A Barbaric Rose

Abstract

This chapter works through the color-printing process of the Technicolor Corporation, used in the mid-1940s, to explore the contradictory registers of dream and practicality to which film-watching moments offer entrance. It provides an analysis of a key color effect in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which a transition from the monochromatic to the vibrantly colorful emphasizes the use of cinematic color beyond the perfunctory. It is argued, with reference to oil painting, that the brilliant and radiant pink of a single rose in this scene represents the potential of color to emotionally penetrate the viewer, not by supplementing the narrative, but by intruding upon and beyond it.