Statement on Scholarship

Scott Higgins

I consider cinema to be the most culturally vital and aesthetically potent art form of the 20th century. At the most basic level, I am compelled to study film because of its sensory complexity and its potential to engage and renew our perceptions. My research concerns the history of film form with an emphasis on classical and contemporary American cinema. I focus especially on visual style with emerging interests in genre and narrative. I work in the traditions of neo-formalism and historical poetics, which favor close textual analysis bounded and informed by economic, technological, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. In all of my work, I seek to situate cinematic art historically and to lay bare the structures and conventions that shape our experience of the moving image.

In particular, my research explores the interplay of norm and innovation in Hollywood cinema. I view classical filmmaking, roughly defined as narrative feature production between 1917 and 1960, as an extremely powerful, if not omnipotent, paradigm for defining our experience of the moving image. Classical Hollywood film constitutes a pervasive field of assumptions about the nature of cinema, expectations about the medium’s potentials, and routines for making art. It provides an arena in which new technologies and formal techniques find meaningful functions, and a background against which subsequent popular film has defined itself worldwide. Much of my work proceeds from the premise that innovation and aesthetic change, whether it is the development of new cinematographic techniques or the emergence of a new genre, can well be understood via the framework of classical norms. In this statement I will discuss the book and three articles not taken from the book that I have produced since coming to Wesleyan, and I will point forward toward my next two projects. Though my conference presentations inform my published work, I will not discuss them here. Neither will I discuss my published articles that are essentially "spun off" from the book.

My book, Harnessing the Rainbow: Technicolor Design in the 1930s (University of Texas Press, in press), is a detailed history of color aesthetics during the introduction of full-color cinematography to Hollywood cinema. The Technicolor Corporation was a significant force during the studio era, dominating color production until the mid 1950s. In 1934, Technicolor unveiled the "three-color process," which was the first successful commercial process capable of reproducing a full range of natural color. By 1939, three-color had found a firm commercial footing and filmmakers could draw on a well-established body of conventions for handling color. The Technicolor feature films of the 1930s present a striking period of stylistic development. Designers and filmmakers rapidly worked through options for shaping, showcasing, and controlling color, and in doing so, they helped create an approach that would hold sway through the classical era and beyond. Through close analysis of significant films and original archival research, Harnessing the Rainbow specifies the nature of Technicolor style and details the struggle to bring color in line with classical Hollywood norms.

The book argues that Technicolor aesthetics constituted a unique response to the possibilities of color, and that they were influenced by corporate strategies, technological limitations, and institutional requirements. My discussion of this style is informed by a close consideration of industrial factors and technological history and by research into the debates about color aesthetics mounted in trade and professional journals and primary industry documents. I further argue that color was met with strong resistance by producers and filmmakers, and that it fell to Technicolor designers to articulate an aesthetic that complemented the dominant style and still promised to offer innovative novelty. This aesthetic background, in turn, enabled new conventions for the control of color within the frame, between shots, and across films. The result was an enduring set of methods that channeled color to guide attention, punctuate turning points, and express emotional subtext. By the end of the 1930s, color had been thoroughly harnessed to narrative, and it could be elegantly expressive without threatening the impression of a coherent story world.

Harnessing the Rainbow is a substantially revised version of my dissertation, and it differs from that work in several key aspects. The dissertation was a rather long technically oriented monograph, with exhaustive analyses of color design in a case-study format. This resulted in a good deal of repetition as each film built upon and developed techniques discussed in earlier chapters. My concern in the dissertation was to generate a method of analysis and demonstrate its merit through as thorough an accounting of each film’s design as possible. The book, by contrast, is a complete rewrite that is far more argument driven. In addition to new introductory and concluding chapters, and a new section on digital technology, I shortened and sharpened the analyses and shifted the emphasis toward a more comprehensive thesis about how classical Hollywood norms shaped and defined innovations.

In response to readers’ critiques, I expanded the range of films that I address, and broadened my discussion of Technicolor’s aesthetic legacy. I retained the case-study structure, but amplified my claims about industry-wide trends with reference to new research on more films from the 1930s and 1940s. I also developed a substantial new section on contemporary digital technology and its use in color design. The emergence of digital color grading in the past several years has encouraged filmmakers to revisit the aesthetic issues of the 1930s, which I chart. Using Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator as my primary example, I explore how digital grading can recreate a classical Technicolor look, and I argue that the new technology has followed a developmental arc similar to that of three-color Technicolor. Moreover, the case of digital grading demonstrates the contemporary relevance of my method of analysis and approach to color functions. I also pursued some of these ideas in my article "A New Color Consciousness" published in the peer-reviewed journal Convergence in 2003, though the analysis of The Aviator is unique to the book.

Finally, for the book I gathered black-and-white and color frame enlargements from the films under consideration. This allowed me to further tighten descriptive passages, and better positions the book to bring the richness of color to the reader’s attention. I was awarded a Wesleyan Project Grant and I obtained a generous grant from the Technicolor Corporation to help defray the expenses of color reproduction. I also traveled to archives in Los Angeles to make the frame enlargements from the best available film prints, a painstaking process. The complications of funding, creating, and reproducing the color plates has slowed the book’s journey through the press somewhat, but the enhancement provided by high quality images easily justifies this longer production schedule. It will be released in fall of 2007.

Harnessing the Rainbow contributes to the field in several ways. It is the first contemporary film studies work devoted to the question of color in film. The field has produced definitive studies on the areas of sound, staging, and editing, but has largely neglected the contributions of color. Beyond its interest as a history of film form in the classical era, the book offers a unique attempt to come to terms with color as a cinematic element. I aim to distinguish my work by offering an unprecedented precision and detail that acknowledges and captures the complexity of both color and the moving image. The book provides film studies with a new critical vocabulary for dealing with color and explaining how it affects the viewing experience.

My current work extends my formal and historical concerns in two different directions. I continue to pursue color in film, and I have initiated a study of the popular contemporary action film genre, which will be the subject of my next book. In terms of color, I am particularly interested in building on the foundations of my book by studying aesthetic strategies since the 1930s. I want to examine how the design formulas of the classical era operate as norms, within and against which filmmakers have defined their work. My article in Convergence, for instance, brings my analytical approach to the interplay of technology and aesthetics in two recent films, Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother Where Art Thou (2000). My essay "Orange and Blue, Desire and Loss," appearing in the forthcoming anthology The Cinema of Todd Haynes, examines color design in Far from Heaven (2002) as a citation and development of conventions from 1950s family melodrama. It focuses on the apparently paradoxical ability of color to distance and emotionally engage the spectator. I argue that this use of color derives from directors like Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli who transformed Technicolor norms by amplifying color coordination and foregrounding emotional motifs. Todd Haynes, in citing the 1950s style and blending it with contemporary norms, plays between conscious reference and direct reinvigoration of classical techniques. For my next color project, I will undertake a book-length auteur centered study of "colorist" directors with chapters on Sirk, Minnelli, Jacques Demy, Yosujiro Ozu and Wong Kar Wai. These directors span generations and nationalities, but they are all critically celebrated for their use of color. My goals are to test critical generalization through close analysis, and to come to a precise understanding of each filmmaker’s aesthetic strategies in relation to prevailing norms. I’ve done a good deal of preparatory work for this project and have written extensively on Sirk and Minnelli.

Before returning to color, however, I will complete Blood and Thunder: Form and History of the American Action Film. This book-length project grows out of my concerns as a scholar with investigating the legacy and vicissitudes of classical cinema. Its impetus was the course Cinema of Action and Adventure, which I originated for the film studies major. In teaching this class, I realized the need for a formally oriented historical work on the action genre, one of Hollywood’s most profitable and culturally significant formulas. Film scholars have approached the genre from theoretical and economic perspectives, but have not traced the form’s development from its roots in early cinema or considered its conventions with any rigor. My essay "Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary Action Film" (under review at Cinema Journal) argues that the genre is founded on structures from 19th century stage melodrama that were influential on the early feature film. Action films, typified by movies like Die Hard, and The Matrix, are part of a long tradition of popular melodrama, and, in a sense they reach back to the foundations of narrative cinema. In following these continuities, I have begun to delineate the history of the genre’s conventions. The essay forms the first part of a monograph that will cover the narrative and formal norms of the genre, and argue for a historical trajectory that stretches from one-reel action melodramas of the early 1900s, through early feature films of the teens, and, in the classical era, the slapstick short, the historical adventure film and the sound serial. Action films seem to straddle classical and melodramatic forms, and I argue that they offer new insight into how these modes have historically interacted. The genre study can help redefine our sense of classical norms and how they support innovations that favor spectacle and episodic plot construction. In studying the form and history of the action film, we can arrive at an explanation of popular cinema’s longevity and appeal.