ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I shall use discoveries from neuroscience to argue that color as much as movement is a source of pleasure in cinema. Pleasure here is defined in neuroscientific terms not simply as enjoyment but also as that which attracts our attention, and furthermore derives from the evolutionary reward for overcoming challenges in the visual field, such as recognising predators, prey, or mates (see Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 31). According to recent neuroscientific work on color perception, it appears that we perceive color before we perceive movement (Viviani and Aymoz 2001), and as a result of this I shall suggest that cinema is as much a medium of spectacle (beholding color) as it is a medium of narrative (which has at its core in-frame movement). This foregrounding of color is made clearer still through the practice of color manipulation in digital cinema, a phenomenon that has similarly been analyzed (e.g. by ScottHiggins 2003) for the effect that it has in downplaying narrative in favor of spectacle. The Coen Brothers’ film,O Brother, Where Art Thou?(USA/UK, 2000), will then serve as a template for a cinema that selfconsciously explores how color can diminish cinema as a narrative form in both “natural” (i.e. scientific) and artificial (i.e. through the digital manipulation of color) ways.
