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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

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Aesthetic Boundaries

From the inception of the three-color process in the early 1930s, the Technicolor Corporation endeavored to convince Hollywood's major studios that their new system could be successfully and profitably integrated into feature production.(1) The company set out to prove that unlike their earlier two-color process, which was widely regarded as a short-lived novelty, three-color could provide a valuable and lasting contribution to film drama. As part of its campaign to sell the industry on the merit of color, the company trumpeted a set of aesthetic guidelines that would help tie color to the normal functions of Classical Hollywood style.(2) Above all, color was supposed to enhance drama and cooperate with the tasks of story-telling, not draw attention or become distracting. Cinematographer Herbert Aller summarized the situation plainly when he applauded the Technicolor cameramen of the 1930s who "carried with them the inalienable thought that the audience when leaving the theater must not say the story lagged for the sake of color" (17).

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The job of articulating and enforcing an official Technicolor aesthetic fell to Natalie Kalmus, former wife to company president Herbert Kalmus and head of the Color Advisory Service. From the 1930s into the 1950s, Kalmus and her crew of color consultants oversaw the color design of every major studio Technicolor production. According to Natalie Kalmus, the Advisory Service would review scripts and generate a "color chart" that accounted for "each scene, sequence, set and character" ("Colour" 121). The goal, says Kalmus, was to produce a color score, like a musical score, that "amplifies the picture" by matching color to the "dominant mood or emotion" of a sequence, thus "augmenting its dramatic value." Leonard Doss, a Technicolor advisor during the late 1940s and early 1950s, recalls that his responsibilities included developing color schemes, meeting with the costume department to establish wardrobe colors and then consulting with the art department to ensure that their designs would mesh with the hues worn by the central characters (Neupert 23). Decor was thus harmonized around the major players.

The Color Advisory Service secured Technicolor a degree of aesthetic control over their process, helping to ensure that all productions conformed to a set of design principles for linking color to drama. These principles are most clearly expressed by Natalie Kalmus in "Color Consciousness," presented in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers of August 1935. Here, she drew on her training in the arts to synthesize a set of four basic rules for organizing and controlling color in film. First, color schemes should be coordinated with the mood or tone of dramatic action. Kalmus supplied a catalogue of the emotional values of specific colors and suggested their potential narrational functions. Warm colors (red, yellow, orange) were known as "advancing colors" that "call forth sensations of excitement, activity and heat" (142). At the cool end of the spectrum (green, blue violet) were "retiring colors" suggesting "rest, ease, coolness" (143). For Kalmus, these broad color groups provided a way to specify the meanings of individual hues and values. For example, red may indicate love, but careful variation and combination could narrow meaning: "By introducing the colors of licentiousness, deceit, selfish ambition, or passion, it will be possible to classify the type of love portrayed with considerable accuracy." As Richard Neupert has noted, these claims served an important promotional function for Technicolor, for they helped to convince the industry that color could be precisely and scientifically controlled (25). In practice, a more general correlation between color and mood informs color design.

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

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