Tony's bar is red. In Mean Streets (1973) Harvey Keitel's Charlie works the room under light the color of a warning, every face in there takes on the color of the bulbs, and under light that red a white shirt and a line of blood come back to the lens as nearly the same thing.
The Scorsese red comes in two kinds. The first is the Mean Streets red of neon and sin, thrown by the bulbs over a bar. The second came out of a lab. By 1980 Martin Scorsese was writing open letters about old color prints turning pink and magenta as their dyes failed, he shot Raging Bull in black and white partly to keep his own film out of that decay, and he petitioned Eastman Kodak with more than two hundred names behind him. Ten years later he founded The Film Foundation. If you've ever pulled an old family photo out of a drawer and found it gone pink, you've seen what he was fighting.
Mean Streets red: the bar, the church and the match
Mean Streets was Scorsese's third feature, drawn from his own upbringing in Little Italy and shot in about 27 days, mostly in Los Angeles, with the church scenes at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. The cinematographer, Kent L. Wakeford, was a documentary cameraman who had never shot a feature, and his handheld camera keeps going back to two rooms, the church and the bar.
It's Scorsese's own voice that opens the film: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets." Charlie believes that, and his idea of punishment is physical, hell, he says, is "the burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite." Then the film puts him right back in the bar, which glows like the inside of that match.
Pauline Kael caught the look, "the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid," and lurid is the exact word, for a reason that comes down to optics. A bulb or a neon tube is a small source, so its light follows the inverse-square law, and twice the distance from the fixture gets you a quarter of the light. So a room lit by its own fixtures breaks up into pools of color with black between them, and people stand in those pools like somebody put them there. Two years later Kubrick's lighting pushed the idea as far as it goes: in the candlelit card games of Barry Lyndon, the candles on the table are the key light.
Red light also wipes out difference. A narrow red source gives every surface the same one band to reflect, so white cotton, skin and blood all send back the same red, and anything green or blue has nothing to give back and drops toward black. The whole palette collapses to one hue and its absence.
- White sleeve
- Skin
- Red skirt
- Wine
- Teal bodice
Taxi Driver cinematography: neon, steam and the red they drained
Three years later the red moved outdoors. Michael Chapman shot Taxi Driver (1976) during a New York heat wave and sanitation strike in the summer of 1975, and for the scenes inside the cab he and Scorsese folded themselves onto the floor of the back seat and shot with available light while the sound crew rode in the trunk. Chapman credited the approach to Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard.
Available light in Manhattan at night means signs, so the city does the lighting, storefront neon and the spill from places that never close, smeared across the glass of a moving cab. Dan Perri's opening titles push it further, color-treating second-unit footage so the film opens on glowing neon and deep black before anybody says a word. Roger Ebert called the film a hell, "from the opening shot of a cab emerging from stygian clouds of steam."
Then the red got taken away. The ratings board gave the cut an X over the final shootout, and Scorsese told The Hollywood Reporter how the studio put it: "Cut it for an R or we cut it." He trimmed some of the blood, and then he reached for a look he'd wanted for years, the desaturation Oswald Morris had used on John Huston's Moby Dick. "What if we drained some of the color out and replicated the process of Moby Dick?" The studio accepted it, and "the entire shootout at the end goes to a grainier look. And I just finally felt good about the picture."
Desaturation pulls the chroma down while the brightness mostly holds, so blood slides from red toward rust and brown, and the scene starts to look like a document of itself. "Ultimately Marty desaturated the red, and that made a big difference," the producer Michael Phillips said. Chapman was not at peace with it. "The whole last scene is completely screwed when they first put it out. I was very angry," he told The Film Stage, adding that in his later restoration he hoped he had brought it back up toward the color of the rest of the film.
Put the dates in order and it gets strange, because the man who would spend 1980 fighting to keep color from leaving films got his R in 1976 by taking it out himself. Tarantino reached for the same lever in 2003, turning the Crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill black and white to keep his R.
Why Raging Bull is black and white
Raging Bull premiered in New York on November 14, 1980, and by then Scorsese had already explained in print why it had no color. In a letter to Film Comment, published in the January to February 1980 issue, he wrote: "My present film, Raging Bull, was shot in black-and-white to avoid the color problem entirely."
The color problem was fading, and in the same letter he named his own film as a casualty: "My own work has been severely affected, in that New York, New York was made to look like a Technicolor imbibition film. Within five years, its color will have faded beyond any recognition of the original concept." And he asked, "How can we sit back and allow a classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, to fade to magenta?"
Fading was one reason, and a pair of red gloves was another. When Scorsese showed 8mm color footage of Robert De Niro boxing to De Niro, Chapman and his mentor Michael Powell, Powell pointed out that gloves of the period would have been maroon, oxblood or black, and in Jami Bernard's National Film Registry essay for the Library of Congress, Powell tells him the gloves are "too red." Scorsese also wanted distance from the color boxing pictures of the moment (Bernard calls the film an "evil twin" to Rocky II), though he worried black and white would be mistaken for pretension.
So the red was held back, and the blood in Raging Bull runs black. Scorsese wanted one camera inside the ring, operated by Chapman himself, close enough to read the fighters' faces, and color only gets into the film twice. Dan Perri, who'd made the Taxi Driver titles, set the main title in red over the black-and-white ring, "I felt strongly that it had to be red," he told Art of the Title, and the other color is the LaMottas' home movies, re-created for the film, with Thelma Schoonmaker remembering Scorsese scratching their negative himself. A black-and-white silver image also has no dyes to lose.
Scorsese and color film fading: the 1980 campaign against Kodak
The chemistry is simple and cruel. An Eastman color print holds its image in three dye layers, cyan, magenta and yellow, and they don't age at the same rate. Henry Wilhelm, whose book The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs documents this history in detail, describes Eastman prints after 10 to 20 years of storage as showing "severe cyan dye loss" with "a pronounced red or magenta appearance." Cyan is the dye that absorbs red light, so as it goes the red passes straight through and every scene drifts toward pink. Magenta usually outlasts the others, and Wilhelm notes that restorers can rebuild color from "the degraded magenta dye image that still survives in most faded motion picture color films."
By the late 1970s you could see the damage on screens. Steven Spielberg wrote to Scorsese in November 1979 that "after only five years the blue is leaving the waters of Jaws while the blood spurting from Robert Shaw's mouth gets redder and redder," and in April 1980 Jack Tillmany of the Gateway Cinema in San Francisco wrote to him about the only 35mm print of Tom Jones still in service: "The whole damn thing has turned fire engine red." So the decay had a color, and it was the same color Scorsese had built his early films on.
By then he had a campaign going. In early 1980, with his staff and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker, he passed around a petition asking Kodak for color film that would last. His letter to colleagues, dated April 5, 1980, was headed "Everything We Are Doing Now Means Nothing!" "Working with film stock that is guaranteed to deteriorate in a matter of months is insulting and insane," it said. More than 200 people signed, Wilhelm records, among them Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, Elia Kazan, John Cassavetes, Steven Spielberg and the title designer Saul Bass, and on June 12, 1980, it went to Kodak with a Request for Information asking for the stability data the company had kept to itself.
Variety put the story on its front page on July 9: "Old Pix Don't Die, They Fade Away." Five days later two men from Kodak's motion picture division met Scorsese in his New York apartment, and a month after that meeting Kodak said it would make stability data public. In October 1981 it announced it was replacing all of its print films with Eastman Color Print Film 5384, which by Wilhelm's account was about ten times more stable than the films it replaced. The new stock came into general use in 1982 and 1983, and Fuji introduced its own improved films in 1983. Wilhelm, who advised the campaign, grants that some of the charges in the press were "rather exaggerated" and a few were wrong, but the thrust of the criticism was valid.
Film Comment runs Bill O’Connell’s “Fade Out”: color fading “has passed all other problems of film preservation.”
Spielberg writes to Scorsese that “the blue is leaving the waters of Jaws.”
In Film Comment, Scorsese says Raging Bull “was shot in black-and-white to avoid the color problem entirely.”
His letter to colleagues: “Everything We Are Doing Now Means Nothing!”
The only 35mm print of Tom Jones still in service: “The whole damn thing has turned fire engine red.”
The petition reaches Kodak with a Request for Information. More than 200 names.
Variety, front page: “Old Pix Don't Die, They Fade Away.”
Two men from Kodak meet him in his New York apartment. A month later Kodak says it will publish stability data.
Raging Bull premieres in New York, in black and white.
Kodak replaces all its print films with Eastman Color Print Film 5384, about ten times more stable.
Scorsese announces The Film Foundation with seven other directors.
- Sep 79
- Nov 79
- Jan 80
- Apr 80
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- May 90
Kodak gave Scorsese its Career Achievement Award in 1987, and on May 1, 1990, he announced The Film Foundation with seven other directors, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg among them. The foundation says it has helped restore more than 1,100 films, and its World Cinema Project, which Scorsese created in 2007, has restored 72 films from 34 countries.
Color as film history: The Age of Innocence, The Aviator, Killers of the Flower Moon
After the fight, Scorsese's color turns historical. The later films quote color processes by name, and red keeps changing what it is made of.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Michael Ballhaus shot The Age of Innocence, and it fades to solid color where a fade to black would normally go. "I was interested in the use of colour like brushstrokes," Scorsese said in an interview quoted by GamesRadar. "It just didn't seem right to fade to black, it had to be something rich in colour and texture, so I used fades to red and yellow." It's a film about desire held down by etiquette, so the screen floods red at exactly the moments nobody in the frame is allowed to.
The title sequence is by Elaine and Saul Bass, the same Saul Bass who had signed the 1980 petition, and it was Elaine's idea, time-lapse flowers opening and dissolving into each other, overlaid with lace and calligraphy from period etiquette books. Scorsese said the sequence had "the essence of the film," and he named it: "the longing, the hidden passion."
The Aviator (2004)
For The Aviator, Robert Richardson said in American Cinematographer, Scorsese "wanted the look of the film to match the time periods depicted in the scenes, chronologically building from hand-tinting to two-color [Technicolor], to three-color [Technicolor], to panchromatic." The Yale Film Archive's notes put the switch at about 53 minutes: the stretch covering 1927 to 1935 recreates two-strip Technicolor "with emphasis on red and cyan," and the rest simulates the three-strip process that reached features in 1935.
Two-color film records only two separations, so its palette is a single axis from orange-red through neutral to blue-green, and anything green has to land somewhere on that line. So the golf course where Hughes meets Katharine Hepburn reads blue-green, and Yale's notes joke about blue peas.
Every hue the painting holds.
Two records, one axis: orange-red to blue-green. The grass has nowhere to land but blue-green.
Three records: red, green and blue, and the whole triangle between them.
Prieto's description: red toward orange, blue toward violet, green stays green.
None of it was shot on Technicolor stock. Richardson shot ordinary Kodak negative and the looks were built in the digital intermediate, from lookup tables that the visual effects supervisor Rob Legato developed with the Technicolor color scientist Josh Pines. When Richard Schickel asked Scorsese why he went to all that trouble when most viewers would never notice, he said: "I thought it would be nice to make a little history of the movies."
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Rodrigo Prieto's work on Killers of the Flower Moon goes back even further, to Autochrome, the Lumière brothers' early color process. Prieto described its palette in American Cinematographer: "the green is green, but the blue leans more toward violet and the red is more of an orangey-red hue." His team built a lookup table to mimic that palette. He told Kodak it suited the scenes of Ernest Burkhart, William Hale and the descendants of European immigrants "since it is a photographic technique imported from Europe."
Scenes with only Osage characters use a "normal film" LUT that reproduces natural color. When Mollie's sister's house explodes, "and Ernest's feelings of guilt and confusion grow deeper," Prieto switched to an ENR-style look, contrasty, with rich blacks and subdued color. A three-strip Technicolor LUT returns for the death of Mollie's mother and for the coda.
So fifty years after the bar in Mean Streets, the red in a Scorsese film gets pushed toward orange on purpose, through a process imported from Europe, and the push belongs to the men doing the killing.
From film dye to pigment: why fading is a print problem too
Henry Wilhelm was a volunteer technical advisor to Scorsese and his staff from April 1980, and he helped write the Request for Information sent to Kodak. Before the July meeting Kodak said it wouldn't come if Wilhelm was in the room, so he went to Scorsese's office instead and missed it. These days Wilhelm Imaging Research tests the permanence of photographic and inkjet prints, the pigment systems used for fine-art editions among them.
What happened to film carries straight over to paper. When an image is made of dyes and one of them fails before the others, the picture changes hue as it fades, which is exactly what happened to Tom Jones. Pigment inks hold color in solid particles that sit in the paper's coating, and their life gets tested as a whole system, ink, paper and display together. What is an archival pigment print goes into the material.
- White wall
- Blue apron
- Yellow bodice
Storage was the other half of Wilhelm's answer for film, cold, humidity-controlled vaults, with the 1991 ANSI storage standard calling for 20 to 30 percent relative humidity for extended-term storage. A print on your wall can't live in a vault, so what matters becomes light, heat, humidity and handling, and how to care for an archival print walks through each one.
Closer To Paradise belongs beside the first red, the one from the bar and the church. A haloed figure in a white robe, a red cloth thrown over it, rises out of a field of fire and looks up toward a patch of clear blue sky: Charlie's argument from Mean Streets, sin felt as heat and grace somewhere above it. It is printed in pigment on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a 100% cotton sheet, so its reds sit in pigment particles, not in dyes like the ones that turned Tom Jones red.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Raging Bull in black and white?
Partly to escape fading. In a letter to Film Comment in early 1980 Scorsese wrote that the film "was shot in black-and-white to avoid the color problem entirely," meaning the fading of Eastman color stocks. Michael Powell also warned him that boxing gloves of the 1940s were maroon, oxblood or black, not bright red, and black and white set the film apart from the color boxing pictures of its day. Two things in it are in color: the red main title and the re-created LaMotta home movies.
Why does the shootout in Taxi Driver look washed out?
Because Scorsese drained its color to get an R rating. The ratings board objected to the blood in the final shootout, so he trimmed some of it and desaturated the whole sequence, borrowing the idea from Oswald Morris's color on Moby Dick (1956). Red blood turns to rust and brown. Scorsese said it made him feel good about the picture; the cinematographer Michael Chapman said he was very angry.
Why do old color films turn pink or red?
Because their cyan dye fades first. Eastman color prints from the 1950s to the early 1980s held the image in three dyes that fade at different rates, and cyan is the one that absorbs red light, so as it goes the image shifts toward red and magenta. Technicolor dye-imbibition prints, made from 1932 to 1978, hold their color far better, and Kodak's 5384 print film of the early 1980s was about ten times more stable than the stocks it replaced. Cold, dry storage slows fading on any stock.
Read next
- Color in film, the hub for this series and how cinema turns hue into feeling.
- Chiaroscuro in film, from Caravaggio's dark rooms to Gordon Willis's Godfather.
- Vittorio Storaro and the meaning of color, a cinematographer who wrote his color theory down.
- The Spectrograph, where the deepest reds in the XPRMTS work are mapped.
References
- Henry Wilhelm, with contributing author Carol Brower, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs, chapters 9 and 10 (Scorsese campaign, petition, Kodak 5384, Technicolor dye imbibition): http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
- AFI Catalog, Mean Streets (1973), production history: https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/55020
- Pauline Kael, "Everyday Inferno," review of Mean Streets, The New Yorker (October 8, 1973), reprinted by Scraps from the Loft: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/?p=11094
- Roger Ebert, review of Taxi Driver, Chicago Sun-Times (1976): https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taxi-driver-1976
- Gregg Kilday, "Taxi Driver" oral history, The Hollywood Reporter (2016): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/taxi-driver-oral-history-de-881032/
- "Michael Chapman Talks Restoring Taxi Driver," The Film Stage: https://thefilmstage.com/michael-chapman-talks-restoring-taxi-driver-and-the-problem-with-modern-cinematography/
- Dan Perri interview, "Raging Bull" title sequence, Art of the Title: https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/raging-bull/
- Thelma Schoonmaker on Raging Bull at Tribeca 2014, No Film School: https://nofilmschool.com/2014/04/editor-thelma-schoonmaker-breaks-down-raging-bull-tribeca-film-festival
- Jami Bernard, "Raging Bull," National Film Registry essay, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/raging_bull.pdf
- Robert Richardson, ASC, "On Color," American Cinematographer: https://theasc.com/article/robert-richardson-asc-on-color/
- Below the Line, on Richardson and The Aviator (after Bob Fisher, ICG Magazine, December 2004): https://mande.net/btl/awards/asc-nominee-robert-richardson
- Yale Film Archive, notes on The Aviator: https://web.library.yale.edu/film/notes/fn00056
- Stephen Pizzello, "Killers of the Flower Moon: Greed, Hubris and Homicide," American Cinematographer (December 2023): https://theasc.com/article/killers-of-the-flower-moon-greed-hubris-and-homicide/
- Kodak, Rodrigo Prieto on Killers of the Flower Moon: https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/killers-of-the-flower-moon/
- "30 Greatest Scorsese Film References," GamesRadar+ (Scorsese on the color fades in The Age of Innocence): https://www.gamesradar.com/uk/30-greatest-scorsese-film-references/3/
- Art of the Title, The Age of Innocence (from Pat Kirkham, Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design): https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-age-of-innocence/
- The Film Foundation, mission statement and 1990 founding announcement: https://www.film-foundation.org/mission-statement