ABSTRACT
Since its notoriety in the late 1980s, a wealth of material has been written about colorization. However, very little of this material assesses the aesthetics of specific colorized films. 1 The dearth of analytical material is unsurprising, given colorization’s status as an abomination within many film circles, but a comparative analysis of a black-and-white film in relation to its colorized counterpart is nonetheless a worthwhile endeavor. Whatever one might think of colorization, at base it is simply another color process, potentially akin to other color processes that attempt to integrate color and film; it is complete with many of the accordant challenges such integration poses. A comparison of the aesthetics of the colorizedCasablanca(Curtiz, broadcast 9 November 1988) with the original black and white version (Curtiz, 1942) reveals the way in which the colorization process alters and contributes to the film’s organization of space and the salience of information, while a comparison of the colorization with the aesthetic principles of three-strip Technicolor makes the choices of the colorization more apparent by indicating how another color process from the time ofCasablanca’sinitial production likely would have handled color in the film. 2
