Nostalgia, Tinted Memories and Cinematic Historiography: On Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958)

Abstract

Colour in film is a matter of subtle photochemical processes and inscriptions on delicate skins, called pellicula in Italian and pellicule in French, indicating proximity of physical and chemical procedures in the perception of the world. Inscriptions of light on film surfaces can create pleasant effects of shades and tones, but when applied excessively they ruin the surface and destroy the image. A similar phenomenon occurs on human skin. If exposed to the sun, Caucasian skin may stage a play of colours from pink to dark red. Colour films that have made an issue of the sunburn, usually on female skin, closely parallel the experience of seeing colours and that of feeling colours, giving a painful reminder of the physical basis in all filmic perception. It reminds the spectator that memory, as Nietzsche insisted, is always linked to a trace and a pain that remembers.1 Colour in films, then, can be discussed as a special form of relating the technological, the physical, the aesthetic and the social side of cinema. Colour is a barely perceivable yet affective thread in the texture of cinematic historiography.