Even before color film existed, filmmakers
have been using color as a tool for
beauty and story telling and
visual minded directors have created
color palettes almost as
memorable as the films themselves.
So get out your paint samples and
follow along, these are our picks for
the top ten best colored
films of all time.
(Music)
Kicking us off at number ten,
let's just get it out of the way and
go full balls to the wall,
crazy colorama with our first slot.
We're talking movies that are somewhere
between a Skittles Taste The Rainbow
themed orgy, and
a technicolor kaleidoscope acid trip.
The hyper-colorful films
that really make us go wow,
are those like 'What Dreams May Come',
'Dick Tracy', 'The Cook, 'The Thief',
'His Wife and Her Lover', 'The Holy
Mountain', 'Gate of Hell', 'Life of Pi',
and like everything "Bas
Lerman's" ever directed.
But really,
our pick's gotta be 'The Fall'.
- The only way to stop a when it's
very beautiful and interesting.
- "Tarsem Singh", 'The Fall's' madman
director took four years to meticulously
create this multicolored
wonderland across 24 different
countries to an effect that "David
Fincher" described as what would have
happened if "Andrei Tarkovsky"
had made the 'Wizard of Oz'.
He employs color in every possible way,
from the space-like
orange dunes of the location to the
sky-high, blood-red-soaked funeral banner
of his set design to the primary color
wheel costuming of his main cast.
But the most important part
is that he does it for
good narrative reason, as a window into
the vivid imagination of the little girl.
The excess is explained,
it is grounded, and it is so beautiful.
Of course, more isn't always better,
in fact, for the rest of our list,
we're looking at how filmmakers use less.
Creating a distinctive color look
of a film often comes down to
building a beautiful, evocative pallet.
And building a pallet involves selecting
a limited range of colors from the vast
assortment of all of those available,
instead of just throwing them all at
the screen like a Home Depot
paint aisle explosion.
Think "Tim Burton" in his darker work,
we notice the colors he likes to use so
much because of all
the other ones he avoids.
Or it can also create a gap, like in '500
Days of Summer', or 'American Beauty', or
the 'Red Shoes', where saving certain
colors for moments and characters
lends those colors far more power than
they might have with less of a vacuum.
"Mishima", 'A Life in Four Chapters",
limits its palette for different segments.
'The Aviator' limits it to
mimic the two strip and
three strip color processes of the era.
And 'Do The Right Thing' painted
everything, including its buildings,
red and orange to contribute
to the feeling of a heat wave.
However, for our number nine pick
we loved the look of O Brother,
Where Art Thou?, and
its milestone history to boot.
- The color guard is colored.
- "Roger Deakins",
'O Brother's' cinematographer,
set out to create a dusty, vintage,
storybook type of look for 'O Brother,
Where Art Thou?', and spent nearly three
weeks in the film lab mucking about with
various photochemical
processes to no avail.
You see, "Deakins'" palette was meant to
specifically avoid green, but they'd shot
in Mississippi in mid-summer which looked,
as he described it, greener than Ireland.
So he turned to digital color grading,
a mainstay in modern features, but
a never before used technology at the
time, and changed film color history and
the look is incredible.
All the lush greens and blues of
the mid-summer south are transformed into
yellows and oranges and
browns and burnt ochers,
evoking a dusty autumn feel without
just tinting everything sepia.
It's a more controlled refined look
that comes from singling out and
affecting some colors while
leaving the others alone.
(Noise) Moving into more specific color
palettes that come from limiting colors in
predictable ways, the first and
most obvious is the selected
saturation palette.
This is limited to the extreme, everything
is in black and white except for
a focal object that gets
the most vivid of color.
This was actually one of the earliest
forms of color on film back when colors
were only achieved by stenciling on the
stock, think the 'Great Train Robbery'.
'Pleasantville' makes this
a part of its narrative while,
while 'Schindler's List' uses it to
heart-wrenching emotional effect.
However, for our slot, we think that 'Sin
City's' color is pretty hard to beat.
'Sin City' takes the color grading
process of ' Brother Where Art Thou?' and
dials it up beyond 11.
It uses color so sparingly,
that they take on a massive emotional and
narrative significance.
The decision to include any one
color is so clearly intentional,
that the audience has no choice but
to snap to attention.
Inspired by the art style
of "Frank Miller's" comic,
'Sin City's' use of color is more akin
to graphic design than photography, and
it makes for one of the most extreme
possible examples of a limited palette.
Next up in color palettes,
slightly less limited than the selective
saturation is the monochrome palette and
it's pretty simple,
as far as colors go, you just get one.
Sure, maybe you deviate in brightness or
saturation a little bit, but
you pick a spot on the color wheel and
stick with it.
It's used by design in 'Buried',
naturalistically in "Kieślowski's" 'Three
Colours Trilogy', Intolerance used
revolutionary monochromatic tinting
to separate out its timelines.
While 'Hero' is probably
the most iconic and
readily accessible example of this over
and over and in every different way.
But we've picked it enough times on our
list that we're gonna keep looking.
In its place, we're making room for a film
we don't talk enough about 'Citizen Kane',
no I'm just kidding,
I couldn't even finish it.
Our number seven slot is actually
going to 'Cries and Whispers'.
- (Foreign)
- Now, our last few slots
have gone to films leveraging the digital
intermediate technology of the 2000s, but
good color has been around long
before the turn of the millennium.
You see, before colorists had digital
trickery, production designers and
cinematographers controlled color the old
fashioned way, through meticulous design.
Films can follow just as strict
a palette by carefully selecting and
coordinating the costuming,
location choices, set design, makeup and
lighting and 'Cries and
Whispers' does just that.
Beyond a few relieving scenes of green and
yellow,
everything in 'Cries and Whispers' takes
place in a world that is blood red.
"Bergman" famously said all of my films
can be thought of in terms of black and
white except 'Cries and
Whispers' and you can see why.
The overwhelming pervasiveness of
the crimson has such a moving effect like
a sensory deprivation tank of color that
you can't help but be emotionally moved.
Adding one more color into the mix, next
we get to the complementary color scheme.
You take one color and
combine it with its opposite, and
boom, you've got yourself a scheme
that's automatically compelling.
It's the source of the ever popular,
every frustrating orange-teal
Hollywood blockbuster look, which look we
get it, it's fun to complain about and
it can definitely get stale if
used to the exclusion of all else.
But filmmakers use it for
a reason, it's color contrast that best
emphasizes the look of human skin.
'Mad Max Fury Road' is maybe our
favorite example of this contrast, but
you can also spin the color wheel further
and get to less common contrasts.
Yellow and purple, as in 'The Curse of
the Golden Flower' and the very difficult,
red-green, most notable in "Amelie", 'The
City of Lost Children' and our pick for
number six, 'Vertigo'.
- The color of your hair.
- No!
- There's hardly a film
that used technicolor so
brilliantly as 'Vertigo' and
there's perhaps no other film that evokes
such a strong impression of a color
palette as does its red and green.
Red for caution and green for envy.
Red for Scottie and
green for Madeleine and
the color scheme is felt even
in scenes of its absence.
The lack of these powerful colors
feels like a lack of powerful emotion.
It's a color scheme so memorable,
we actually feel it when it's gone,
which makes it a must
include on this list.
(Music)
Adding in even more colors, we wind up in
triadic and tetradic color schemes and
in their most extremes lands you somewhere
between a "Pete Mondrian" painting and
a game of 'Twister'.
But they can make for effective color
schemes, ones that tend to seem fun and
carefree and stereotypically colorful.
Films like 'A Clockwork Orange',
'Women on the Verge of
a Nervous Breakdown', 'The Last Emperor',
'Kurasawa's Dreams' and 'The Umberellas
of Cherbourg' all live within this world.
However, if there's a film that does it
best, we think it's "Godard's" 'Contempt'.
- (Sound) That's what I think
of that stuff up there.
- "Godard" has always had
a love affair with colors.
And in 'Contempt', they find their
expression in the triadic colored red,
blue, yellow that establishes
itself early on and
then saturates the screen to greater or
lesser extents.
But they are never overbearing or garish,
instead they are beautiful and striking
and thoughtful and memorable, orchestrated
by a master to masterful effect.
(Music)
Of course, color palettes don't
always come from limiting hues.
Sometimes focusing on some
specific lightnesses or
saturations can produce a stunning
cinematic effect as well.
For our number four,
we wanna look at a more recent trend,
that of the neon palette.
Keep your colors bright and ultra
saturated, and you might wind up with
the in your face Tokyo shop front
aesthetic of 'Springbreakers',
'Enter The Void', 'Suspiria', or
our number four pick, 'Only God Forgives'.
(Music)
- Take it off!
- There's very little middle ground
in "Nicolas Winding Refn's" odd and
challenging followup to 'Drive',
the screen is either black or
bathed in a neon glow.
Reds, blues, lime greens, teals,
yellows, pinks, purples, and
brilliant oranges all find their place
in mostly monochromatic compositions.
But what's consistent across the film is
that there is no subtle, gentle color,
it is harsh and unnatural, violent and
uncaring, like much of the plot.
But it's certainly striking and definitely
one of the best incarnations of what seems
to be a popular contemporary aesthetic
in our 21st century digital world.
Of course, if you dial the colors way
back and stay away from the extreme of
lightness and darkness,
you end up with the pastel aesthetic.
They're neutral, milky a little
washed out with a relaxed feeling and
a storybook quality.
There's a notable pastel look to
'Floating Weeds', 'The Danish Girl' and
'The Shining', but
"Wes Anderson" is really the master here.
He's been developing the highly curated
pastel look ever since 'Rushmore' but
come on, has he ever done it better
than 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'?
- You're looking so
well darling, you really are.
They've done a marvelous job, I don't
know what sort of cream they've put on
you down at the morgue, but I want some.
The 'Grand Budapest Hotel' is pretty much
the opposite of 'Only God Forgives',
soft, gentle, forgiving colors.
Never neon, rarely primary,
often peculiar, and difficult to name.
"Anderson" doesn't use yellow so
much as mustard, not pink so much as rose,
not red so much as burnt amber.
There's a sophistication to
his color choices that is, and
we name this lovingly,
a little bit hipster.
But his odd color tastes tend to both
connect his work into a greater oeuvre and
find unique expression in
each individual piece.
But they're so lovingly chosen and
precisely expressed in every
detail that you absolutely have to
appreciate them even as we make fun
of them at every possible turn.
Depressing the palette even more,
lowering the saturation
even further while hovering just above
grey, going murkier and darker and
staying away from red,
you end up with the muted palate.
This can look like a simple
desaturation as in 'The Road', or
a whole computer look when
tinted green as in 'The Matrix'.
It's the favorite of
post-apocalyptic films, but
it has its place in society as
well as in our number two pick,
"Roy Andersson's" mad genius
'The Living Trilogy'.
(Sound)
- (Foreign)
- Micke Larsson.
- No.
- "Andersson's" color is so subtle yet
so meticulously controlled that
we can't help but admire it.
Starting with 'Songs
>From The Second Floor', moving on to 'You,
The Living', and culminating in 'A Pigeon
Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence',
"Roy Andersson" has created a world
of the beautiful mundane with such
elaboration and vision that is wholly
unique and immediately recognizable.
Much like "Wes" in his playful twee
finding expression in his pastel palette,
"Andersson" accomplishes the unimaginable,
expressing his tragic comic
humor in his color-scape.
With obsessively crafted sets built over
years, designed for as little contrast as
possible and lit with no shadows, that we
do exactly what he was setting out for
us to do, peer into the details,
look deeper and see more.
Finally, for our last palette, the darker,
deeper, richer version of
the pastel palette with spikes
of saturation around very specific colors,
we have the jewel-toned look.
'This is Fanny' and Alexander' and
'Lola Montes' and 'Anna Karenina'.
It's hard to describe but it's rich and
supple and gorgeous without looking
manufactured, it blends in as naturalistic
even when it's catching the eye.
For our favorite version of this,
we have no qualms giving it
to 'In the Mood for Love'.
- (Foreign)
- What can we say about 'In the Mood for
Love' that we haven't already?
It is a beautiful film in every possible
sense of the word, stylized yet tasteful,
subtle yet bold.
His colors are without
over obvious symbolism or
binary meaning, instead working for
emotional effect.
They create a world, its characters,
the feeling and the mood.
There is heartache in the redness of
billowing curtains, longing in the magenta
of a lipstick stained cigarette,
irony in the vivid green of a dress.
"Wong Kar-wai" and "Christopher
Doyle" are visual color masters, and
'In the Mood' is their finest work,
breathtaking and beautiful beyond measure,
which is why it's our pick for
the Best Colored Film of all Time.
(Music)
What do you think?
Do you disagree with any of our picks?
Did we leave out any of your
favorite colored films?
Don't say 'Gone With The Wind'.
We know we left out 'Gone With The Wind'.
But otherwise, let us know in the comments
below, and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.
(Music)
