Antonio Cassiano Santos - Visions in Technicolor

Centre culturel portugais Camões - 4, place Joseph Thorn, Luxembourg-Merl (2637)

Accueil par Adília Martins de Carvalho, directrice du centre culturel portugais Camões, ensuite visite guidée en présence de l'artiste, et vernissage de l'exposition.

It is impossible to fully appreciate colours without first understanding that the chromatic spectrum exists in a self-complementing equilibrium. Colours are intrinsically beautiful, but they are even more so, when one understands their relationship. There is only red in the absence of yellow and blue, but there is also only red in opposition to both yellow and blue. Such is the nature of colour, and so is the nature of context.

In the Golden Age of american cinema it became possible to capture life’s colours on moving pictures, by superimposing three different sets of coloured negatives. Visual greatness was being achieved with every frame, the image was king and queen.

The image was such a powerful force that, at times, it alone remained in the viewers memory, devoid of its full context. The image is to thisday, such a powerful force, that an icon may only be remembered for being an icon, and not for what it iconizes per se. This, importantly, raises the matter of knowing if a piece of art should be truly beautiful in face-value alone, without the need for understanding all that went into making it so. Shouldn’t true art be impervious to lack of context, when to be considered truly, beautiful?

Perhaps an image can be beautiful by itself, but it can become even more so when given its many different contexts. An image’s artistic value compounds the more is revealed about it, giving true beauty a layered aspect.

So, what if portions of beautiful images can be stitched together to form new beauty, the same way colours can be joined and opposed to each other for varied contextual beautiful results? How much strength will several icons stitched together hold?

With Technicolor, layering chromatic variations of film proved to compound beauty. Humanity’s culture has enough layers and colours for icons to be reinvented and remain, icons. It’s just a matter of having enough different negatives to colour for our visions.

With Technicolor cameras, by exposing film to different physical and chemical processes, one would find the final edition capable of portraying life to its fullest colourful potential. Colour was taken as a revolutionary discovery that came to change the world of the moving picture. But the Technicolor way was soon relegated from being a standard practice in movie industry as it was an extremely expensive and demanding technical procedure.

The history-altering cultural value of cinema was, soon after its inception, deeply intertwined with the economical value of its productions, and the goal of presenting magnanimous colourful productions was shelved as it was a suboptimal revenue stream.

Financial aims help streamlining the success of a production, looking to assure the highest comercial value is attainable with each improvement of a baseline economic practice. This streamlining process, when applied to art can lead to ingenious cultural and technical progress, but, if left unchecked, it can disrupt a fundamental (very fragile and fickle) part of said progress, which is it’s ability to catalyse humanity’s self discovery.

Much like in an imbalanced relationship between colours, if the comercial value of a production is its only concern, the global potential value of it will be encumbered by the need to result in high corporate profits. Was the ultimate goal of adopting Technicolor technology to increase revenue? It is known that the treatment of Judy Garland during filming was highly criticisable, which indicates a quiet pressure to achieve high

financial results with the Wizard of Oz. It is also known that the requirements for the use of technicolor cameras were so steep that Technicolor was later replaced with cheaper methods. Perhaps revenue does make the world go round in the end, but more than any box office record Technicolor movies might have broken, what stays in the collective memory is its culture defining, intense colourful imagery.

This imagery will remain in history as visions, colourful, beautiful, painful, greedy, unfair and gruesome, but also genius, progressive, beautiful and colourful visions.