Nosferatu. A Symphony of Colour

Nosferatu. A Symphony of Colour
One of my interest has always been cinema and its visual language. This is the
reason why, from previous researches on the basic forms and colours, my attention
focused on the content and the context of colour in the early movies.
At the end of the 19th century colour films did not exist. Directors and film producers started using different techniques in order to achieve more realism, inspired
by the colourful postcards and advertising posters that began to spread in the same
years.
At the end of the 19th century, colour was applied by hand with a brush onto the
film, frame by frame. It was a very expensive and slow technique. Between 1907
and 1913, film companies used to tinting or toning with emulsion and colouring
agents.
The resulting images presented an homogenous colour and they were only an abstraction of the real colours of the scene, and the effect were not realistic, for two
reasons. Firstly because one colour claimed to summarize all the colours of the
scene. For example yellow represented daylight or candlelit interiors.
Secondly, colour became only a symbolic reference to the real resemblance of the
scenes. Although we can admit that yellow is iconic (Peirce 1931-‘35) for the sun
and a sunny day, we can not state that the colour of the night is cyan or blue. Hence, it should be said that a code of the chromatic perception of the physical world
was established.
It could be also argued that because of the technique, colour in the early cinema
was also intrinsically indexical. Furthermore, it was used in order to support the
story. It was useful in beating time of the plot and it was functional to the narration. It often was also a symbol for emotionality according to the context.
Although to the eyes of the contemporary audience the effect could be estranging,
it is clear that for the audience of the early cinema it was not at all.
For this reason, I started to think about the estranging effect. One of my first ideas
was the analysis the effect that a tinted image would have on a contemporary
audience. Consequently, by using Photoshop, I coloured cult image from cult movies such as La Dolce Vita by Fellini. Nevertheless, I discovered that I was more
interested in translating time in space.
My purpose was to adapt for a book or a poster the recently restored tinted version
of the silent movie: Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror, by FW Murnau (1922),
that was itself an adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula.
The first problem I had to face up was how to represent something that works as
time-based medium in a space-based medium. I started studying works by Edward
Muybridge and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, keeping in mind Futurism and Cubism
experiences. My research continued looking at Francis Bacon and David Hockney.
I could find only few pieces of work of art and graphic design about cinema:
“Deanimated” by Arnold Martin, who chose to visualize significant images of the
scenes of a film by increasing their size on the page of a book according to their
duration. I saw a work by Jonathan Puckney, “Killing time” and I examined a
major project by an MA student, Vasilli Mitsiopoulos, who worked on cinema and
adaptation with the aim to express the moving images in time.
I researched also in video-art. Douglas Gordon worked on Psycho, by Hitchcock,
by extending up to 24 hours the duration of one scene.
The adaptation I had in mind should have been focused on the colours, also because they are crucial because of their meaning, and functional to the narration. In
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour
fact, in Nosferatu, colours not only define space and time of the story (diegesis),
but they also represent good and evil: the contrast between them and the slight
borderline that distinguishes them.
I experimented several approaches. I started by investigating potentialities that
the sheet of paper offers in order to visualize the duration of the scenes or of the
colours of the scenes: length, size, areas, depth, weight, number of page, etc.
The first ideas were about superimposition by using frames captured from the movie and covering them with coloured transparent sheets. In a second time, I thought to use frames and increase their colour’s saturation according to the duration
of the images on the screen. Finally, I considered to layer images upon images.
Nevertheless, I concluded that it was impossible to manage in this short time more
than 5000 frames. In fact, I wanted to adapt the entire movie, as the only way to
visualize the changes of colours.
Consequently, I started thinking about a short movie, but it was an abstract synthesis of the movie. One of the latest attempt, was a sort of stripe, but I evaluated
it as an obvious repetition of the physical film, although it gives the sense of the
colourful flux.
As a final result, I designed a book in which each page (the format respects the
original aspect ratio of the frame 1.33:1) corresponds to a minute of the movie
(which lasts around 93 minutes). I translated the time by covering areas filling
60 gaps for each page according to the duration of each colour on the screen.. I
defined the tints by setting an average from the samples I got from the frames and
I treated them as a code.
I gained an abstract time-line of the images/frames that run on the screen together
with the texts (intertitles, inserts, letters, etc.). I decided to separate texts from
images by creating a double layer/level of communication, because texts are essential to understanding the movie as demonstrated by their huge number and their
persistence on the screen.
The book is to me an interesting visual result and it corresponds to what I expected.
I found cinema an interesting field that I would like to explore further. It would
be interesting study, for example, the angles of the shot or the type of shot on the
basis of the distance between the scene and the camera.
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Inspiration
A.G. Bragaglia
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Inspiration
F. Bacon
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Inspiration
D. Hockney
M. Galimberti
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Inspiration
E. Muybridge
E. J. Marey
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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour
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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour
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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Colour
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Bibliography
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UTET
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Bibliography
Sega, P. B., Tolomeo, M. G., ed. (2002), Ultime generazioni e new media. L’arte
europea alla fine del XX secolo, Bologna: CLUEB
Stam, R., Burgoyne, R., Flitterman, L.S.(1992), Semiologia del cinema e degli
audiovisivi, Milano: Bompiani
Websites
www.lifeofthemind.net/
www.jonathanpuckney.com