Dune: Part Two goes black and white on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen world, and the Dune 2 arena scene isn’t monochrome the way an old film is. Denis Villeneuve and his cinematographer Greig Fraser shot the Harkonnen world in infrared, on cameras that couldn’t see any of the light your eyes use, so the colours of the costumes and the sky were never recorded at all. What the sensor caught was infrared, and the image was turned to grey after that. The story’s reason is the sun. In the rule Fraser set for the planet, the Harkonnen sun gives off no visible light, only infrared, and a sun like that is a black sun to anyone standing under it.
It’s Feyd-Rautha’s birthday. Austin Butler fights under a white sky in front of a crowd of pale, bald Harkonnens, the skin on everyone glows like paper, and when the fireworks go off they’re black, ink thrown into the air. You know you’re on another planet before anyone says a word.
The black sun of Giedi Prime: a sun with no colour
Frank Herbert’s novel says little about what Giedi Prime looks like, but the glossary at the back of the book, “Terminology of the Imperium,” gives the Harkonnen homeworld one line of ecology: “A median-viable planet with a low active-photosynthesis range.” It is a world where sunlight does little for anything green. The first film only showed it at night, indoors, so Villeneuve and Fraser worked from the inside out, from the Harkonnens’ heads. “We know Giedi Prime is an industrial planet with all links cut to the natural world,” Villeneuve told American Cinematographer. “We are shaped by our environments.” They landed on the idea that the Harkonnen sunlight “has no color,” “some kind of nightmarish black-and-white,” and Fraser suggested shooting it in infrared.
Villeneuve told Inverse: “The idea that the sunlight, instead of revealing colors, will kill colors” would “tell us a lot about their psychology.”
Fraser’s first test for Villeneuve gave the rule a body. The Harkonnens are “very pale, white-skinned characters,” he said, because “there was no visible light from the sun on Giedi Prime, only infrared.” Walk out of a lit room into their daylight and you go “from visible light into infrared light and pure black-and-white.” For the camera the rule was even simpler. Everything the sun hit was washed out, “so it’s direct sun and it’s bounced sun.”
A star that sends out heat and no visible light would be a black disc to a human eye, and everything under it would be lit by light nobody can see.
The infrared camera: how Greig Fraser shot the arena
A digital camera’s sensor picks up some infrared on its own, past the red end of what you can see, so an infrared-cut filter in front of it keeps the picture to visible light. For Giedi Prime, by American Cinematographer’s account, Fraser shot on Arri Alexa LF and Mini LF cameras with that filter taken off the sensor, which gave him a colour infrared image. Then he added an 87C, a Kodak filter that cuts all visible light and lets only infrared through, and the image was desaturated in post.
He had used the trick before, on a smaller scale. On Rogue One, ARRI Rental modified some Alexa 65s “to do exactly the same thing,” Fraser told ARRI Rental, and they ran as VFX cameras, with parts of the set lit by infrared that didn’t touch the main image. “We just took that a step further.”
What a camera like that records, in his words, is “the infrared that bounces off skin or clothes, so colors are rendered as different tones and something that looks black to the eye might look white to the camera.” Jacqueline West had to change the material of many of her costumes so they would stay solid black in infrared, and some characters needed an exterior and an interior version of the same costume, one for their own light and one for the sun.
The walk from shade into sun needed its own trick. For a shot like Lady Margot Fenring, Léa Seydoux’s character, stepping out of the shade during the fight, they put two cameras on a 3D rig, “one camera was a color camera, and the other camera was the infrared camera,” and lit with LEDs “that put out visible light but don’t have infrared light,” so each camera saw its own light and nothing else.
None of it can be undone. Giedi Prime was the first thing they shot on stage, the first footage the studio would see, and Fraser told Screen Rant how that went: “Suddenly, we’re on phone calls going, ‘Can we fix that? Can we fix it in post? Can we add color? How do we resolve this?’” There was nothing to add back: the colour had never reached the sensor. “There’s no way back,” he said. “We’ve made a choice, and we’re going one way.” Villeneuve told IndieWire the same: “I had to warn the studio that there was no way back. It’s not an effect that we did in post-production.” And: “I love the commitment and the risk of it.”
Infrared before cinema: Robert W. Wood and the white leaves
The look is older than the movies that use it. In February 1910 The Century Magazine printed photographs by the American physicist Robert W. Wood, made with light past the red end of the spectrum, and that October the Royal Photographic Society’s journal ran his paper, “Photography by Invisible Rays.” His plates needed long exposures, so he photographed landscapes, and in them the leaves came out white, the way snow comes out white in an ordinary photograph. Photographers still call it the Wood effect.
Leaves look green because chlorophyll swallows most of the visible light that hits them, while the cell structure inside the leaf, as NASA puts it, “strongly reflects near-infrared light.” A clear sky works the other way. Its blue is sunlight scattered by the air, and air scatters infrared far less, so in an infrared photograph the sky goes dark and the clouds stand out white. Skin lets near-infrared a few millimetres in, which is why infrared portraits come out milky and smooth, with dark eyes. Put those three together and you have the Harkonnens. Astronomers use infrared to see more, through dust that hides the stars; Giedi Prime uses it to see less.
In the same year, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the Monastery of St. Nil on Lake Seliger in colour, through a red, a green and a blue filter. None of those channels is infrared, so the instrument below can only weigh them the way infrared would: lean on red, lift chlorophyll green hard, and sink clear blue. Put the ring on the sky, then on the trees.
The arena and the painting: Gérôme’s Pollice Verso in infrared
Movie arenas keep coming back to one painting. Jean-Léon Gérôme painted Pollice Verso, “with a turned thumb,” in 1872, and it hangs in the Phoenix Art Museum. A gladiator in a crested helmet stands with his foot on the throat of the man he’s beaten, who lifts two fingers asking for mercy. Above them the Vestals lean out of their box in white, every thumb turned down, and the emperor hasn’t decided yet. When the producers of Gladiator showed Ridley Scott a reproduction, he said, “That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness. I knew right then and there I was hooked.”
Gérôme painted it warm, sand and red walls and gold and the blood under the loser. Drag the line and infrared takes the warmth out: the skin goes pale and flat, and the red banner under the emperor’s box turns white where plain black and white leaves it dark. It ends up very close to Feyd-Rautha’s birthday, the same cruelty with nothing warm left in it.
The black sun in alchemy: Splendor Solis, 1582
Long before a film needed one, the black sun was an alchemist’s picture. Splendor Solis, “the splendour of the sun,” is an alchemical book of 22 full-page paintings, and the British Library’s copy, Harley MS 3469, is dated 1582. On folio 30 verso is the page the library’s catalogue calls, simply, “The black sun.” It goes down over a darkened country with a walled city far off, it has a face, and the trees in front of it have been cut down.
In alchemy the blackening came first. The nigredo was the stage where everything had to be broken down and cooked into one black matter before it could turn white and, at the very end, red, and three leaves later the same book gives you “The red sun,” rising over a city. The black sun is a world stripped to nothing so it can be made again. On Giedi Prime it never comes up red.
Arrakis by contrast: the colour Giedi Prime doesn’t have
Giedi Prime hits as hard as it does because the rest of the film is so warm. Arrakis is sand and spice and heat, and even there Fraser shaped the light with a filter instead of the grade. For the eclipse the Fremen attack under, he used a variable IR filter to change how much blue and green reached the sensor. “We tested creating that effect in the grade, but it just didn’t work as well,” he told American Cinematographer. “I needed to use the filter to achieve a strong red tone with hints of green and blue.”
In most films power comes as fire, loud and red and gold. Giedi Prime is power with every warm thing taken out of it, and that is what makes it frightening: nothing is left in the picture to hold on to.
The print to hang beside it is So Rose the One Wrapped in Flame, the black sun’s opposite. A figure made of fire reaches one arm out over burning rock, a wing of white and blue light streaming behind him and a small red planet in the dark: all the heat and colour the Harkonnen sun withholds, held in one body.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the Dune 2 arena scene in black and white?
Because in the film’s own rule the sun of Giedi Prime gives off no visible light, only infrared. Greig Fraser shot the Harkonnen exteriors, Feyd-Rautha’s birthday fight among them, on cameras that recorded only infrared, and the image was desaturated in post. Indoors, under artificial light, they are back in visible light and in colour.
What camera shot the infrared scenes in Dune: Part Two?
American Cinematographer names Arri Alexa LF and Mini LF cameras with the infrared-cut filter taken off the sensor and a Kodak 87C filter added to block visible light. On Rogue One, ARRI Rental had modified Alexa 65s the same way for Fraser to use as VFX cameras.
Why do the Harkonnens look so pale?
Fraser’s idea was that they’re pale because there’s no visible light from their sun. Infrared also goes a few millimetres into skin, which makes skin look milky and smooth in any infrared picture.
Why do black clothes turn white in infrared?
A dye that looks black is only black in visible light. Many reflect infrared, so “something that looks black to the eye might look white to the camera,” in Fraser’s words, and the costume designer Jacqueline West changed the material of many costumes to keep them solid black on Giedi Prime.
Read next
- Is Gargantua real? Interstellar’s black hole next to the real ones.
- The Star Gate in 2001, how light became a corridor, and the filters that made Monument Valley look like another planet.
- Why Tarkovsky switches between black and white and colour, Stalker’s sepia and the Bruegel in Solaris.
- Bleach bypass, the other way films take colour out: by leaving the silver in.
References
- Jay Holben, “Expanding the View for Dune: Part Two,” American Cinematographer, November 2024; online 24 January 2025: theasc.com
- ARRI Rental, “Greig Fraser ACS, ASC on Dune: Part Two,” 29 February 2024: arrirental.com
- Hoai-Tran Bui, interview with Denis Villeneuve and Greig Fraser, Inverse, 4 March 2024: inverse.com
- Grant Hermanns, interview with Greig Fraser, Screen Rant, 3 May 2024: screenrant.com
- Kodak, “KODAK WRATTEN 2 Optical Filter / 87C,” spectral density curve: kodak.com
- John Weier and David Herring, “Measuring Vegetation (NDVI & EVI),” NASA Earth Observatory: science.nasa.gov
- Robert W. Wood, “A New Departure in Photography,” The Century Magazine 79, no. 4 (February 1910), 565–572; “Photography by Invisible Rays,” The Photographic Journal 50, no. 10 (October 1910), 329–338
- “Infrared photography,” Wikipedia (the Wood effect, skies, skin): en.wikipedia.org
- Library of Congress, “The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated,” making the photographs: loc.gov; the St. Nil photograph, ppmsc.03973, via Wikimedia Commons
- Phoenix Art Museum, “Pollice Verso,” 28 August 2024: phxart.org
- Diana Landau, ed., Gladiator: The Making of the Ridley Scott Epic (Newmarket Press, 2000), p. 26
- British Library, Harley MS 3469, Splendor Solis, catalogue record: searcharchives.bl.uk; folio 30v via Wikimedia Commons
- “Nigredo,” Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
- Chris O’Falt, “Little Time Passed Between Dune and Dune: Part Two, but Worlds Changed,” IndieWire, 27 March 2024, via Yahoo News
- Frank Herbert, Dune (Chilton, 1965), appendix “Terminology of the Imperium,” entry “Giedi Prime”: archive.org
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