"There's one thing which I hate about color films... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer's money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn't any color"
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Chabrol’s jab lands because it’s aimed at the most seductive kind of cinematic dishonesty: the belief that technology can substitute for meaning. On the surface, he’s complaining about fussy lab work and wasteful producers hemorrhaging money. Underneath, he’s policing the line between style as illumination and style as camouflage. Color, in his view, isn’t an automatic upgrade; it’s a commitment. If a scene has no emotional or thematic “color” to begin with, no amount of chemical coaxing will conjure it into existence without tipping into kitsch.
The phrase “despairing producer’s money” is doing quiet but pointed labor. It frames the director-lab-technician machine as a kind of con, where the financier becomes the patsy and aesthetic ambition becomes a budgetary alibi. That’s a very Nouvelle Vague-era suspicion: the industry’s glossy promises versus the harder truth that cinema’s power comes from choice, not polish. Chabrol, who built a career dissecting bourgeois surfaces, is allergic to surfaces that merely admire themselves.
His real target is dominance: “dominant hues” implies a bullied image, forced to declare a mood it hasn’t earned. You can hear the cynicism toward films that treat color like a loud soundtrack cue, telling you what to feel. Chabrol isn’t anti-color; he’s anti-makeup. He wants images that bleed meaning because the world of the film is alive, not because someone paid the lab to paint the pulse on afterward.
The phrase “despairing producer’s money” is doing quiet but pointed labor. It frames the director-lab-technician machine as a kind of con, where the financier becomes the patsy and aesthetic ambition becomes a budgetary alibi. That’s a very Nouvelle Vague-era suspicion: the industry’s glossy promises versus the harder truth that cinema’s power comes from choice, not polish. Chabrol, who built a career dissecting bourgeois surfaces, is allergic to surfaces that merely admire themselves.
His real target is dominance: “dominant hues” implies a bullied image, forced to declare a mood it hasn’t earned. You can hear the cynicism toward films that treat color like a loud soundtrack cue, telling you what to feel. Chabrol isn’t anti-color; he’s anti-makeup. He wants images that bleed meaning because the world of the film is alive, not because someone paid the lab to paint the pulse on afterward.
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| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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