ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I examine the situation where a color reappears in a new guise, i.e., when a hue appears to shift and change its color. This leads to a definition of four basic types of reidentification and tracking that involve the cognitive notion of radial association and the philosophy of Derrida. A radial series is a series of contexts, each of varying strength that continues to inform an often arbitrary starting point. An advantage of this approach to film comprehension is that one can readily see how moving along certain radial lines of thought will bring parts of a metaphor together, literalizing it, and making real a provisional fiction, i.e., a counterfactual that has been proposed by a spectator or prompted by a text. Is the single plot of a fictional story really the only strand to find? Does a story stand only for itself? I think instead that a story is about a lived reality complete with contingencies. This augmented story is the interface between world and art.

In the previous chapter as well as the present one, I employ a binary of tracking color either in place, when it seems not to change, or in movement, when it seems to change hue. I conclude this chapter by discussing how the binary may be condensed into a single mental image of a spectator walking through an ornamental garden. Some formal techniques of film are mentioned that may drive color tracking. I also consider whether color “movement” is merely a somewhat specious metaphor. It is not.