ABSTRACT
In his filmDreams(USA/Japan, 1990) director Akira Kurosawa cast fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh. This ingenious choice was generally understood as a tribute to the latter’s efforts to promote and advance the preservation of color films, an issue that had in particular come to the fore with the fast fading of color film stocks dating from the 1970s onwards (Stern 1995: 155). Using the master painter to evoke the film artist and his conscious color choices, Kurosawa and Scorsese created an image that, perhaps unintentionally, offers a metaphor that extends well beyond the color film art and technology of the past century’s later decades.
