


This article focuses on Eastmancolor’s introduction in the British film industry from 1954 to the complete adoption of colour by the end of the 1960s. We discuss how aesthetic experiments with colour offer a compelling parallel history to debates concerning British film genres, films and filmmakers. This approach allows us to see British film history through a different lens, to move beyond the constraints of the monochromatic realist canon and explore familiar and unfamiliar films in the ‘fresh light’ of colour. We select key film genres including the adoption of colour within the social realist film, considering whether black- and-white conventions were disrupted by the addition of colour. The section on Hammer horror films demonstrates how colour popularised a largely dormant British genre, while our consideration of the popular Carry On... comedies looks at colour’s centrality to a new narrative approach for that series. Finally, we consider the historical biopic, focusing on Isadora (Karel Reisz, 1969) in relation to how colour defined thematic and narrative concerns with psychology, temporality and symbolism. We conclude that these years of experimentation constitute an essential transition period in which filmmakers were engaged in a complex negotiation with intermedial chromatic trends.



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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
From the Margins to the Mainstream? The Eastmancolor Revolution and Challenging the Realist Canon in British Cinema
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Cinéma & Cie
Carolyn Rickards
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From the Margins to the Mainstream? The Eastmancolor Revolution and Challenging the Realist Canon in British Cinema
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16199/16664
19
From the Margins to the Mainstream? The Eastmancolor
Revolution and Challenging the Realist Canon in British
Cinema
Sarah Street, University of Bristol
Keith M. Johnston, University of East Anglia
Paul Frith, University of East Anglia
Carolyn Rickards, University of Bristol
    Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards

Abstract

     This article focuses on Eastmancolor’s introduction in the British film industry
     from 1954 to the complete adoption of colour by the end of the 1960s. We
     discuss how aesthetic experiments with colour offer a compelling parallel history
     to debates concerning British film genres, films and filmmakers. This approach
     allows us to see British film history through a different lens, to move beyond
     the constraints of the monochromatic realist canon and explore familiar and
     unfamiliar films in the ‘fresh light’ of colour. We select key film genres including
     the adoption of colour within the social realist film, considering whether black-
     and-white conventions were disrupted by the addition of colour. The section on
     Hammer horror films demonstrates how colour popularised a largely dormant
     British genre, while our consideration of the popular Carry On… comedies
     looks at colour’s centrality to a new narrative approach for that series. Finally,
     we consider the historical biopic, focusing on Isadora (Karel Reisz, 1969) in
     relation to how colour defined thematic and narrative concerns with psychology,
     temporality and symbolism. We conclude that these years of experimentation
     constitute an essential transition period in which filmmakers were engaged in a
     complex negotiation with intermedial chromatic trends.


Introduction

   Our research project, ‘The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema,
1955–85’, reveals how a colour-centric approach to British cinema challenges
existing understandings of what constitutes the ‘canon’ of films that have
received the greatest critical attention as markers of cultural value.1 Discussions
of international or American film canon formation highlight the critical selection
of artistically or culturally renowned works which tends to be perpetuated by


1
 The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant no. AH/
N009444/1.

                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                  Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


academics, the film industry, and through popular discourse.2 In relation to
British cinema, critics have historically privileged black-and-white documentary
social realism as a marker of quality and importance, often signalling such realist
films as the ‘correct path for British cinema’.3 Focusing on the mid-century period
from the initial adoption of Eastman Colour in 1954 until the full adoption of
colour at the end of the 1960s, we discuss how aesthetic experiments with colour
can offer a compelling parallel history to debates around British film genres,
films and filmmakers. This approach allows us to see British film history through
a different lens, to move beyond the constraints of the monochromatic realist
canon and explore familiar and unfamiliar films in the ‘fresh light’ of colour.4
    The academic study of colour film has increased in recent years, with the
bulk of that work focusing on the pre-sound era or the Technicolor monopoly
within the film industry.5 That scholarship has its own canonical traits, with
fantasy, musical, animation, and historical films dominant in the US Technicolor
feature canon while British Technicolor films such as A Matter of Life and Death
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946) and Jassy (Bernard Knowles,
1947) offer a different approach based on techniques developed by the British
school of Technicolor.6 Our project moves beyond that time scale and focus,
using the British experience of the 35mm Eastman Colour film stock as the key
event to consider how colour reshaped this national industry.7 British ‘Eastman
Colour’ is clearly not a discrete element than can be easily lifted out for study, as
it represents a national usage embedded within broader Eastmancolor adoption
in the US and elsewhere. American colour films represent the bulk of films
released at British cinemas in this period, and remained popular with audiences.
Additionally, Eastman Colour was regularly paired with widescreen processes
such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Panavision, or other processes such as


2
  Janet Staiger, ‘The Politics of Film Canons’, Cinema Journal, 24.3 (1985), 4–23 (p. 8); Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore and London: The John
Hopkins University Press, 2004); Christopher Long, ‘Revising the Film Canon’, New Review of
Film and Television Studies, 4.1 (2006), 17–35.
3
  Charles Barr, ‘Introduction: Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British
Cinema, ed. by Barr (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 1–29 (pp. 13–14). For more on the documentary
realist tradition, see: John Ellis, ‘Art Culture and Quality — Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and
the Seventies’, Screen, 19.3 (1978), 9–50; Andrew Higson, ‘“Britain’s Outstanding Contribution
to the Film”: The Documentary-Realist Tradition’, in All Our Yesterdays, pp. 72–97; Julian Petley,
‘The Lost Continent’, in All Our Yesterdays, pp. 98–119.
4
  Barr, p. 14.
5
  James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915–1935 (Rochester, NY: George
Eastman House, 2015); Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
6
  Sarah Street, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
7
  The spelling ‘Eastman Colour’ is used throughout this article since it was the most common usage
in British industry publications and documents. For more on Eastmancolor’s introduction see
Heather Heckman, ‘We’ve Got Bigger Problems: Preservation during Eastmancolor’s Innovation
and Early Diffusion’, The Moving Image, 15.1 (2015), 44–61.

28
                            From the Margins to the Mainstream?


stereoscopic 3-D or Dynamation. For this article, we necessarily bracket the
British use of Eastman Colour in order to consider its specific impact on the
realist canon within Britain. In the broader project, the complex interaction of
Eastman Colour with other colour processes, technologies, and the influences of
Hollywood and other national cinemas, is given due prominence.
   What we offer here are four case studies that foreground the use of colour
within British film genres, each of which reveals a different perspective on how
colour was deployed within the British film industry. Given its primacy within
critical debates, the article first considers the adoption of colour within the social
realist film, and whether the genre was disrupted by the addition of colour to
its prevalent black-and-white aesthetic. The section on Hammer horror films
reveals how colour was used to popularise a largely dormant British genre, while
our consideration of the perennially popular Carry On… comedy series looks at
how colour was central to the development of a new narrative approach for that
series. Building on those sections, we look to the historical biopic, where a key
film and director from the late 1960s allows us to consider how colour was being
used to define thematic and narrative concerns with psychology, temporality and
symbolism.


Colour in Social Realism

   As already discussed, the strong association of social realism with black-
and-white cinematography is well-established, almost clichéd, particularly
in the established canon of ‘New Wave’ British films.8 Geoff Brown notes
black and white as ‘the perfect colour scheme for gloomy skies, smokestacks
and poetic melancholy’.9 This viewpoint made filmmakers cautious when
attempting to depict ‘the real’ in Eastman Colour. Art director Carmen Dillon
and cinematographer Chris Challis, for example, created a muted palette for
the sets of Miracle in Soho (Julian Amyes, 1957) in spite of the film’s vibrant,
cosmopolitan locale.
   Yet colour presented opportunities for innovation within realism, and our
project has brought to light films that contributed towards the mainstream shift
to colour. Social trends influenced this development with colour increasingly
vibrant in advertising, fashion and interior décor. British marketing specialist
Eric P. Danger emphasized connections between colour and affluence, youth
and modernity.10 While the classic ‘New Wave’ films featured these themes the
persistence of a black-and-white realist aesthetic meant that the cycle was unable


8
   The cycle from Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1958) to Billy Liar (John Schlesinger,
1963).
9
  Geoff Brown, ‘Paradise Found and Lost: The Course of British Realism’, in The British Cinema
Book, ed. by Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 3rd edition, 2009), pp. 28–38 (p. 29).
10
   Eric P. Danger, Using Colour to Sell (London: Gower Press, 1968).

                                                                                           29
                 Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


to fully exploit this key observation. Filmmakers who did use colour to both
reflect and critique the times produced work that pushed aesthetic and generic
boundaries. One such director was Clive Donner who worked for the J. Walter
Thompson advertising agency and made commercials for television. Some
People (1962), his first feature film, was noted for its vitality and fresh approach
to realism by critic V. F. Perkins. Donner turned to Eastman Colour ‘for the
entertainment value, but also because to me the convention that reality is better
in black and white is just a convention, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t
adopt another one’.11 Some People was filmed in Bristol, a city that was not an
industrial heartland, and focused on youth problems in housing estates. Donner
used colour as a means of connecting characters to their local environment,
their clothes and identities, with a satirical opening montage showing a neon
sign flashing ‘Bristol’ followed by bright hoardings advertising food, jewels,
motorbikes, hire purchase schemes and consumer products. This visual assault is
full of colour interest, announcing the film’s general tone of openness to stylistic
experimentation, wit and energy. The world of advertising and hire purchase is
very much part of the characters’ lives in a city experiencing economic transition.
In this way, Some People is alive to colour’s potential for contemporary realist
drama. Although Some People was well-reviewed and did well at the box-office,
it eluded the critical radar, largely because it differed from the classic ‘New Wave’
cycle. Yet in retrospect it began an important trend in experimenting with colour
for social observation.
    Clive Donner went on to make other distinctive colour films, most notably
Nothing but the Best (1963). This is a biting satire on social class, featuring Jimmy
(Alan Bates), an opportunist who uses charm, guile and violence to repress his
working-class background and rise to the top. Donner used colour to chart
Jimmy’s social climb and to demark the film’s three segments, beginning with
brash, primary colours and progressing to ‘a sort of muddy, porridgy middle
period, and coming out into rather muted elegant neo-regency tones’.12 He and
cinematographer Nicolas Roeg also incorporated experimental techniques such
as changing colour negative into positive in the opening titles ‘to show the whole
hypocritical nature of society in which we live today: don’t take anything at face
value, have a look behind it, see what it is’.13
    Colour provided opportunities for expressivity in other lesser-known realist
films. It added dramatic value to Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959) and Flame in
the Streets (Roy Ward Baker, 1961), films that focused on racial issues. In their
linkage of vivid colours with sexuality and racial identity, these films exposed
the ideological assumptions upon which such judgements are made. They also
reveal a complex relationship with colour during a period in which it stood for
experimentation, novelty and exoticism while at the same time artificiality, danger


11
   V. F. Perkins, ‘Clive Donner and Some People’, Movie 3 (October 1962), 22–25 (p. 23).
12
   ‘Interview with Clive Donner’, ISIS, 5 September 1964, pp. 15–16.
13
   Ibid.

30
                            From the Margins to the Mainstream?


and otherness. The Family Way (John and Roy Boulting, 1966) shows a young
couple’s aspirations for a ‘Moonlight Special’ honeymoon abroad, as advertised
by vivid drawings of blue seas and skies, golden beaches and palm trees. But
this turns out to be a swindle when the travel agent makes off with everyone’s
money; what at first looks exciting is the opposite. But the same film also uses
colour evocatively to convey the past in a non-realist mode. A character recalls a
romantic memory, but this is not seen through a flashback. Instead, as she speaks
the background becomes infused with a blue/violet chromatic effect. In this way
colour opened-up realist conventions to impressionistic effects and a greater
variety of visual tropes to provoke audiences into re-evaluating information and
cultural values.
   Directors such as Ken Loach who were at first reluctant to use colour
subsequently exploited its multivalent properties. The chromatic sensibility
of Poor Cow (1967) contributed greatly to its verisimilitude, communicating a
sensuous experience of the look and feel of the mid-1960s. The shock of seeing
vivid colour in a realist drama is announced in the first scene of a woman giving
birth. Colour then documents domestic interiors, urban development and also
satirizes the advertising world. In this way, although the association between
realism and black and white has persisted, films that were the exception to this
rule in the mid-century period played a key role in challenging canonical histories
of British cinema.14


Hammer and Beyond

   Hammer Film Productions dominate discussions of post-war British horror
cinema, starting with the first British horror film shot in colour, The Curse of
Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957). Hammer’s status in the early 1960s was
principally due to the lavish chromatic spectacle of period fantasy found in its
films, something that set the company apart from other British horror productions
of the period, which were largely associated with contemporary settings and a
black-and-white aesthetic. The commercial failure of Hammer’s own black-and-
white contemporary horrors was linked by one critic to the studio’s colour period
fantasies since they were ‘unencumbered… [by] suggestions of realism carried
by modern locations’.15 Yet the success of the period horror films was challenged
by a social and industrial shift towards a more ‘realistic’ use of colour within film
as a result of a wider ‘technological and aesthetic shift within cinema’.16
   By the mid-1960s, the association between fantasy, horror and colour was


14
   Street, ‘The Colour of Social Realism’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 15.4 (2018),
469–90.
15
   David Robinson, quoted in Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 65.
16
   Hutchings, p. 132.

                                                                                              31
                 Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


beginning to unravel, with the notion of colour adding realism having ‘important
implications for the horror genre’.17 The success of the Amicus film Dr Terror’s
House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) led to ‘a cluster of films which seek,
presumably in the commercial interests of product differentiation, to relocate
horror in a recognisable present-day world while at the same time appealing to
the already established market for that period horror’.18 Other contemporary-set
colour films attempted to blur the lines of demarcation by introducing elements
of period fantasy into modern settings. This approach made the transition
less conspicuous and played a key role in shaping the look of British horror in
the following decade. Such films as It! (Herbert J. Leder, 1967), for example,
combined the storyline of a supernatural Golem brought back to life by Arthur
Pimm (Roddy McDowall) with psychological themes in the form of Pimm’s
relationship with his deceased mother, an echo of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock,
1960).
   These transitional films also echo Hammer’s earlier colour films in their
approach to chromatic design. In the early stages of Eastman Colour’s adoption,
the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommended
Technicolor’s approach to film colour.19 Possibly as a result of that advice,
the horror colour aesthetic developed at Hammer by director Terence Fisher,
cinematographer Jack Asher, art designers Edward Marshall and Bernard
Robinson, and costume designers Molly Arbuthnot and Rosemary Burrows
for Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula (Fisher, 1958), has strong parallels with
Technicolor’s methods, notably the use of colour to underscore narrative events.20
Beyond Hammer, that chromatic legacy is felt in a number of late-1960s horror
films, including The Deadly Bees (Francis, 1966), The Psychopath (Francis,
1966), Twisted Nerve (Roy Boulting, 1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (Vernon
Sewell, 1968) and Corruption (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1968), in which the use
of colour combines those earlier associations with fantasy and the verisimilitude
of contemporary settings and themes. The ethereal green lighting that dominates
scenes of ritual sacrifice in Curse of the Crimson Altar, for example, resembles
Hammer’s deployment of colour to designate the supernatural or otherworldly
through the appearance of the eponymous antagonist in The Mummy (Fisher,
1959) and during sequences featuring the life-elixir in The Man Who Could
Cheat Death (Fisher, 1959). The blood-red interiors of the homes of Mrs Von
Sturm (Margaret Johnston) in The Psychopath and Mr Manfred (Frank Finlay) in
The Deadly Bees infer the ever-present threat of bloody violence found in Dracula
and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Fisher, 1966). Equally, the association of yellow

17
   Ibid.
18
   Ivi, p. 130.
19
   Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2007), p. 47.
20
   Natalie Kalmus, ‘Color Consciousness’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 25.1
(August 1935), 139–147 (p. 140). Technicolor’s Natalie Kalmus ascribed a role to colour similar to
the musical score, editing and set design for their contribution to the film’s narrative.

32
                            From the Margins to the Mainstream?


tones with a deceptive character such as Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing), who
murders a young prostitute in Corruption, draws parallels with the chromatic
costume and lighting designs that represent the dual personalities of Carla / The
Gorgon (Barbara Shelley) in The Gorgon (Fisher, 1964).
   However, the echoes of earlier period horror colour design in these transitional
horror films led to a familiar negative critical response, fueled by critics struggling
to balance the prevailing association of colour horror as an escapist fantasy with
the newer films’ use of colour to portray a more brutal contemporary realism.
This was most directly addressed in Penelope Mortimer’s review of Corruption
in The Observer, which also criticised the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC)
for allowing this ‘pernicious and repellent rubbish to appear on the screen’.
Mortimer’s review warns audiences, ‘In case anyone should think that this is
just a good old horror picture […] Here are no evil fangs, stakes driven through
the heart, gaping midnight graves, horrible transformations. The thing actually
purports to be realistic.’21 As the evidence of the films reveals, and as Mortimer’s
review underlines, overlooking these transitional films ignores a key moment
within the British horror genre in which the association of colour / fantasy and
black and white / realism was being shattered.


Carry On… in Colour

   Unlike the ebb and flow in popularity of horror, comedy has long been
‘the most popular genre in British cinema […] drawing mass audiences when
other genres fail’.22 Despite that popularity and dominance, there is no strong
association between comedy films and colour in British cinema. To consider how
colour remains an underexplored aesthetic aspect of film comedy, this section
looks at the British film industry’s most successful comedy franchise, the Carry
On series of thirty films released between 1958 and 1978. Contemporaneous
with the Hammer horror films, both series shared a desire to keep ‘production
costs to levels which were sustainable in British markets alone’.23 The budget for
the Carry On series was low even in comparison with other comedies of the time:
the first film Carry On Sergeant (Gerald Thomas, 1958) ‘cost around £73,000 to
make, at a time when an average Rank comedy was estimated to cost £125,000’.24
The different Carry On art directors ‘were obliged to keep costs down by […]
recycling and cheap location matching’ including the reuse of standing sets such
as a Western town in Carry on Cowboy and those built for Twentieth Century
Fox’s Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) for Carry on Cleo (Thomas,


21
   Penelope Mortimer, ‘Uplifting Blossoms’, The Observer, 24 November 1968, p. 23.
22
   Laraine Porter and I. Q. Hunter, ‘British Comedy Cinema: Sex, Class and Very Naughty Boys’,
in British Comedy Cinema, ed. by Hunter and Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1–17 (p. 1).
23
   Laurie Ede, British Film Design: A History (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p. 74.
24
   Ivi, p. 75.

                                                                                             33
                 Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


1964).25 Although budgetary in nature, such restrictions on set and costume re-
use may have actually increased the colour palette available for the films.
   Discussions of this series have identified a narrative shift that happens across
the 1960s, from institution-set films such as Sergeant and Carry on Constable
(Thomas, 1960) through parodies of British and Hollywood genre films that start
with Carry on Jack (Thomas, 1964) and run through Spying (Thomas, 1964),
Cleo, Cowboy, Screaming (Thomas, 1966), Don’t Lose Your Head (Thomas,
1966), Follow That Camel (Thomas, 1966) and Carry On Up the Khyber
(Thomas, 1968), before the series reintroduced an institutional comedy focus
with Carry On Doctor (Thomas, 1968).26 What is not traditionally acknowledged
in that production trajectory is the crucial role that Eastman Colour played in
the development of the genre parody. The Carry On films are rarely celebrated
for their cinematography, but the work of Alan Hume on Cleo, Cowboy, and
Screaming is critical in creating the right tone, combining a naturalistic approach
with examples of more experimental lighting techniques. Screaming uses specific
lighting effects to parody (and echo) Hammer’s horror films, with a particular
colour scheme being used in different rooms: red for the mad scientist’s
laboratory, purple in the living room, and yellow in the basement where Orlando
(Kenneth Williams) and Valeria (Fenella Fielding) Watt create shop mannequins
out of female victims. Even away from such an obvious genre connection, Hume’s
lighting casts an illicit rendezvous in Don’t Lose Your Head in purple and yellow
shades, while green hues suggest a supernatural element to an otherwise comical
crystal ball sequence in Follow That Camel.
   Colour in set designs and costume also enhances the parodies by including
contemporary sight gags such as the green-and-gold signage for Marcus et
Spencius in Cleo, which mimics a similar ‘colour scheme as the high street store
Marks and Spencer’.27 The series makes striking use of red and blue in uniforms
for Cleo (Roman legion), Don’t Lose Your Head (French soldiers) and Up the
Khyber (British troops), allowing the films to both ridicule authority figures and
make broad claims to issues of historical accuracy and generic identity. More
obvious slapstick gags use colour to set up narrative events, such as in Cleo where
Caesar’s (Kenneth Williams) robes are pelted with red tomatoes, well before the
later (largely bloodless) stabbing. Colour in costume is more predictably used
to highlight the female body, creating iconic and canonical spectacle: Fenella
Fielding’s tight-fitting red dress in Screaming, Amanda Barrie’s skimpy costume
in Cleo, and Angela Douglas’s silver outfit for her song-and-dance in Cowboy.


25
   Ivi, p. 78.
26
   James Chapman, ‘A Short History of the Carry On Films’, in British Comedy Cinema, pp. 100–
115; Sally Hibbin and Nina Hibbin, What A Carry On: The Official Story of the Carry On Film
Series (London: Hamlyn, 1988), p. 88.
27
   Nicholas J. Cull, ‘“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve All Got It in for Me!” Carry on Cleo and the British
Camp Comedies of Ancient Rome’, in Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular
Culture, ed. by Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamud and Donald T. McGuire, Jr. (London: John
Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 162–190 (p. 174).

34
                             From the Margins to the Mainstream?


Throughout the 1960s, the series’ increasing interest in half- or wholly-naked
women would ultimately lessen the impact of colourful female costumes, but it
underlines how important (and often overlooked) colour was to these parodic
franchise entries.


Historical Film and the Colour Bio-pic

   Both Hammer’s period horror films, and the Carry On… series’ historical
parodies, draw from a rich tradition of British costume and historical drama,
even though both franchises are generally less concerned with historical accuracy.
From the mid-1930s three-strip Technicolor provided an aesthetic feature for
historical films which emphasised period spectacle and perpetuated ongoing
debates concerning realism and authenticity.28 This is particularly applicable for
the biopic, a sub-genre of the historical film which often engenders accusations
of inaccuracy, fraudulence and misrepresentation. The full conversion to
colour offered by the new Eastman Colour film stock saw a slow uptake for
the biopic when compared to other examples of historical films. In the period
1954 to 1960 only two British colour feature film releases appeared to channel
the biopic format: Beau Brummell (Curtis Bernhardt, 1954) and John Wesley
(Norman Walker, 1954). This began to change during the 1960s with Lawrence
of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), a film that heralded technical advances in colour
cinematography and postclassical developments in the genre by adopting a more
complex, psychological approach towards the biographical narrative.29
   Isadora (Karel Reisz, 1969) continued this trend in its exploration of the life of
the American dancer, Isadora Duncan (in an acclaimed performance by British
actress Vanessa Redgrave). Reisz was better known for his contribution to the
critically acclaimed black-and-white social realist films, particularly Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1960), but his debut colour feature has been
hailed as a ‘marvellously appropriate subject for the 60s’.30 The film employs
a similar temporal framework to Lawrence of Arabia, beginning towards the
end of Isadora’s life, and recreates her experiences as dreamlike encounters
fueled with passion and tragedy. Isadora adheres to the conventional female
biopic tropes of ‘suffering, victimisation and failure’, played out in the tension
between her professional achievements and the demands of ‘home, marriage
and motherhood’.31 However, the film explores Isadora’s complex persona
by adopting a psychologically-centred narrative which is fragmented and


28
   Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant, ‘Introduction: the Past in British Cinema’, in British Historical
Cinema, ed. by Monk and Sargeant (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–14 (p. 2).
29
   Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (USA:
Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 72–99.
30
   Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992), p. 271.
31
   Bingham, pp. 10 and 213.

                                                                                               35
                 Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


impressionistic. This approach is underscored by considered colour choices in
the film’s creative design.
   Film and stage designer Jocelyn Herbert was employed to create the look
of Isadora, and her personal archive reveals some of the colour challenges
production personnel faced due to the non-linear structure. These were related
to physical changes in Isadora’s (and Redgrave’s) appearance and in crafting
aesthetic contrasts between different time periods. In her sketchbook, Herbert
considers: ‘going on the assumption that the past and present are going to be
different — how and to what degree?’32 She debates whether Isadora’s past
should be filmed in black and white or colour to evoke a time that was more
‘vivid and alive’ and to recreate the ‘garish and fun’ sentiment of the 1920s.33
Black-and-white cinematography which had previously ‘reinforced dominant
generic codes of realism’ is assessed here in a very different context: as a signifier
for the past and reconstructed memory.34 The finished film follows Herbert’s
latter idea by employing vivid colour for most of the flashbacks, accentuating the
subject’s life story and reinforcing colour as spectacle.
   It begins with twelve-year old Isadora in her parents’ bedroom, the muted
browns and flickering candle light creating a silent film effect that emphasises
this is a different era. The action then shifts in time as she recites her memoirs
whilst staying on the French Riviera in 1927. As Isadora’s stage routines become
more flamboyant and outrageous, her costume changes from predominantly
white, promoting classical ideals, to fiery reds and oranges. Herbert’s set
designs, inspired by her work at the Royal Court, include sparse studio interiors
decorated with minimalist furnishings, providing a theatrical ambience that
reflects Isadora’s artistic ambition. The apartment she shares with her first love,
the English theatre designer Gordon Craig (James Fox), resembles a stage set: an
expansive space in which to experiment with colour and light. The warm orange
glow of these early sequences reflects Herbert’s suggestion that Isadora’s past
should be presented as more ‘vivid’. Later scenes shift from the romantic and
opulent French château where Isadora sets up a dance school for girls, through
to the grey, sombre tones of Soviet Russia, punctuated by brazen displays of red
costume, flags and regalia (defiant until the end, Isadora also wears a scarlet red
scarf at the moment of her untimely death).
   Isadora presents an evocative biographical film where colour performs a
significant symbolic role in depicting the subject’s psychological journey. This
is in contrast to earlier black-and-white biopics such as Ken Russell’s Isadora
Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World (BBC, 22 September 1966), with
Reisz’s film version offering a stronger visual resonance through its chosen colour
palette. As with the horror films discussed above, colour increased the creative


32
   Isadora Folder (d.1967-1968), Jocelyn Herbert Collection, National Theatre Archives [accessed
23 May 2017].
33
   Ibid.
34
   Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 132.

36
                           From the Margins to the Mainstream?


opportunities for filmmakers working in this genre, fueled by the broader move
towards more psychologically-driven narratives. The input of practitioners such
as Herbert helped shape the visual direction of mid-century British historical
biopics, a direction that continued after the complete conversion to colour by
the end of the 1960s.


Conclusion

   Between the years 1954 and 1969, as Eastman Colour entered its period of
mainstream adoption, it is clear that the British film industry was coming to terms
with the new aesthetic possibilities of colour. As the case studies demonstrate,
a focus on Eastman Colour in British cinema has begun to reveal how colour
helped redefine the look of key British genres. While this period remains
critically known for the monochrome and ‘realist’ films of the British New Wave,
the new perspectives developed in our project contribute to scholarship aiming
to challenge and expand that narrow historical view.35
   The case studies reveal how this British period of colour transition and
experimentation can be linked to shifting cultural connotations of realism,
character psychology, parody, and social commentary. The British industry was
also reliant on colour for more prosaic reasons: most films from America and other
countries were in colour from the early 1960s, and the rise of British-American
film and television coproduction through the 1960s (in part due to London’s
‘Swinging Sixties’ pop culture reputation) meant Britain needed to convert to
colour to keep in step with international colour trends. Other media were also
converting to colour, with advertising, publishing, fashion and television offering
alternative chromatic opportunities. Such intermedial influences (and challenges)
meant Eastman Colour became mainstream in British film production around
the same time as colour supplements appeared in newspapers, and as colour
broadcasting appeared in Britain. BBC2 began broadcasting in colour from 1967,
BBC1 in November 1969, and the regional commercial channels between 1969
and 1970. These initial mid-century years of experimentation, then, can be seen as
an essential transition period for the British film industry but also one in which it
was engaged in a complex negotiation with intermedial chromatic trends.
   Beyond this period, colour remains a complex and shifting topic in terms
of aesthetics, industry attitudes, and the realist canon. Hammer and the Carry
On... series continued into the 1970s, with period horrors like Lust for a Vampire


35
  See, for example, Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema
(London: BFI, 1996); Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
(London: Continuum, 2000); British Horror Cinema, ed. by Julian Petley and Steve Chibnall
(London: Routledge, 2001); Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film (London: BFI,
2009); British Comedy Cinema; Ealing Revisited, ed. by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith M.
Johnston, and Melanie Williams (London: BFI Palgrave, 2012).

                                                                                        37
                    Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards


(Jimmy Sangster, 1971) or genre parodies such as Carry on Henry (Thomas,
1971) attempting to recapture the elusive commercial success of the 1960s.
Contemporary psychological horrors offered a more pared-down realism in
films such as Fragment of Fear (Richard C. Sarafian, 1970) or The Shout (Jerry
Skolimowski, 1978), while the Hammer-inspired colour tradition was continued
by low budget horrors such as Frightmare (Pete Walker, 1974) and Virgin
Witch (Ray Austin, 1972). The historical biopic, meanwhile, became a key site
of chromatic experimentation in the films of Ken Russell, most notably in The
Music Lovers (1970) and Valentino (1977). The acceptance of colour in social
realism across the 1970s may lack some of the commercial critique found in
earlier films, but realist directors such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach continued
to use colour effectively as they moved between television and film projects such
as Bleak Moments (Leigh, 1971) and Family Life (Loach, 1971). While those
realist traditions continue to echo through debates about a British film canon,
the parallel history that our project is uncovering demonstrates how colour may
be key to revealing a ‘richer and more diverse British cinema’.36




36
     Barr, p. 14.

38
