deft trajectories for the eye: bringing arnheim to vincente minnelli’s color design scott higgins

Within the field of film studies, Rudolf Arnheim has a reputation as a narrow and stalwart adherent to black-and-white aesthetics, a “chromophobe” to use David Batchelor’s influential term.1 In Film as Art, Arnheim’s theory famously consigned color and sound to the realm of “wax museum ideals” and intractably referred to film art as an experiment that took place in the first three decades of the twentieth century.2