pattern by briefly enhancing and then
draining out colour. The camera tracks left, following Ulysses and his
family as they pass along a brown and gray small-town street. The shot
pauses when one of Ulysses’ daughters halts on a railroad track, and it
briefly reframes the strong Persimmon Orange groundcover. Finally, the
camera cranes upward and in an echo of the earlier shot it catches the
blind prophet moving into the distance on his handcar. This time the
image swiftly fades to black-and-white. Like the first shot, the last
illustrates the ease with which digital grading can achieve colour shifts
within a continuous take. Where cutting helps to temper the colour
effects in other scenes, the opening and closing images forcefully
demonstrate the colourist’s intervention. In the fashion of the restrained
mode, 0 Brother draws attention to chroma at several key transitional
passages, piquing the viewer’s awareness so that less obtrusive
manipulations within ongoing dramatic scenes may nonetheless stand
out.

As noted earlier, colour foregrounding, techniques for making colour a

visible formal element, has an important place in contemporary cinema.
In this regard, 0 Brother participates in current trends rather than
innovates. The film keeps pace with what David Bordwell as called
’intensified continuity’, a tendency of Hollywood films since the 1980s
favour obtrusive, though narratively centred, style.23 For example,
to
standard motivations for colour manipulation are pushed further than in
the classical era. Moonlight commonly justified shifts in colour
temperature during the classical era, but in 0 Brother, as in much
contemporary filmmaking, it is used to render the image entirely blue,
even interfering with flesh tones. The point of this discussion is not to

suggest that the degree of play with colour in 0 Brother is a radical

departure. Rather, digital technology has allowed the filmmakers to
realise contemporary goals through new means. That the power of
digital grading to reshape the image has been channelled toward the
virtuosic achievement of conventional objectives is significant. To have
colour consciousness, as Kalmus saw it, was not to remake the cinema
into a new form, but to find ways that the new device can fit into
current market demands. Having pulled attention to digital colour at the
opening and closing of the film, Deakins, Freide, and the Coens more
subtly test the process’s expressive potential in the sequences noted
above. Where the film showcases the peculiar powers of digital colour

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grading by manipulating saturation within ongoing shots, it is

controlled, one might even say stately, in its approach. The appeal of
restraint is that it helps legitimise the technology beyond its appeal as a
passing gimmick.

The reader may be tempted to see Pleasantville and 0 Brother Where

Art Thou as representing two alternative approaches to digital grading:
one dictated by industry enthusiasm for a gimmick, the other by the
artist’s pursuit of a look.I would instead suggest that the two films
present distinct phases of a single programme to introduce and define a
place for the new technology in Hollywood. Together, the films illustrate
how the introduction of digital grading seems to follow the aesthetic
tread of Technicolor, and they remind us of the interplay between film
form and the promotion of technology. Pleasantville tests and
demonstrates the technology by tying it to a high-concept premise and
systematically parading digital manipulation. It gave Cinesite and other
firms valuable experience with the process, and it announced the power
of digital grading to the industry and the viewing public. As a
demonstration film, though, Pleasantville does not offer a lasting set of
digital-colour practices suitable to mainstream production. In this film
digital colour is defined as an effect, a novelty that could well wear thin
were it so forcefully reiterated in subsequent productions. Yet far from
being an aesthetic dead-end, Pleasantville paved the way for the
technology’s adoption. Having caught industry attention, Cinesite and
other post-production firms needed a film that would establish the value
of digital grading for a wide range of production. 0 Brother filled that
need. The film is a canny prototype because it adopts an approach that
tests the process’ ability to perform basic tasks and that calls attention to
the subtle underscoring of drama. These films are governed by a
consciousness that new colour technology will only survive if it is first
carefully advertised and then integrated into existing practices.
If the comparison with Technicolor holds, the future of digital grading
would seem clear. As Technicolor filmmakers built up a body of
conventions for using the technology, the emphasis on restraint eased
and a set of distinct styles emerged. We might speculate that as
filmmakers become more confident in assigning conventional roles to
digital colour, they will likely expand its repertoire. Ultimately digital
artists may forge a assortment of stylistic options from the understated to
the spectacular, but all will be built on the basic mastery of narrative
centring and underscoring taught by the restrained mode. Even if this
speculation proves untenable, the case of Pleasantville and 0 Brother
can tell us much about the nature of the ’digital revolution’ in

filmmaking. In the case of colour, digital advancements have not

created a rupture or radical change. Rather, the institutional pressures
associated with Hollywood filmmaking, in particular the need to test
and integrate new technologies, have encouraged a familiar aesthetic

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trajectory from demonstration to restraint. Apparently revolutionary

approaches to the technology are most likely only a passing phase in
the adoption of digital grading. In the rush to describe how digital
technologies are changing film form, the case of colour grading
reminds us to view them against a historical background that
emphasises continuities, ancestry and the enduring sway of craft norms.
Notes 1 Debra Kaufman, ’The Post Process: Control in the Digital Suite’, American
Cinematographer, 83, (March 2002), p. 14.
no. 3
2 David E. Williams, ’Firepower in Post’, American Cinematographer, 83, no.
2 (February 2002), p. 50.
3 ’The Future of Filmmaking: The Future as seen by Cinematographers’,
American Cinematographer, 81, no. 9 (September 2000), p. 82.
4 Christopher Probst, ’New Products & Services: A Digital Revolution’,
American Cinematographer, 81, no. 9 (September 2000), p. 151.
5 John Pavulus, ’No Holds Barred’, American Cinematographer, 83, no. 11
(November 2002), p. 45; Probst p. 151.
6 Jean Oppenheimer, ’Toying With Visuals in Post’, American
Cinematographer, 81, no. 9 (September 2000), p. 56.
7 Bob Fisher, ’New Products & Services: The Latest Technique: Technicolor’s
Digital Film-Mastering Facility’, American Cinematographer, 82, no. 11
(November 2001), p. 118; Debra Kaufman, ’New Products & Services:
Deluxe Labs and Post Logic Ally to Increase Services’, American
Cinematographer, 83, no. 3 (March 2002), p. 99.
8 Debra Kaufman and Ray Zone, ’A Legacy of Invention: Cinematographers
Exploring the Growing Possibilities of Postproduction are Continuing a Time-
Honored Tradition’, American Cinematographer, 83, no. 5 (May 2002), p.
73.
9 Bob Fisher, ’Black-and-White in Color: The Comedic Fantasy Pleasantville
Provides a Unique Opportunity for the Digital and Photochemical Production
Worlds to Momentarily Merge’, American Cinematographer, 79, no. 1 1
(November 1998), pp. 60-62, 64-67.
10 Scott Higgins, ’Demonstrating Three-Color: Early Three-Color Aesthetics and
Design’, Film History, 12, no. 3 (2001), pp. 358-383.
11 Robert Edmund Jones, ’A Revolution at the Movies’, Vanity Fair (June
1935), p. 13.
12 Capitalised colour names refer to colours in The Pantone Book of Color, a
reference of 1,024 colour standards based on the Pantone Matching
System. This encourages a somewhat higher level of descriptive precision,
though the comparison of printed colour to film must remain approximate.
Leatrice Eiseman, Lawrence Herbert, The Pantone Book of Color (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).
13 The DVD release of Pleasantville offers a brief documentary that explains
the digital techniques employed in these sequences. Such supplementary
material highlights and extends the promotion of the technology implicit
within the film.
14 S. Argy, ’Cinematographer’s Computer Age: Cinematographers and Visual
Effects Experts Assess the Impact of Digital Technology on the Creative
Process’, American Cinematographer, 80, no. 8 (August 1999), p. 76.
15 Bob Fisher, ’Escaping from Chains’, American Cinematographer, 81, no.
10 (October 2000), pp. 36-40, 42, 44-49.

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16 Higgins, ’Technology and Aesthetics: Technicolor Cinematography and

Design in the Late 1930’, Film History, 11, no. 1 (1999), pp. 55-76.
17 Natalie Kaimus, ’Color Consciousness’, Journal of the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers, (August 1935), pp. 142, 145.
18 Kalmus, p. 146.
19 ’The Future of Filmmaking’, p. 79.
20 Fisher, ’Escaping in Chains’.
21 Ibid, p. 47.
22 ’The Future of Filmmaking’, p. 79.
23 David Bordwell, ’Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary
American Film’, Film Quarterly, 55, no. 3 (2002), pp., 16-28.

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