Colour Consciousness and Design in Blanche Fury as Technicolor Melodrama

Abstract

This article addresses colour and music as elements associated with the rhetoric and excesses of film melodrama through a case study of Blanche Fury (1947). Music is discussed as an analogy for thinking about colour composition and the moving image through the rhetoric and practices of Technicolor design and a theoretical context contemporary to the film’s making discerned in both production materials and film text. Colour takes on a musical value which serves a diegetic function by both situating characters in relation to the mise-en-scene and operating as a cue to instances of perception attributed specifically to the female protagonist. Drawing on theories of melodrama and colour I will argue that colour and music are integral to and offer material for further explorations of feminine desire and sexual difference as they can be seen to operate in this particular melodrama.1 For Laura Mulvey, the premise that film melodrama offers the illusion of a coherent image of the world indicates the potential of fractures for a progressive text (1989: 39). Melodrama stages scenarios that engage the spectator’s fascination by veiling mechanisms of representation and foregrounding moments of excess; within this system, elements that elide the unfolding narrative logic of the film touch upon unarticulated desire. The potential of a film which is dependent on the concealment of the marks of production, its material ground and technology (celluloid, dyes specific to threestrip Technicolor) to disturb the construction of an illusion operates through the interrelations of the film as process and text. The narrative of Blanche Fury traces a discourse of familial loyalty, dispossession and desire surrounding ownership of the Fury family name and estate at Clare Hall. The film’s disowned heroine, Blanche Fury, returns to Clare Hall at the invitation of her uncle, Simon Fuller,