Color at the center: Minnelli's Technicolor style in 'Meet Me in St. Louis.' - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Vincente Minnelli

Scott Higgins

The image of Judy Garland on a trolley, framed by a circle of singers with brightly colored hats and dresses, has become a popular emblem of the Hollywood color musical. Part of the enduring appeal of this image, aside from its association with one of Garland's most famous songs, must stem from its bold deployment of color. The frame is packed with bright and varied accents of violet, green, yellow, pink, and blue. But this swirl of chroma only helps drive attention toward the star at its center. Garland, clad in black and white with the surrounding hues gently accentuating her auburn hair, commands the graphic core of the composition. Indeed, the image embodies many qualities of classical Technicolor design. Color generates a spectacular setting for the star, guarantees her compositional prominence, and accentuates the ebullience of the narrative moment. Three-color Technicolor, at the time still a relatively new addition to the toolbox of classical Hollywood style, appears thoroughly and gracefully integrated with the image's formal design.

Meet Me in St. Louis, produced by Arthur Freed's musical unit at MGM in 1944, offers an outstanding example of how color could serve the demands of classical filmmaking. Indeed, the film exhibits an innovative confidence in the way it moves color toward the center of its stylistic system. Under Vincente Minnelli's direction, Technicolor becomes a key contributor to the moment by moment shaping of visual information, making images striking, comprehensible, and affecting. This essay seeks to pinpoint the nature of color in Meet Me in St. Louis through detailed analysis. My goals here are to isolate color's functions and explicate the film's color design against the background of contemporaneous aesthetic trends. By presenting an overview of the film's color strategies and closely analyzing a single sequence, I will illustrate how the production largely conforms to conventions of Technicolor design while also elaborating them to make color a particularly forceful element of film style.

Vincente Minnelli has long been recognized as one of Hollywood's leading visual stylists. In his 1958 review of Minnelli's oeuvre for Film Quarterly, Albert Johnson tagged the director "a master of the decorative image," explaining that he "permits all spheres of the visual and decorative arts to embellish his film" (22). His reputation for relying on color and mise-en-scene for graphic embellishment actually preceded Minnelli's migration to Hollywood. As a director and designer on Broadway's popular musical stage during the 1930s, Minnelli earned praise for his flair with color. One reviewer, after lauding Minnelli's manipulation of contrasting hues for "rich beauty instead of what you would naturally expect," urged his readers to "utter a fervent plea to the deities of the theatre that the bogeymen of Technicolor don't get him for a for a while at least" (Minnelli 79, 80). More to the point, Theatre Arts Quarterly paraphrased the director's views that scenic backgrounds should form a "comment" on the action and emphasize the star's "special qualities," while the alternation of scenes based on high and low color values should ensure "that the show will not fall out of balance chromatically" (Houghton 787). Early in his career Minnelli acquired distinction as a colorist.

Once he was within a major Hollywood studio, reports indicate that Minnelli continued to heavily emphasize the small details of set design and composition. Keogh Gleason, set decorator for An American in Paris (1951) described Minnelli's working method as "very production conscious." Armed with a file of magazine clippings to generate ideas for various color combinations and props, the director would instruct his decorator to "bring this in and move that around" composing the frame in a "studied" manner (Knox 100, 116). In his production history of Meet Me in St. Louis, Gerald Kaufman describes a string of delays as the director fine-tuned the placement of props and details. He

cites a typical interruption noted in the daily report: "3.20-3.26 Wait for perfume bottle (special container with satin lining asked for by director)" (40).

Clearly, Minnelli built a reputation for keen attention to the graphic qualities of his films, and analysis of color in Meet Me in St. Louis often reveals the intricate manipulation of mise-en-scene for pictorial effect. But the director made his choices within the broader context of classical Hollywood Technicolor aesthetics. Rather than view Meet Me in St. Louis as the inspired work of a willful artist, it is more fruitful to examine the film as one response to the potentials and conventions of the 1940s Technicolor musical. Indeed, I argue that Minnelli's production modifies conventions in two important ways. First, while it was standard for Technicolor musicals to offer striking displays of color during production numbers, Meet Me in St. Louis extends these techniques to the film's entirety. Second, the film makes the basic principles of the Technicolor aesthetic more conspicuous because it employs an exceptionally vivid palette and elaborates the methods for guiding attention and underscoring mood with color. Before turning to the specifics of this film's color design, we should take stock of some aesthetic norms that shaped it.

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).

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.

A second principle held that excessive use of bright, saturated color should be avoided in favor of more "natural," harmonious and less intense color schemes. In Natalie Kalmus's words: "A super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well." She recommended "the judicious use of neutrals" as a "foil for color" in order to lend "power and interest to the touches of color in a scene" (142). Successful design would balance assertive hues with an array of neutrals.

Third, warmer and brighter shades should emphasize only narratively important information, otherwise neutral colors were advised. According to Kalmus: "the law of emphasis states in part that nothing of relative unimportance in a picture shall be emphasized. If, for example, a bright red ornament were shown behind an actor's head, the bright color would detract from the character and action" (147). In general then, the warmest colors should be associated with the main action while background and incidental information should be carefully blended and carried by cooler and unobtrusive hues. The maximum point of color contrast should be associated with the principle players in a scene while those who play "relatively unimportant roles" blend with the background (146).

Finally, elements of mise-en-scene should be coordinated so as to avoid distracting juxtapositions when characters move through space. Kalmus advised that it was vital to "consider the movement in the scene in determining its color composition because the juxtaposition of color is constantly changing due to this movement" (148). Restraint and attention to color harmony were the keys to avoiding unwanted juxtapositions when the director staged action within a set.

A central goal of all these rules was to tame color's potential for misdirecting spectator attention. As David Bordwell has argued, a central function of film style is to make the image intelligible, to direct the viewer's attention toward relevant portions of the frame.(3) Critics of Technicolor often referred to the distracting effects of ill-conceived color design. One observer complained that "colors perform strange tricks at the most unexpected times and for no apparent good reason. "One may suddenly decide to stand up and cheer, or roll over and play dead. And the perverse little devil usually does it at just the wrong time" ("Just What" 414). Harmonizing color to avoid striking juxtapositions, concentrating assertive hues on the protagonists, and associating color with mood would have the net effect of preventing these "strange tricks" of chroma. Natalie Kalmus's rules were drafted to guarantee that color, like lighting, sound, camera-movement, and editing, would hold the viewer's attention to the narratively important elements of the moving image.

Moreover, Kalmus's directives would seem to be especially relevant to Meet Me in St. Louis, given Minnelli's stylistic preferences. The director professed a dislike for the standard method of scene dissection editing, calling it "unimaginative and repetitious" (123). Rather than break scenes down into routine master shots and closer angles, he tended to rely on somewhat longer takes, camera movement, and more distant framing. If color presented a problem for directing attention, it would only be magnified by a style that depends more heavily on guiding the viewer's gaze within the frame. Technicolor's aesthetic guidelines were designed to help regulate color so that it supported the demands of directing attention. One challenge faced by a Technicolor filmmaker, and by Minnelli in particular, was to develop these guidelines into specific methods for making color harmonies and contrasts steer attention within an unfolding shot or series of shots.

Though different commentators specified and extended Kalmus's ideas, those four principles set the pattern for most discussions of the proper and tasteful use of color into the 1950s. Proof of the principles' longevity can be found in the 1957 manual Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures published by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers as an aid to production personnel in the early era of Eastmancolor. Not surprisingly, the manual's suggestions for color design follow closely those propagated by Technicolor decades earlier. In fact, the book goes so far as to suggest that productions employ "color coordinators" to take the place of the now absent Technicolor consultants (44; see also Clyne 653-56). Natalie Kalmus's legacy was a set of long-standing aesthetic criteria for the correct use of color in motion pictures. It established that color was to be channeled toward the subtle expression of drama through careful harmony and coordination. Thus it was within these boundaries that filmmakers, Minnelli included, were expected to work.

But it would be misleading to characterize the Technicolor aesthetic as an inflexible style. Rather, the guidelines could accommodate a range of options. Although most films before 1939 exhibit a restrained style, marked by restricted palettes dominated by browns and neutrals, by the early 1940s commentators recognized several distinct modes of color design, all operating within the codes of taste and harmony recommended by Kalmus and other color advisors.(4) An excellent indicator of aesthetic trends in Hollywood cinematography can be found in American Cinematographer's "Photography of the Month" reviews. With regard to Technicolor, the reviewer drew distinctions between films that "use color for strikingly dramatic effect," those that "subdue color for realistic illusion," and those that seek "to paint with a lavish brush for pictorial effect and dramatic illusion" (22.10:502). These "schools" of color design were broadly associated with genres. A modern drama like MGM's bio-pic Blossoms in the Dust (1941) was praised for "some of the most restrained use of color yet seen," while Paramount's exotic romance Aloma of the South Seas(1941) received commendation for "scene after scene" of "eye-arresting pictorial quality" (22.7:326; 22.10:502).

Yet the critics of American Cinematographer expected films of all genres and color styles to conform to the basic principles of harmony and unobtrusive coordination with the story. The bold palette of Rouben Mamoulian's Blood and Sand (1941), was praised for serving the narrative without "any obvious attempt at chromatic symbolism," while Billy the Kid (1941) was criticized for "a feeling that the dominant chromatic value of a scene is jarringly out of key with its emotional content" (22.6: 272, 273). Similarly, the reviewer praised a fantasy, The Jungle Book (1942), for offering a "lavish" palette that is so "skillfully planned and photographed" that "it never becomes garish" (23.5:208). On the other hand, the critic berated the musical Louisiana Purchase (1941) for a "riot of color" that "forced itself into the foreground of the viewer's attention" because sets and costumes were poorly coordinated (23.1:19). Even in genres oriented toward spectacle, the codes of harmony and coordination held critical authority.

By turning Technicolor's basic prescriptions into evaluative criteria, American Cinematographer squared specific films with institutionally endorsed ideals of color use. In doing so, the reviews presented a picture of diverse color styles coexisting within the borders of an overarching set of aesthetic principles. Though American Cinematographer had discontinued its monthly reviews by 1944, these discussions help us understand the aesthetic concerns of motion picture professionals during the period. As a musical, Meet Me in St. Louis might be granted greater latitude to develop a complex, "pictorial" palette, but the production's color design would ultimately be held to standards of harmony, unobtrusiveness, and subordination to narrative.

Color in Meet Me in St. Louis

MGM produced Meet Me in St. Louis at a time when Technicolor was allowing studios greater freedom in the use of their process. By the mid- 1940s the major studios had proved their allegiance to the company, allotting color a comfortable niche in their production schedules. This newfound stability may have encouraged Technicolor to relax its system for overseeing color production. No longer so concerned about proving the worth of their system to Hollywood, the parent company could afford to modify its protective posture.

This easing of supervision affected the Technicolor package. From the 1930s, Technicolor required that studios hire not only a consultant from the Color Advisory Service, but a special Technicolor cinematographer as well. Beginning in the early 1940s Technicolor began allowing some studio cinematographers to handle shooting on their own. By 1943, most productions were shot by unsupervised studio camera operators. An editorial in American Cinematographer suggested that some professionals felt the Technicolor cinematographers, by "avoiding innovations in lighting and similar techniques," had been "too conservative in their approach" ("Through the Editor's" 424). The shift in policy put more control in the hands of studio artists and may have encouraged more experimentation in color cinematography. For example, in Meet Me in St. Louis, cinematographer George Folsey could freely indulge his penchant for the extremely diffused "bounce lighting" that he helped pioneer in the 1930s.(5)

More importantly, the easing of Technicolor strictures during the 1940s was manifested in an expansion of color-design options. The number of Technicolor productions increased from just over twenty features between 1935 and 1939 to nearly fifty between 1940 and 1944. Several commentators have noted that the 1940s brought bolder and more vibrant palettes to Technicolor productions (Basten 102). The carefully restrained style characteristic of many 1930s productions gave way to more aggressive designs that foregrounded color as a forceful element of visual design. Within this aesthetic environment, the musical emerged as a staple Technicolor genre, capable of motivating this kind of display.

In Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli takes full advantage of the room opened by the musical genre for adventurous color. But Minnelli's film diverges in at least one important respect from the pattern set by other films at the forefront of the trend. The 1940s color musical had found particular success in a series of features made at Twentieth Century Fox, exemplified by such Betty Grable and Alice Faye vehicles as Moon Over Miami (1941) and The Gang's All Here (1943). In color design, the Fox musicals tend toward conservative harmonies during scenes of exposition, saving bold splashes of color for the large production numbers. Against this generic context, Minnelli and the Freed unit innovated color design by integrating pictorial effects into the film as a whole. Just as Meet Me in St. Louis seeks to incorporate the musical performances into the story, it extends the musical's broader palette and techniques for color foregrounding beyond the confines of production numbers.(6) An overview of the film's strategies for handling color indicates how it takes advantage of the genre's stylistic latitude to achieve a range of effects.

Based on a series of autobiographical short stories by Sally Benson, the film follows life around the Smith family's St. Louis household from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904. When father Lon (Leon Ames) decides to take a job in New York, he threatens the family's happiness and dashes their dreams of attending the World's Fair. Lon's decision is particularly troublesome for two of the Smith daughters: Esther (Judy Garland), the second oldest, and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), the youngest. Esther develops a romance with neighbor boy John Truett (Tom Drake), who proposes to her three days before she is to move. For Tootie, the move will interrupt a cycle of countless childhood traditions and schemes such as the annual Halloween revelry that she and her sister Agnes (Joan Carroll) undertake. On Christmas eve, after witnessing Tootie's destruction of her backyard snow-people, Lon has a change of heart and announces that he will keep the family in St. Louis "until we rot." The film ends as the Smiths view the opening night of the fair and Esther declares: "I can't believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis."

In the custom of the integrated musical, Minnelli roots songs and dances directly in narrative situations. During the film's opening, various cast members pass the song "Meet Me in St. Louis" from one to another as they go about their daily activities. Esther sings "The Boy Next Door" while gazing into John's yard from a ground-floor window in her house. She joins in "The Trolley Song" when John meets her on a ride to preview the fair grounds, and she comforts Tootie on Christmas eve with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." A party to celebrate Lon Jr.'s (Henry H. Daniels Jr.) departure for college occasions a square dance to a swing version of "Skip to My Lou," and Tootie and Esther entertain the guests with "Under a Bamboo Tree." In this manner the songs, all but one featuring Judy Garland, are interspersed without venturing far beyond the Smith family's domestic world.

As with the music, Minnelli weaves color into the production's basic texture. He uses some script elements, such as the name of eldest sister Rose (Lucille Bremer), retained from Benson's original story, to help to highlight the role of color in the world of each character. As she dresses for a party, for instance, Esther contemplates her auburn hair, speculating that if Rose were a brunette "nothing could have stopped us." Characters who acknowledge and discuss color help to foreground it, reminding the viewer that the film's environment could not be rendered in black and white. Color is also employed to reinforce the film's broad structure. Minnelli recalls that he planned colors to accentuate the seasons into which the film is divided:

Summer saw the damp, wilted white of women's dresses and men's suits, the brilliant yellow of beer wagons [....] fall brings bright-colored leaves whisked from trees, the deep orange of pumpkin heads at the windows on Halloween, [...] Our winter sequence finds the same scene blanketed in snow [...] holiday colors are reflected in the silver bells of horse-drawn sleigh. (Fordin 114)

In actuality, seasonal accents do crop up in key episodes: yellow for summer, black and orange for fall, green and red during winter, and bright whites during spring. Some elements of decor change with the seasons, the Smith's draperies are bluish gray in summer, and deep red in fall and winter. But this is by no means a dominant principle of color design since each group of episodes offers a multitude of hues with special emphasis on blue, pink, red, and gold.

Like other directors of musicals, Minnelli makes color most active in the film's elaborate production numbers, "Skip to my Lou," and "The Trolley Song." Allowing Minnelli to marshal the film's most complex and assertive color schemes, these sequences feature intense mixtures of primaries and pastels. Though color is on display, the codes of harmony and emphasis remain in place. In the Trolley number, Minnelli manages to invert Kalmus's prescription that warm and bright shades should be carried by a scene's protagonist. Esther is clad in a black blouse, light blue gloves, and a low-value green and blue pleated taffeta skirt with a thin line of pink running through it. The outfit makes her the least colorful rider on a bright yellow trolley packed with extras in high-value pink, green, and blue [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. This decision allows Minnelli to cram the frame with aggressive colors while ensuring that contrast always serves to highlight Esther's position. But even at its most audacious, the color design seeks to provide harmony. The elements of color that Esther does carry on her gloves and dress are carefully chosen to blend with the accents that surround her. The principles that call for color to anchor attention and offer pleasing harmonies are constantly at work in Meet Me in St. Louis, not the least in the most stylized production numbers.

While Minnelli brings forward the film's elaborate palette most forcefully in the musical numbers, he never really retreats from it to render a neutral background for action. Instead, through costumes and set dressing, he uses color details continually to embellish compositions and generate striking harmonies. In some cases the deployment of hue is used to guide spectator attention on a moment by moment basis while reinforcing coordination between costume and set. An example of how the film elaborates and emphasizes a standard Technicolor strategy can be found in the sequence where Esther and her siblings build snowmen and discuss the upcoming Christmas dance. Esther wears a deep blue overcoat, blue gloves with bright blue accents, and a deep red high-collar blouse. One of her snowmen features a bright blue parasol that echoes her gloves, and a green hat with a red tassel which matches her blouse. Another wears a red hat which also picks up her blouse. Similar splashes of color are repeated across costume and decor, lending the setting a particularly coordinated look. Keying the set to the star's color scheme helps center her as a point of attention. Meanwhile, deep in the background, Katie (Marjorie Main), the family maid, generates an eye catching dash of red with her hat. The accent draws attention to her presence, alerting us that she is listening to the exchange before she enters the conversation. Color primes us to expect that she will contribute to the action. This is a fairly standard ploy for tying color to the tasks of directing attention, but it stands out more forcefully because of the degree of contrast allotted by the film's palette.

In a more general way, Minnelli organizes color to reinforce broad shifts in mood or tone across the film. This use becomes most pronounced after the Christmas dance, when Lon is convinced by Tootie's emotional outpouring that he should keep the family in St. Louis. After the richly colored dance, the film's palette contracts significantly and then sparingly reintroduces selected hues until Lon's announcement triggers a flood of color. John's bittersweet proposal to Esther is rendered entirely in shades of blue and silver gray. Red is strikingly reintroduced when Esther sheds her overcoat to reveal her ball gown as she attempts to comfort Tootie with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." But aside from a few coordinating accents, the scenes of her song and Tootie's subsequent rampage are dominated by shades of blue-gray. Indeed, the reduction of chromatic range helps make variations in color even more powerful. The contrasts between Esther's dress and her surroundings, or between the silver-blue snow and a solitary patch of yellow light that falls on the snow-family, appear intensified because of the palette's simplicity.

In this shift in color range, Minnelli accentuates the solemn mood of the Smith house just before their impending move to New York. Both color and dramatic tone are in stark contrast to earlier scenes of celebration in the Smith home. The shift becomes even more apparent as Lon wanders through the house, contemplating his decision. The house is now stripped of the ornaments that had provided dashes of texture and hue in earlier scenes; bare patches on the wallpaper mark the places where paintings once hung. But the moment that Lon rises to announce his resolution to stay in St. Louis, saturated dashes of hue return to the frame. First the green and red shade on a tiffany lamp streaks across the foreground as the camera pans to follows Lon. He pauses to turn up another red lamp and adds a burst of scarlet. When the family assembles in the living room, they return chromatic complexity to the household. Esther's red dress now plays off Rose's blue nightgown, while Agnes and Tootie provide accents of pink. Compositions are framed to include the tiffany lamp, as well as red and green streamers hanging overhead. The range of color expands as the mood brightens.

Several observers have noted the way this sequence uses mise-en-scene to accentuate the resolution of the plot's central conflict (Bordwell and Thompson 329; Casper 113). Indeed, it presents the most emphatic correlation between emotional tone and color values in the film. But it seems important to note that this use of style conforms strongly to the broad Technicolor principle of color scoring. In this instance, the film elaborates the coding of color to narrative situation in a manner that foregrounds the device. As a closer look at the "You and I" sequence will illustrate, Meet Me in St. Louis tends not to diverge from Technicolor's prescriptions for binding color to story; rather it makes these principles more visible by playing them out with an unusually dynamic palette.

The examples discussed so far help to illustrate how Meet Me in St. Louis relies on color to do a certain amount of work in laying out information and punctuating narrative developments. But as in the production numbers, color is also called on to provide momentary stylistic flourishes throughout the film. Hue can be pushed forward for the purpose of simply drawing attention to the fact of color. A final area for this overview to consider, then, is the methods the film uses to foreground color as an element of film style.

In the classical Hollywood style, establishing shots and transitions are traditionally open to spectacular display and stylistic embellishment. In Minnelli's production, these moments offer occasions to remind the viewer of color's contribution to the image. This is another point where the film embellishes a fairly common Technicolor tactic. The most obvious examples involve the four seasonal transitions that demarcate the film's major episodes. Each section of the film begins with a black and white still of the Smith house surrounded by colorful filigree illustrations of seasonal motifs. Minnelli explained that he intended these illustrations, resembling turn-of-the-century greeting cards, to help set the film's nostalgic tone (131). But beyond this, they present a device for highlighting the power and presence of color. For example, the art-card for "Summer" features a band of pale yellow on a beige background with white daisies and red roses accenting the upper corner of the frame. Some green accents, and gold gilt around the photo of the house, complete the palette [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. The camera dollies forward until the monochrome image entirely dominates the frame. Then color bursts onto the screen, and the frozen image begins to move [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. The red and white striped awnings and rust colored roof of the Smith house contrast with the light blue sky. A beer wagon with a green and yellow canopy moves leftward across the frame, only to be passed by a bright red automobile. As the camera cranes toward the house, extras passing along the sidewalk offer more pink, green, and blue accents. The image is organized as a parade of color, demonstrating Technicolor's then unique capacity for simultaneously rendering sharply defined reds, yellows and blues.(7)

At regular intervals in the film, Minnelli's removal and reintroduction of hue renews our recognition of color as a mark of difference from standard monochrome filmmaking. Similarly, he organizes transitions between scenes to generate momentary surges of color. In the final moments of Esther's rendition of "The Boy Next Door," for instance, she releases a translucent white curtain from the window frame where she sings. The veil of white falls before her face, lowering the saturation of an already very soft, predominantly blue and white composition. From this muted image, the film dissolves to a shot of the intense red vat of catsup in the kitchen. The juxtaposition of shots briefly reduces and then reveals color, reasserting it as the focus of attention.

At other times, Minnelli uses camera movement or staging to unveil color within a scene. The most spectacular instance occurs after an ellipsis during Lon Jr.'s going-away party. The image dissolves from an interior shot of Lon in his black coat against a brown background to the porch outside the Smith's living room. Cold blue evening light contrasts with warm yellow illumination being emitted from the house windows. Partygoers provide red, blue and some yellow accents within the relatively low-key environment. Seizing on a passing extra in a soft pink dress, the camera pans left and dollies forward to discover a large window into the living room [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. Color temperature shifts from cool to warm as the room light engulfs the frame. In the center of the living room, a young woman in a lavender and blue outfit with brilliant pink and blue stripes stands playing a trumpet. She is encircled by listeners who contribute more intense points of color. One woman with a bright red bow in her hair sits before the trumpet player, another with a red and white plaid skirt is revealed to the right of the window. Guests on the staircase in the far background generate vivid blue and red touches [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED]. Rather than simply dissolve to this composition, the camera elegantly unveils a lavish display of hue, emphasized by the shift in lighting.

This survey of color effects should indicate the importance Minnelli gives to color as an element of style in Meet Me in St. Louis. The film offers a constant play of color, muting and revealing it for spectacular effect, arranging hue to guide attention within the frame, and modulating the palette to underscore dramatic developments. In doing so, color is made an important actor, taking on functions usually assigned to camerawork, music, lighting, and editing. Even so, color rarely dominates the system to the exclusion of other variables. Minnelli's forcefully mobile camera is central to enhancing the spectacular flourishes of many transitional moments. Conventional lighting codes (the shift from low to high-key)and music cues (the swelling "Meet Me in St. Louis" theme) augment the emotional tone during Lon Sr.'s change of heart. But since this survey is necessarily general, it can tell us little about the fine grained interactions of color with other stylistic registers. In order to grasp the intricacies of color's moment by moment development, therefore, we can take a closer look at a single sequence, one that relies on hue to perform a large share of stylistic work.

You and I

One sequence consolidates many of the film's color strategies and provides a vivid demonstration of the way that Minnelli takes advantage of the stylization afforded to the musical genre for dramatic ends. It also bears testament to the director's well-known interest in controlling minute details of mise-en-scene. The scene occurs on Halloween, just after Lon announces his plans to move the family to New York. Rather than indulge in their traditional holiday feast of cake and ice-cream, the family drifts apart. Esther, Rose, Tootie, Agnes, and Grandpa (Harry Davenport) retreat upstairs, leaving Lon and Anna (Mary Astor) alone in the dining room. In an effort to comfort her husband, Anna sits at the piano and begins to play the Arthur Freed-Naccio Herb Brown song "You and I." Lon joins in, and as the couple sing the duet, their family gathers around them.(8) As in the more famous "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "Trolley Song" numbers, the song is integrated with narrative development. The musical performance serves as a catalyst for family reconciliation, and color plays a key role in underscoring the action.

The sequence begins with an elegantly composed medium-long shot of Lon and Anna in the living room [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]. He has taken a seat in an easy chair just beside the dining room entrance. Anna enters from the dining room, often Lon his cake, and gives him a kiss. The frame is dominated by neutrals with Lon in a dark gray suit, seated on a soft gold-brown (curry) chair before the light beige textured wallpaper that reflects slightly yellow lamplight.(9) Anna wears a white blouse and black skirt. This relatively subdued range of color coincides with a change in dramatic tone from celebration to solemnity. When the family members vacate the set, they remove key sources of color provided by wardrobe. Tootie's and Agnes's soft pink robes, Esther's blue and red outfit, and Rose's green-gold dress had helped enliven the palette during the aborted holiday gathering. The shift in location from the dining room, decorated with orange and black Halloween streamers, to the living room helps to further reduce the palette. In a general way, the color design has been keyed to the sequence's dramatic mood.

Still, Minnelli injects a few sources of varied color into the frame. On a foreground table sits a fruit bowl with a few bananas and apples. This prop brings a splash of red and yellow into the lower right corner of the image, an accent that harmonizes with other set dressings. The apples provide a balance to the deep crimson red velvet curtain that hangs in the dining room entryway at the rear left of the frame, while the bananas pick up gold tones in the chair and wallpaper. Once Anna begins playing the piano, reaction shots frame Lon from a slightly lower angle that makes the fruit bowl more prominent in the image [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]. Such ornamentation is quite common in the film, and this instance is indicative of how decorative elements can reinforce compositional unity by repeating and echoing color. At the same time, the prop functions to keep color an active player within the relatively subdued design.

Upon recognizing the song "You and I," Lon joins Anna at the upright piano, setting up the sequence's most important composition. The camera is oriented toward a side-view of the piano in the right foreground, with Anna seated in medium shot just left of center frame. Lon stands just beyond her in medium long shot, facing toward the camera. Beyond them, the living room opens onto the front hall with the staircase at the rear left and a deep crimson window curtain at rear right.

With the foreground dominated by neutrals (the deep brown piano, and figures clad in gray, black, and white) Minnelli concentrates the greatest area of color variation at the rear of the frame. The curtain and the rust-red (paprika) hall carpet draw attention from the foreground. It should be immediately obvious that the arrangement violates Natalie Kalmus's dictum that warm hues be associated with the key characters and backgrounds be based on cool, "receding" hues. Here, chromatic emphasis is placed on the background plane. The effect is accentuated by a lighting scheme that brings portions of the hall floor and rear wall just below key level. Rather than provide a inert backdrop to the foreground action, color helps underscore the depth of the shot. Nonetheless, Minnelli has taken steps to simplify the background by removing from view a group of ferns that had previously provided a green accent in front of the red curtain. The background has been fine-tuned to highlight a limited but distinct set of color accents.

Minnelli makes this arrangement of hue crucial for guiding attention as the action unfolds. He makes color part of a precisely organized composition in which minute changes are significant. As Lon finishes the song's first verse, he shifts rightward to lean slightly on the piano. This subtle movement opens up the center of the composition, uncovering the foot of the stairs, which had been blocked by his suit jacket. The motion also more fully reveals a well-lit patch of carpet just in front of the stairs, introducing another source of color to contrast with the foreground [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED]. Having presented one verse of the song, Minnelli alters the composition to amplify the background. It is in this portion of the frame that the drama of reconciliation will be played out as the Smith daughters and Grandpa descend to join Lon and Anna.

At least one commentator has mistaken this composition for a deep-focus shot, and the error is understandable since so much emphasis is placed on background staging (Harvey 54). But Technicolor's remarkably slow film stock limited three-strip to a relatively shallow depth of field. By 1944 the Technicolor system had an effective speed of around 12 ASA, compared to the 80 ASA panchromatic stock that helped Greg Toland achieve his bravura deep focus a few years earlier in Citizen Kane (1941). Because the system required so much light, it was impossible to close the lens aperture enough to extend the depth of field. Significant deep focus would remain an insurmountable challenge to Technicolor into the 1950s (Bordwell 237). But the same technological characteristics (a slow film stock and extreme illumination requirements) afforded Technicolor an exceptional density of detail in a well lit background. Carefully measured and directed lighting helped ensure the registration of shade and color that could contribute to apparent sharpness. For example, though the crimson curtain is beyond the plane of focus, the image presents the folds of fabric and variations in tone in an almost tactile manner.(10)

These technological idiosyncrasies are key to Minnelli's staging of the action. Because the foreground is subdued, any changes in color at the rear of the image have particular force. The first figure to appear on the stairs is Rose in her greenish-gold (between yolk yellow and chartreuse) dress. She halts on the first landing, stepping into a pool of light and introducing a high-value dash of new color into the background. Both lighting and movement cue the viewer to notice her entrance, but color helps seize attention and immediately identifies her. The dress generates a significant contrast with the red and rust background accents while coordinating with an arrangement of yellow roses placed on a table at midground right.(11)

When Agnes and Tootie enter, they pass Rose and continue down the stairs. Agnes wears a peach pink gown, and Tootie a flat pearlblush pink robe. Together they introduce another color accent that harmonizes with the gold and red hues already present [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]. Although color contrast punctuates the characters' entrances, the design presently steers clear of extreme juxtapositions. The pinks and reds are part of the same family of hues, their difference primarily a matter of tint and value. Meanwhile, the green component of Rose's dress forms a more definite contrast with these reds, but this contrast is tempered by yellow tones that move the color closer to the warm accents of her surroundings. By generating variation without high contrast, Minnelli's design serves the goals of tactful harmony while directing attention.

The problem of highlighting figures as they enter the frame is made especially conspicuous by Esther's appearance. The arrival of the film's star and protagonist conventionally demands some method of granting her prominence. By adhering to a single, static take, Minnelli has ruled out several standard options for generating emphasis. The customary solution would be to use editing, cutting in to Esther as she descends the stairs. But, Minnelli seems devoted to maintaining the composition's unity. Keeping the parents in the foreground as the family gathers around them helps boost the scene's emotional significance, perhaps underlining the connection between the lyric and the action. It seems important that the parents should share the frame with their children as they sing: "You and I, together forever. [...] Through the years of dark and fair weather, you and I."

A second option would be to rack focus, shifting the plane of sharpness from the parents to the children in the background. In fact Minnelli and Folsey do utilize a rack to serve a similar situation later in the film. There, when Lon wanders the house on Christmas eve, he pauses in the front hall and glances back at the stairs as Esther escorts a sobbing Tootie to her room. When Lon turns toward the staircase, focus gently shifts to the background plane, and then returns to the fore as he continues his trek through the house. In this case, the character's glance justifies the change of focus, covering the manipulation of the image with an on-screen action. But, in the "You and I" number, the parents remain unaware of their gathering family, and without a motivating glance a rack might well seem too obvious a manipulation of the image.

Once again, Minnelli relies on color design to provide emphasis. Just as Tootie and Agnes exit the frame at the left midground, Esther appears at the top of the steps, passing behind Rose [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. The staging is timed to allow the pink accents to clear out of the composition at the very moment that a new accent is introduced, helping secure attention for Esther's arrival. Moreover, Esther's costume presents both the most pronounced contrast and coordination with the surrounding mise-en-scene. Her soft light-blue (plume) blouse introduces the only source of cool blue in the frame. The new hue forms something of a split complementary relationship with the gold tones of Rose's dress and the red carpet and curtain accents. A standard color wheel places red and gold on either side of blue's direct opposite, orange. This arrangement permits a high degree of color contrast without resorting to the hard juxtaposition of complementary (opposing) hues that Technicolor design tended to avoid. Indeed, this harmony might explain why Rose's outfit is gold, when orange would have formed a tighter harmony with Tootie and Agnes's pinks a few moments earlier.

At the same time, Minnelli uses Esther's deep crimson skirt to provide a very near match in hue with the curtains at rear right. Unlike the more minute point of coordination between Rose's dress and the vase of flowers, Esther's skirt precisely aligns with the most pronounced source of warm color in the frame. The red accent that had initially served to mark out the background as an important zone of action is now activated as a means of highlighting the star. Further, the relatively low value of these crimson elements contrasts with the high value of Esther's blouse, the brightest spot in the background now that Agnes and Tootie have exited. This play of coordination and contrast in hue and value turns Esther's introduction into a graphic event. Underscoring her arrival without cutting or altering the properties of the frame, Minnelli deftly uses the assets of color in place of more conventional devices for guiding attention.

As the family comes together, Minnelli once again makes color design more complex and assertive. After Esther and Rose have exited the frame, the image cuts to a view of the dining room [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED]. This returns elements such as the rose wallpaper and the orange streamers that had been featured before the family celebration was interrupted. As Rose and Esther enter the scene to serve themselves cake, the complex play of contrast and coordination is again exercised. The key hues are gold, blue, red, and pink, with Esther's blouse still generating the point of maximum contrast. Harmonizing with Esther's blue and Agnes' pink accents, the green-gold of Rose's outfit now helps to bridge the warm and cool tones. But the relationships between set dressing and costume seem even more important to unifying the palette. A blue and white fruit bowl piled with apples and bananas in the center of the table ties the composition together by consolidating the major hues into a single prop. A yellow accent in the painting on the rear wall echoes Rose's dress, while another set of drapes hanging beside the living room entrance matches Esther's skirt. When the camera pans to follow Esther to a seat in the living room, the basic color combination of pink, red, and blue is maintained [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED]. To one side of the chair stands Tootie in her pink robe, while a red table lamp provides an accent on the other side. The return of more forceful color and the coordination of costume and decor seems to underline the family's unity. Thus Minnelli orchestrates hue as a counterpart to the scene's dramatic trajectory.

Having offered closer views of the daughters, Minnelli returns to a long shot that frames Anna and Lon in the foreground [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. This time, he positions the camera behind the piano so that the living room and entrance to the dining room take up the background (Esther and Tootie are off-screen left). Again, the foreground is a subdued blend of neutrals, and again the background offers color accents that draw attention to points beyond the plane of focus. In the far left corner a blue chair is placed before the red curtain that frames the dining room. The combination preserves Esther's color combination featured in the previous shot, repeating in decor hues that had been associated with costume. Similarly, to the right of the archway, and partially occluded by Lon, sits the gold-brown (curry) chair, echoing the tones of Rose's dress. Agnes stands, back to camera, in the center of the dining room archway, providing the pink accent. The composition reprises the basic structure and color design of the stairway shot, with several of the colors that had been introduced by character entrances now carried by props and set dressing. In gathering together, the family activated a group of harmonizing colors that now extend to the set itself.

But the main function of these familiar accents at the rear of the composition is to flag the empty chairs as important zones of action. As the singers begin their second chorus, the remaining members of the family file in from off screen, fitting themselves into the composition. In the foreground, Lon lowers himself to a piano stool, unblocking the gold-brown chair just as Rose takes a seat. Her choice seems determined by the yellow tones shared by her dress and the upholstery. Grandpa, clad in a black suit, unobtrusively sits at a table near the far left edge of the frame. Agnes completes a blue, red, and pink combination, echoing the shot of Esther and Tootie, by taking the blue chair. Katie, wearing gray, white, and black, sits in a simple dining room chair placed at the center of the archway [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].

When the sequence ends with a return to the side of the piano, Minnelli provides a shot that brings Tootie and Esther back on screen at the rear left and places Lon and Anna at midground right [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED]. By including Esther and Tootie, Minnelli's composition sustains the pink, red, and blue combination across the cut, once more lending graphic prominence to the stars. Swiftly, though, a dolly forward eliminates them, bringing Lon and Anna into a medium shot that recalls the song's opening [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED]. This shot completes a circuit, ending the scene with a subdued image of Lon and Anna that, by virtue of its symmetry, helps accentuate the shift in tone from the beginning. The family's initial resentment of Lon's news has given way to a renewed sense of togetherness.

Minnelli's interest in carefully organized compositions has led some observers to criticize this sequence for its artifice. For instance, James Naremore quotes critic George Toles, who complains of the "Trapp family prescience" with which the cast members take their places, and "the pictorial harmony of the completed tableau" that takes precedence over the scene's emotional content (78). Clearly, the sequence is indeed rather stylized in the way characters fit themselves into arrangements of harmonized colors. But to dismiss the scene on this basis misses an important aspect of the film as a whole. Throughout Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli takes advantage of a level of stylization granted by the musical genre and often channels it toward the embellishment of story material. The musical number conventionally permits a more obvious manipulation of style than straight drama, often in the form of exacting choreography and, for Technicolor, a display of the contributions of color. As this sequence illustrates in an elegantly pictorial manner, Minnelli manages to harness color to the functions of guiding attention and conveying narrative development. The performance of"You and I" gives the director an opportunity to push color forward so that it becomes a central stylistic system. In doing so the film might forsake unobtrusiveness, drawing attention to color design by repeating a narrow set of coordinating and contrasting hues. But, like the song itself, this play of color is integrated into the film's dramatic fabric. More exactly, color behaves like the nondiegetic orchestration that subtly accompanies Lon's and Anna's singing, it gently organizes our perception of the action, rising out of and underscoring the situation.

For his part, Minnelli claimed that he achieved the color design of Meet Me in St. Louis despite interference from Technicolor. In his autobiography the director recalls: "My juxtaposition of color had been highly praised on the stage, but I couldn't do anything right in Mrs. Kalmus's eyes" (131). Minnelli explains that after Kalmus warned him, "You can't have one sister in a bright red gown and another in a bright green" during the shooting of the Christmas dance, he decided to abandon her advice: "I depended on my own instincts from then on" (132). As my discussion of the film indicates, Minnelli did manage to bend the Technicolor aesthetic toward an unusually dynamic color design, perhaps challenging some of Kalmus's rules along the way. But the production ultimately seems indebted to a way of thinking about color as an amplifier of drama, and as such it remains true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Technicolor's aesthetic guidelines. Situated within the context of the Technicolor musical, Meet Me in St. Louis innovates by forcing the conventions for maintaining harmony and augmenting narrative tone to shoulder an assertive palette. In doing so, the film conspicuously relies on color to carry out an array of stylistic duties. Herbert Kalmus, head of Technicolor, was fond of justifying the price of his process by claiming that the effects of a color film "could not have been done in black-and-white at any cost" (95). Few Technicolor productions would support his assertion better than Meet Me in St. Louis.

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.

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.

Casper, Joseph Andrew. Vincente Minnelli and the Film Musical. South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1977.

Clyne, Adrian Cornwell. Colour Cinematography. 3rd ed. London: Chapman and Hall, 1951.

Eisman, Leatrice, and Lawrence Herbert. The Pantone Book of Color. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.

Fordin, Hugh. The World of Entertainment. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Genne, Beth. "Vincente Minnelli's Style in Microcosm: The Establishing Sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis. "Art Journal 43 (Fall 1983): 247-54.

Harvey, Stephen.Directed by Vincente Minnelli. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Houghton, Norris. "The Designer Sets the Stage." Theatre Arts Monthly 20 (October 1936):776-88.

Johnson, Albert. "The Films of Vincente Minnelli." Film Quarterly 12 (Winter 1958): 21-35.

"Just What is So Mysterious about Color."American Cinematographer 17.10 (October 1936):414, 424-26.

Kalmus, Herbert. Mr. Technicolor. Abescon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1993.

Kalmus, Natalie. "Color Consciousness." Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 25 (August 1935): 135-47.

----."Colour." Behind the Screen: How Films are Made. Ed. Stephen Watts. London: Arthur Baker, 1938.116-27.

Kaufman, Gerald. Meet Me in St. Louis. London: BFI Publishing, 1994.

Knox, Donald. The Magic Factory. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Minnelli, Vincente. I Remember It Well. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

-----, dir. Meet Me in St. Louis. prod. Arthur Freed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1944.

Naremore, James. The Films of Vincente Minnelli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Neupert, Richard. "Technicolor and Hollywood: Exercising Color Restraint." Post Script 10 (Fall 1990): 21-29.

"Photography of the Month." Review of Aloma of the South Seas. American Cinematographer 22 (October 1941): 502.

-----. Review of Billy the Kid. American Cinematographer 22 (June 1941): 273.

-----. Review of Blood and Sand. American Cinematographer 22 (June 1941): 272.

-----. Review of Blossoms in the Dust. American Cinematographer 22 (July 1941): 326.

-----. Review of Jungle Book. American Cinematographer 23 (May 1942): 208.

-----. Review of Louisiana Purchase. American Cinematographer 23 (January 1942): 19.

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Elements of Color. Los Angeles: SMFTE, 1957.

"Through the Editor's Finder." American Cinematographer 22 (September 1941): 424.

Wannamaker, Mark. "Cinemasters: George Folsey, ASC."American Cinematographer 66 (July 1985): 40-48.

Scott Higgins (shiggins@students.wisc.edu) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently completing his dissertation, An Aesthetic History of Technicolor: 1934-1942.

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