used color film strategically, like the widescreen
aspect ratio, to lure people away from their televi-
sion sets and back into theaters. (See “Framing of
the Shot,” pages 248–275.)
Now that color film dominates, a new naturalism
has become the cinematographic norm, where what
we see on the screen looks very much like what we
would see in real life. By itself, however, color film
stock doesn’t necessarily produce a naturalistic
image. Film artists and technicians can manipulate
the colors in a film as completely as they can any
other formal element. Ultimately, just like its black-
and-white counterpart, color film can capture realis-
tic, surrealistic, imaginary, or expressionistic images.
Much of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon(1975;
cinematographer: John Alcott), for example,
employs a color palette that reflects its temporal
setting very well; it’s the world of soft pastels
and gentle shadows depicted in the paintings of
such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists as
Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, and
Adolph von Menzel. However, this palette wasn’t
achieved merely by pointing the camera in a cer-
tain direction and accurately recording the colors
found there. Instead, the filmmakers specifically
236 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY
Evocative use of color Because we experience the world
in color, color films may strike us as more realistic than black-
and-white films. Many color films, however, use their palettes
not just expressively, but also evocatively. For Stanley
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon(1975), cinematographer John Alcott
has helped convey both a historical period and a painterly
world of soft pastels, gentle shading, and misty textures.
Colors reflect and change lives in the movies In Gary
Ross’s Pleasantville(1998; cinematographer: John Lindley), a
comic fable about the role of color in our lives, two
contemporary teenagers (played by Reese Witherspoon and
Tobey Maguire, leftto right) are magically transported back
into the world of a black-and-white television series called
Pleasantville,set in 1958. Finding the town as realistically
conformist, small-minded, and opposed to change as many
small towns were in the late 1950s, they set about liberating
their classmates and families. As they introduce love, sex,
knowledge, modern art, self-expression, and freedom to the
repressed black-and-white town, color begins to appear——
slowly at first and then spreading as if it were a contagious
disease. The town rebels, stages a witch hunt, and passes a
law against all kinds of freedom, but the genie is out of the
bottle, and color is there to stay.manipulated the images through careful planning
art direction, and technical know-how to render
the naturally occurring colors in more subtle and
“painterly” shades.
In a different vein, the interplay of fantasy and
reality is brilliantly and vibrantly conveyed in
Federico Fellini’s first color film, Juliet of the Spirits
(1965; cinematographer: Gianni Di Venanzo),
through the use of a rich, varied, and sometimes
surreal palette. To underscore the movie’s theme,
Fellini and Di Venanzo often interrupt seemingly
naturalistic scenes with bursts of intense and
dreamlike color. The effect is disorienting but mag-
ical, much like dreams themselves.Lighting
During preproduction, most designers include an
idea of the lighting in their sketches, but in actual
production, the cinematographer determines the
lighting once the camera setups are chosen. Ideally,