There's a moment in The Last Emperor, in a courtyard of the Forbidden City, where the sun sits on the horizon as a giant red ball and then drops, the red drains out of the scene, there's a beat of neutral color, and when the moon comes up the light turns a deeper and deeper blue. American Cinematographer read that passage as the film telling its audience, in color alone, that the sun had set on the Chinese empire. You can feel that before anybody explains it to you.
Vittorio Storaro lit it, and he's the cinematographer who actually wrote down what color means, a spectrum running from black to white with every hue tied to a meaning and to a time of human life, and a written plan for every film built out of it before the camera ever turns. He calls the work writing with light.
Writing with light: the method behind Storaro's color
Back in the 1970s most cinematographers still called the craft painting with light, and Storaro argued for a different verb, taken from the Greek roots of the word itself, that cinematographers write with light and motion. "It is the real meaning of what we are trying to accomplish," he told American Cinematographer in 2001. "It is a visual language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing ideas and feelings."
He means the writing literally. "Before I begin a film, I always sit down with the script and create my own scenario in colour and light," he wrote. He goes through it scene by scene, marking where a sequence wants night instead of day, then works with the production and costume designers until the color moves as one. American Cinematographer called that document his ideation, "a symbolic map of color and emotion that he develops for every film."
Those notes became a trilogy of books, Writing with Light, Colors and Elements.
Not everybody around him bought into it. In the 1992 documentary, also called Writing With Light, the production designer Richard Sylbert points out that every viewer brings their own private associations to a color, and Bertolucci says he lets Storaro keep symbolism he disagrees with. Storaro never asked to be decoded, he figured you'd feel it either way: "Even if the audience doesn't see the meanings of different colors, they can feel them."
Caravaggio and The Calling of Saint Matthew
Before any of the color he had to learn light, and he learned it from painters. In the early 1960s, after his third film as a camera operator, work in Italy dried up and he saw the hole in his own training: "I learned everything about technology at school, but nobody taught me how to interpret stories." So he spent the next years on Mozart, Rembrandt, Faulkner, Vermeer and Caravaggio.
One church did more than the rest. Walking around the center of Rome with Antonia, who later became his wife, he went into San Luigi dei Francesi and saw The Calling of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel without knowing who had painted it. "It took my breath away," he told MovieMaker. "There is a beam of light that goes from the top to the bottom of the painting, dividing it into two parts. One side is in daylight and the other side is in darkness." "That was the first time that I saw light and darkness used as metaphors for life and death." He drew on it for The Conformist, 1900 and Reds.
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The wide
One beam, two halves of a room. Look at where the light comes from.
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The window
A window is painted on the back wall. The beam runs beneath it, so the light comes from somewhere else.
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The source
It comes from outside the picture, high on the right above Christ’s head, from a source Caravaggio never shows.
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The hand
It travels toward the table the way his hand points, so the light and the gesture reach Matthew together.
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The dark at the right
Christ and Peter stand in the dark at the right, Christ’s hand and profile caught at the beam’s edge.
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The table
Where the beam and the hand arrive together: the table, and the men counting money at it.
Decades later, shooting the 2007 television film Caravaggio for Angelo Longoni, he made the painter's palette a rule for himself. "While studying Caravaggio's paintings, I noticed that he used blacks, orange to red colors, yellows, some whites, and very rich green tones, but you never see blue in his paintings. So I also completely avoided the use of blue."
Vittorio Storaro's color theory: the meaning of color in film, hue by hue
In the 1992 documentary, explaining how he lit Willard's trip upriver in Apocalypse Now, Storaro walks through the spectrum like it's a life:
…"heart of darkness" is represented by black, black is the unconscious, [it's] where everything start; and the first step is red the color of the blood. Orange is the color of the warm, female and family. Yellow is the consciousness. Green is the process of knowing, knowledge. Blue is your intelligence as a human being. Indigo is your material power. Violet is your last stage in the human life. And the sum of all of this color is the last one, white, which means balance, which means equilibrium.
In 2016 he gave AnOther the ages that go with it. Orange is "between three and ten years old," when "we need the warm feeling of family around us." Yellow comes "around 12 years old," green "around 20," and blue, freedom, "between 30 and 50 years old." Violet, at 76, was where he was himself: "the moment when you transfer your knowledge to a new generation." White is "the unity of the different stages as you reach the end."
Newton gives him the order of the spectrum, and Goethe's Theory of Colours gives him the idea that hues act on the mind. The Greek elements give him a second key that overlaps the first: water is green, fire is red, earth is ocher, air is blue, and when a life is in balance they combine into white. "The meanings of colors are universal, even if they have different meanings in different cultures," he said.
Sometimes the two keys disagree, and he lets them. For the 2000 miniseries Dune the Harkonnens are fire and red, "which signifies conflict," the desert Fremen are water and green, the emperor is air and blue, and Paul ends as white, "the unity of the four basic elements." So green means water in Dune, while in The Last Emperor the same green means knowledge. Twenty-four years later Dune: Part Two shot the Harkonnen world in black-and-white infrared, with no color to read at all.
The Conformist: a cage of light, then Paris in blue
Storaro and Bertolucci were both still in their twenties when they shot The Conformist, released in 1970, months after The Spider's Stratagem, their first film together. "We were searching for some way to dramatize color," he recalled, "because at that time everybody thought that color was for comedy."
Marcello Clerici is a man trying to disappear into Fascism, and the film builds his Rome as a trap. "I wanted to create a kind of visual cage around him, using very sharp light and shadows to create a claustrophobic feeling," Storaro said, and he kept that cage "almost monochromatic." The film stages Plato's cave, and he took the point for his own trade: "In a way, Plato's myth of the cave is also the myth of cinema."
Then the cage opens up. "For Italians of that era, Paris represented freedom," so in Paris he made "the light much more soft" and let more color in. On the honeymoon train, "the scene progresses from the morning to the afternoon, which is completely orange, and then to the evening, which is blue." He admits he "didn't really understand the true meaning of the color blue at that point," and used it anyway, on feel. "In a way, The Conformist was my passport to Apocalypse Now," he said.
Apocalypse Now cinematography: artificial color imposed on nature
Apocalypse Now was Storaro's first Hollywood film and the start of his work with Francis Ford Coppola, and the whole idea was a collision: "I could convey the conflict of cultures by creating a visual conflict between artificial light and natural light."
When he found out the film would use colored smoke to carry military signals he thought it was wonderful, because "these artificial colors were placed next to the natural colors of Vietnam." The opening is nearly monochrome, and as the boat goes deeper, American Cinematographer wrote in 2001, "Storaro imposes an unnatural color (red) on a natural one (green) to visually represent the escalation of the conflict." Years later, supervising the DVD transfer, he was still protecting that line, telling the colorist Lou Levinson to push an orange river mist toward red: "Make that a little more red, but keep the green the same."
At the end of the river there's black. "Colonel Kurtz represents the unconscious, which we all have inside of us," Storaro said. "He represents the dark side of the United States, which is why black is such an important color in the film." Black is the bottom rung of his spectrum, the unconscious, where, as he put it in 1992, everything starts.
He went after those blacks in the lab too. ENR, the process Ernesto Novelli devised at Technicolor Rome (the letters are his initials), keeps silver in the print to deepen the blacks. In tests it gave him "exactly what I'd had in mind" for the Kurtz scenes, but it couldn't be used on the first release prints.
After Apocalypse Now he took a year just to study color theory. "I was knowledgeable about the technology of cinema, but ignorant of the knowledge of art," he said, and that year is where the spectrum came from.
Reds, One from the Heart and Dick Tracy: tools for the theory
A theory of color needs control, and the 1980s are where Storaro built the tools for it. On Reds (1981), the start of his work with Warren Beatty, ENR finally went into production. On Coppola's One from the Heart (1982) he brought a theater technique to film, every light preset on a dimmer board so whole lighting states could be set up in advance and changed at once. American Cinematographer said it made cinematography comparable to choreography.
Dick Tracy (1990), for Beatty again, is the system at its easiest to read. Storaro gave Chester Gould's characters their own hues, red for the Kid, orange for Tess Trueheart, yellow for Tracy, green for D.A. Fletcher and for discoveries, darker blue and indigo for the gangsters, and violet for murder. "Each color has an energy, a specific meaning," he said. "I don't ever want to accidentally misuse a color and give the wrong information to an audience." The saturated gels he needed didn't exist yet (for one yellow he stacked three layers), so Rosco built him a palette of pure colors, later sold in its Cinegel range as the Storaro Selection.
The Last Emperor colors: Pu Yi's life through the spectrum
The Last Emperor (1987) is where the whole system runs, start to finish. "For The Last Emperor, I tried to visualise Pu Yi's life through the colour spectrum, with his evolution as a journey towards the light of knowledge," Storaro wrote. This is the order as he wrote it:
- Red: Pu Yi's birth as emperor, "on a dark night lit by flickering torches," when he is taken from his mother.
- Orange: "The Orange rays of the morning sun," his childhood inside the Forbidden City.
- Yellow: the color of imperial dominion, his conscious power when he is crowned.
- Green: knowledge, which reaches him as a teenager through his English tutor, Reginald Johnston.
- Blue: freedom, when the warlords drive him out of the Forbidden City.
- Indigo: his second coronation, as the Japanese restore him as ruler of Manchukuo.
- Violet: consciousness, "the introspection of his behaviour as emperor and as a man."
He treated light itself as knowledge too. While the boy emperor is kept from the world he's kept out of the direct beam, "there's always the umbrella of the eunuch or some other material at the window," and American Cinematographer noticed that sunlight never touches his face until he starts to understand there's an outside world. Then the tutor arrives. "When R.J. brings knowledge I bring light, and for the first time Pu Yi is lit by the sun's rays." Direct light brings hard shadow with it, and from Johnston through Tientsin and Changchun the shadows grow until they overpower the light.
When the Japanese seat Pu Yi in a small conference room and his position becomes clear, the sunlight in the window behind him moves from day toward night inside the one scene. In prison, while Pu Yi looks back on his life, Storaro separates light and shadow to show a man changing. The film's underlying movement, he wrote, is "from Black to White," and it resolves in the weather: "In the end when Pu Yi is pardoned, we have white snow, with no shadows. Light and shadow are no longer in conflict, they are in harmony."
Of the films here, Apocalypse Now sits closest to Signs of the Solstice. A woman in an orange shirt lifts a burning flare out of a field of green leaves and violet flowers, and red smoke streams across a violet-blue sky: a made red over natural green, like the signal smoke on the river, here in daylight with her face turned up to it.
Frequently asked questions
What does each color mean in Vittorio Storaro's color theory?
As he put it in the 1992 documentary: black is the unconscious, red blood, orange warmth and family, yellow consciousness, green knowledge, blue intelligence, indigo material power, violet the last stage of life, and white, the sum of them all, balance. A second key comes from the four Greek elements (water green, fire red, earth ocher, air blue), so the same hue can mean two things in two films.
How many Oscars has Vittorio Storaro won?
Three for Best Cinematography: Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981) and The Last Emperor (1987), plus a fourth nomination for Dick Tracy (1990). In February 2001, at 60, he received the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, the youngest person to receive it.
What cameras and film stock was Apocalypse Now shot on?
Mitchell reflex cameras modified by Technovision to take Cooke anamorphic lenses, on Kodak's then-new 5247 color negative. Storaro was unhappy with its contrast, so after tests in Rome with Ernesto Novelli the exposed negative was flown to Technicolor Rome and flashed before development. Dailies went to Rome too, after he threatened to quit when the producers wanted them done in Los Angeles.
Read next
- Caravaggio's paintings: light and emotion, the painter behind Storaro's first lesson in light.
- Chiaroscuro: Caravaggio to The Godfather, how one beam in a dark room became a way of lighting cinema.
- Color in Film: how cinema makes you feel, the hub of the Screening Room series.
References
- "Guiding Light: Vittorio Storaro," American Cinematographer, February 2001 (archived): page 1, page 2, page 3
- Stephen Pizzello, "Apocalypse Now: A Clash of Cultures," American Cinematographer, February 2001: theasc.com
- John Bailey and Stephen Pizzello, "Shadows of the Psyche: The Conformist," American Cinematographer, February 2001: theasc.com
- Ray Zone, "A Novel Approach to Dune," American Cinematographer, February 2001: theasc.com
- Vittorio Storaro, "Painting with Light," in Basil Pao, The Last Emperor Revisited (Hong Kong University Press, 2023): HKU Press preview
- Writing With Light (documentary, 1992), transcript excerpt in E.M. Taboada, No Film School, 2013: nofilmschool.com
- Daisy Woodward, "Talking Café Society with Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro," AnOther, 2016: anothermag.com
- Bob Fisher, interview with Vittorio Storaro on Caravaggio, MovieMaker, 2008: moviemaker.com
- Jon Fauer, "The Calling of Vittorio Storaro," Film and Digital Times, 2015: fdtimes.com
- Joel Svendsen, "Vittorio Storaro Reveals the Origin of the Storaro Selection in Dick Tracy," Rosco, 2020: rosco.com
- Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, Wikimedia Commons (public domain): commons.wikimedia.org
- "Storaro Will Receive ASC Lifetime Achievement Award," Widescreen Review, 29 September 2000: widescreenreview.com
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