Filtration: Three Colours: Blue

Please note that due to illness, we will have to reschedule this week’s talk. The film will play at 1:00 pm without the talk. Ticket buyers will be notified of the new date for the talk portion of this event.

In this film education series, cinematographer, film colourist and educator Devan Scott illuminates the ways filmmakers have created mood and meaning through the manipulation of colour. Each 40-minute talk will examine a different colour process – including lighting, tinting, production design – within its historical context, and exploring its aesthetic, artistic and storytelling attributes.

Each talk will be followed by a complementary screening, today: Three Colours: Blue.

Directly filtering the image that comes into a camera’s lens allows cinematographers to vastly alter how a scene looks and feels. We’ll analyze the radical ways Kieslowski’s closet collaborator, cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, uses his complex system of filters to editorialize images, express the emotional state of characters, and establish place in such films as Three Colours: Blue, The Double Life of Veronique, and A Short Film About Killing.

About the film: The first of Polish filmmaker’s acclaimed Three Colours Trilogy, inspired by the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French flag, the Tricolour, Blue stars Juliette Binoche as the wife of a celebrated composer who loses her husband and child in a car accident. Depressed and detached, Julie is nevertheless drawn back towards life. Three Colours: Blue won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival.

This film will also play as part of the Total Cinema series.