Colors of "Chicago" Movie Clip

Each time when I see a movie or a clip, the first thing I pay attention to is the background music, then the heroes' appearance, and finally the plot of the negotiations I am observing. I would never say that colors used by the movie director could have any influence on my personal understanding of what I have seen. However, when you start analyzing particular colors used in each single movie clip, it becomes obvious that the colors we see in the clip have been carefully chosen by the movie director in order to represent the main idea and help us to understand it correctly as well.

I have not seen the full versions of any of these movies. Therefore, colors should help me a lot to analyze the plot of the scenes.

So, I would like to discuss the movie clip "Chicago" as for me it describes a story of a woman, her attitude to man and the progress of their mutual relationships depending on the social status of the woman starting from the ordinary one to her becoming a recognizable celebrity.

The movie director uses the contrast of colors in order to highlight the status of a woman on the one side and feelings of men towards her, on the other side. Firstly, we can observe the white color of the lady's clothes on a black background, which reflects that while being an ordinary woman she used to have a bad experience with men. Further, the director uses the violet color of the actress' dress combining it with black or white background in order to show her way from the ordinary woman to a celebrity. And finally, we can see bright red color of the celebrity's clothes, which has its reflection on the black background. Here, the movie director uses black color for the men's clothes having strong interest in the celebrity in order to show her dominant position in their relationships.

I need to say that in Ukrainian culture the red color has the same mening as in the most of the other cultures. It represents love, passion, and domination. Black color should be considered as rather depressive one, and being combined with red, the last one will always be dominating. I may not say that violet color has a special meaning for Ukrainians. It could represent some kind of transitional period from one status to the other, as it is reflected in the movie clip.

Based on the movie clip I have seen I may conclude that colors have a very strong influence towards our understanding of the reality. However, we do not usually understand that, it just works on the unconscious level.