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Color at the center: Minnelli's Technicolor style in 'Meet Me in St. Louis.' - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Vincente Minnelli
Style, Fall, 1998 by Scott Higgins
Notes
1 Three-color Technicolor was developed in 1932 and first used in a full-length feature in 1934's Becky Sharp. This system was a refinement of Technicolor's two-color (red and green) process which enjoyed some success during the 1920s. The three-color camera exposed three separate negatives, each registering a different portion of the spectrum. Color prints were generated through a"dye transfer process" in which yellow, cyan, and magenta components of the image were dyed onto blank stock, a process similar to lithography. For an accessible, detailed discussion of the process, see Fred Basten's Glorious Technicolor, 199-204.
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2 For a discussion of Technicolor's strategies for promoting their process to the film industry, see Neupert, H. Kalmus, and Basten.
3 For a discussion of the attention-guiding function of style, see Bordwell esp. pp 163-65.
4 I develop a thorough discussion of the restrained style in my larger project, An Aesthetic History of Technicolor. Typical films exhibiting the 1930s restraint include Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), A Star is Born (1937), and The Goldwyn Follies (1938). Also see Jean-Loup Bourget, 110-19.
5 For a review of Folsey's work, see Mark Wanamaker.
6 Beth Genne makes a similar observation regarding camera movement. She notes that unlike Busby Berkeley, who saved spectacular crane shots for musical finales, Minnelli exploits fluid camera movement throughout his films. The director's treatment of color may well be part his broad tendency to integrate spectacular stylistic devices into the fabric of the film's narrative. See Genne 251.
7 For an extended analysis of this opening sequence, see Genne 248-51.
8 Lon's singing voice was dubbed by Arthur Freed, Anna's by D. Markas.
9 Color names in italics refer to similar hues cataloged by The Pantone Book of Color. This is a reference book of 1,024 color standards developed for use in the printing industry. Though matches between the printed colors and those in a film can be approximate at best, Pantone's color names provide a useful tool for describing and identifying hues. In order to better specify important colors for this section of my analysis, I provide Pantone names.
10 There is evidence that Technicolor's capacity for registering background detail influenced the film's set design. Hugh Fordin reports that the original wallpaper patterns appeared washed out under the lighting conditions and were redesigned at some expense. This suggests a high degree of concern regarding background texture (111).
11 This detail is cropped out of the commercial video.
Works Cited
Aller, Herb. "Color Marches On. "International Photographer 7 (May 1936): 17.
Basten, Fred E. Glorious Technicolor: The Movies Magic Rainbow. Cranbury: A.S. Barnes, 1980.
Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
-----, and Kristen Thompson. Film Art. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf 1986.
Bourget, Jean-Loup. "Esthetiques du Technicolor." La Couleur en Cinema. Ed. Jacques Aumont. Milan: Mazotta, 1995.110-19.
