The Last Emperor costumes

As such a strongly visual medium it should not be surprising to learn that filmmakers have been experimenting with colour since the first moving pictures were invented. It has even been estimated that 80% of films made between the 1890s and the 1920s were coloured through hand-painting and dying individual frames similar to the earlier application of colour on magic lantern slides. Filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, quickly realised that by using colour as a storytelling tool they could heighten an audience’s reaction to a scene or a character. Red might be used to suggest passion or love, with blue evoking a more sombre mood whilst green suggested vibrancy and life. Colour could also be adopted to assist audiences with complex narratives involving multiple timelines and characters. D.W. Griffith employed four different colour tints for each of the four time periods in Intolerance (1916) giving the audience a clear visual cue of where they were in the narrative.

Similarly, colour can also be used to chart a character’s journey within a narrative with alterations in colours visually expressing shifts in mindset or life stage. In The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci uses colour as a transitional device, the colour palette moving from reds to oranges and yellows and finally to greens and greys. This represents Pu Yi’s journey from his life of tradition and naivety in the forbidden palace to his life as an ordinary citizen in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. As his awareness of the world around him grows, the colour transitions a full 180 degrees on the colour wheel representing his completely altered position from the start to the end of the film.

– Curator Chelsey O'Brien