Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Colors: An important element in the movies....but... What about our culture?


When I think in colors, I think of life.  Life is not wonderful if we do not have colors. Why? Because colors  make the life easier with a meaning and sense. To explain it, we have many examples, nevertheless, I am going to emphasize in the genre of movie. What could we infer about silent movies and white and black movies were changed by colored movies?  In my opinion, I think due to colors are one of the most important elements to set the atmosphere that the Director and the producers the movie would like to show.  Unconsciously, colors in movies, give us a better understanding about the message producers show us. The way we understood the movies, may be influenced by the meaning of the colors in our country or culture and we never realize it. Therefore, this brief essay is going to explain why colors are important for the movies and in our lives.

First, I am going to explain two different scenes from the two movies clips: Blades of Glory and Down with Love. We can compare each movie as they use the opposite colors and they show the appropriate colors according the message of each movie. Second, I am going to show, as an example, how colors are important in our lives; hence, I will explain if the colors showed,  have an important meaning in my country, in my culture.

About Blades of Glory, we could see a clip where two young men are participating in the National Figure Skating. Perhaps they are so nervous, they are waiting for their turn. Before of this, there was two people, one man and one woman skating with pop music. They are wearing bright black and neon dark colors, with shine and silver colored sparks. They are pretty sure they are going to win the competition because they realized the public is clapping.  When the first couple finished, they said an expression: “Did you hear it?”-  (They were showing  how the public was excited with their presentation).

Then, both man start to skate. It was very different in comparison with the first one presentation for these reasons: first, because they were figure skating with classic music and then they changed it to a rock genre (Bon Jovi’s song). Second, because they were wearing different kind of dresses with different colors, the pale swarthy man was wearing with bright red, bright yellow and bright brown colors, those colors had a lot of shine and sparks. While the white and blond man was wearing bright blue, white, silver and also, its clothes had shine and sparks too.

When they began to skate, everybody in the public was laughing and they fell down once. One of them convinced the other one to continue the competition and then they skated excellent. Now the public was clapping and they succeed.  Those colors highlighted the scenes in the movie, maybe the Director or producers wanted to show the roles of main characters, if they are participants, they must wear different colors of the public, the coach or organizers.

In the case of Down with Love, we could see a clip where two beautiful and elegant ladies are in a white mansion with colored furniture and they were wearing pastel colors like light blue, light pink. One of this woman- Barbara- is famous because she wrote a book named Down with Love. She wanted to present the free women and teach them to enjoy sex without commitment. The clip showed us how she tries to promote her book, having a meeting with an important man who writes in a ladies magazine – Mr. Block. Nevertheless, Mr. Block always postpones the meeting giving her an excuse until she realized he is making fun of her because he did not want approve or accept her book. 

In this movie, we could see pastel  and light colors, with 60´s fashion clothes, so  we could infer the director or producers want to show a movie where some behaviors were taboo at this time and those kind of colors were worn by people,  because in those years women were more “shy”.

Therefore, as I said before, in the case of movie, colors are one of the most important elements to the directors and producers because of it express details about the films. Now, taking account the colors we saw on the clips, in my country, Colombia, I think we are a liberal country in this way.  The dilemma that I had thinking about it is that Colombia has five regions with different costumes, gastronomy, accents, music, weather (hot, warm and cold), and religions. So, it makes easier (I think) that each people wear different colors. It depends of your city, region or the most import: it depends on the weather. For  a woman, if you are going to a party, you can wear bright colors at night and pastel color at morning, but I think, as I said, it is about which city you live and which are your costumes. 

However, in conclusion,  I could say that we have four important colors which appeared in both movies: Yellow, blue, red and white. Three of them are the colors of our flag, the yellow means the sunshine, the gold we have in our mountains and the t-shirt of our soccer team. The blue color means our seas, Colombia is the one country in South America that has exit to Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Also it means our sky and Colombia is one of the most important countries with water resource in the world. The red color means the blood of our soldiers in all our history, since the independence until nowadays with our conflict against the non-legal groups. Also we have on September one special day for love and friendship and all is colored with red. Finally, the white color means peace, we usually wear white clothes when we walk around the streets looking for a special objective, most of them against the problems of violence, we take into account the white dove as a symbol of peace.

For me, Colors means life,   mean happiness, I think without them our life is boring.

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