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If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling
If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die is a must-read book for all film students, film professionals, and others interested in filmmaking. This enlightening book guides filmmakers toward making the right color selections for their films, and helps movie buffs understand why they feel the way they do while watching movies that incorporate certain colors.
Guided by her twenty-five years of research on the effects of color on behavior, Bellantoni has grouped more than 60 films under the spheres of influence of six major colors, each of which triggers very specific emotional states. For example, the author explains that films with a dominant red influence have themes and characters that are powerful, lusty, defiant, anxious, angry, or romantic and discusses specific films as examples. She explores each film, describing how, why, and where a color influences emotions, both in the characters on screen and in the audience. Each color section begins with an illustrated Home Page that includes examples, anecdotes, and tips for using or avoiding that particular color.
Conversations with the author's colleagues - including award-winning production designers Henry Bumstead ( Unforgiven ) and Wynn Thomas ( Malcolm X ) and renowned cinematographers Roger Deakins ( The Shawshank Redemption ) and Edward Lachman ( Far From Heaven ) - reveal how color is often used to communicate what is not said.
Bellantoni uses her research and experience to demonstrate how powerful color can be and to increase readers awareness of the colors around us and how they make us feel, act, and react.
Guided by her twenty-five years of research on the effects of color on behavior, Bellantoni has grouped more than 60 films under the spheres of influence of six major colors, each of which triggers very specific emotional states. For example, the author explains that films with a dominant red influence have themes and characters that are powerful, lusty, defiant, anxious, angry, or romantic and discusses specific films as examples. She explores each film, describing how, why, and where a color influences emotions, both in the characters on screen and in the audience. Each color section begins with an illustrated Home Page that includes examples, anecdotes, and tips for using or avoiding that particular color.
Conversations with the author's colleagues - including award-winning production designers Henry Bumstead ( Unforgiven ) and Wynn Thomas ( Malcolm X ) and renowned cinematographers Roger Deakins ( The Shawshank Redemption ) and Edward Lachman ( Far From Heaven ) - reveal how color is often used to communicate what is not said.
Bellantoni uses her research and experience to demonstrate how powerful color can be and to increase readers awareness of the colors around us and how they make us feel, act, and react.
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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1692 people want to read
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September 1, 2014
This book has been interesting, but I’m not sure if I would really recommend it. It has been interesting because it has gotten me thinking about how colours are used in films and the impact those colours have on us as we watch them. How the colours help to inform the story – inform the narrative. But there were problems with this book and also things about the central thesis that annoyed me.
The main idea behind this book is an art teacher who gets her students to respond to colours by having a series of lessons on the colours of the rainbow. They have to bring along things that illuminate the meanings behind the colours – it is a cute idea. And off they go. Over 20 years of experiments there are a number of things that the art teacher is able to say about the impact of colour on visual story telling and she does this with reference to films and their use of colour.
It is hard to read this book and to watch films at the same time. I went to see The Great Gatsby in the middle of reading this book – I fell asleep in parts of it, I’m afraid. Anyway, the bit that made me really think of this book during the film was where the main character is first brought into the debauched and drunken world of Tom. The room they are in is lusty red (you can hear Tom having sex from a further room) and the woman Nick is with is dressed in a toxic green – with even green lipstick. We are told in the narration that this is one of the first times Nick has been drunk.
There is no question that colour is important to films – but reading this book made me feel like I was reading a book on the interpretation of dream symbolism by someone called something like Madame Solistanian. Far too much of this book was devoted to telling the stories of films – but just enough of the story not to have any ‘spoilers’ if you haven’t seen the film… All this became a bit dull, to be honest. And often the point of telling the story of the film became a bit obscure too. Sometimes I would think – I’m not sure she’s mentioned a colour in the last three paragraphs…
However, her discussion of the use of blue and yellow in Billy Elliot was utterly fascinating and utterly perfect. Billy Elliot is one of the reasons why I rarely see films anymore, by the way. I find them far too immediate. When I took the kids to see it years ago, I was nearly in tears during a scene where one character becomes a scab. Maddy turned and looked up at me and asked if I was going to cry – hmm. I think I would have rather been the world-weary parent comforting my crying daughter at the pictures, than the crying father being comforted by his pre-adolescent daughter…
I’m always going to have problems with a book that says, “First and most importantly, you select your left-brain and click ‘Quit’.”
Left brains are handy things to have – no reason to quit them. If I had been writing this book I would have probably not organised it according to the colours of the rainbow. How we categorise things says more about what we are going to think about those things (what we will decide is the truth about those things) than we generally realise.
One of my favourite books of all-time is Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations by Luria. In that he gets a group of illiterate peasant women to group little rags of materials by their various colours. They completely fail to group these into what we would consider logical collections of colours. You know, the shades of pinks grouped with the reds or the light greens working their way up to the dark blues. When he asked them why they didn’t put, say, the light browns with the dark browns he finally got to see what was wrong and why they failed to not only come up with logical groupings of colours according to our ‘logic’ – but any logical groupings at all. The women told him – “no, that colour can’t go with that one! This is the colour of cream and that is the colour of cow shit. They can’t go together!”
If I was writing a book about colour and how it impacts on us I would probably want to look at colours as manifestations of relationships, rather than colours as things. I wouldn’t, for instance, have chapters on blue and red and green and purple. I would more likely have chapters on summer and spring, on night and twilight – and therefore on the colours likely to be seen in those times. The impact being reminded of those times has on our emotions. I would have chapters on lust and power and envy. She does this, but because she is doing it from a ‘green means toxic’, ‘red means lust’ sort of way (I’m overstating this – she is actually much more subtle and much more smart than that) I think it undermines itself. Let me explain. I think people will come away from this book thinking – ‘shit, look, purple – who’s going to die?’ But that shouldn’t have been the point of this book. It should never have been about directly linking colours to emotions – but precisely the opposite – linking emotions to colours - as she does beautifully and utterly clearly at the end with those wonderful paintings from her students on rage and tranquility. You shouldn’t think – ‘look, lots of red, I need to feel horny, or angry or elegant now’. Better by far that you do this in exactly the opposite way – what is going on in this scene that is making me feel angry? Oh, look at all the red. Look at the closed in space the shot is taken in and listen to the scratching sound of the music on the soundtrack. By organising the book by colour she made it almost inevitable that people would go looking for colours as if they were star signs.
If I was writing this book I would also talk much more about visual rhymes – but that is only because I’ve only started thinking about these recently and have become a bit obsessed with them. Still – more on the subtle affects of colours rhyming through films would have been really interesting (this is done so, so well in her discussion of American Beauty and the use of Red) – as would something showing how great works of art have been used in constructing various scenes in films, to work as subliminal reminders.
Anyway, this makes it sound like I hated this book, and I certainly didn’t hate it at all. It also makes it sound like I learnt nothing from it – and that wouldn't be true either. The discussion on American Beauty and that film's use of Red, White and Blue throughout was inspired, for example. This is on a subject I’ve become increasingly aware of and find increasingly important. It is good to be forced to notice things like the use of colour and the affect it has on how we see films, how we feel them, how we come to understand them. I worry that we are basically illiterate when it comes to understanding visual language – and tragically, the illiterate are those most likely to be manipulated.
The main idea behind this book is an art teacher who gets her students to respond to colours by having a series of lessons on the colours of the rainbow. They have to bring along things that illuminate the meanings behind the colours – it is a cute idea. And off they go. Over 20 years of experiments there are a number of things that the art teacher is able to say about the impact of colour on visual story telling and she does this with reference to films and their use of colour.
It is hard to read this book and to watch films at the same time. I went to see The Great Gatsby in the middle of reading this book – I fell asleep in parts of it, I’m afraid. Anyway, the bit that made me really think of this book during the film was where the main character is first brought into the debauched and drunken world of Tom. The room they are in is lusty red (you can hear Tom having sex from a further room) and the woman Nick is with is dressed in a toxic green – with even green lipstick. We are told in the narration that this is one of the first times Nick has been drunk.
There is no question that colour is important to films – but reading this book made me feel like I was reading a book on the interpretation of dream symbolism by someone called something like Madame Solistanian. Far too much of this book was devoted to telling the stories of films – but just enough of the story not to have any ‘spoilers’ if you haven’t seen the film… All this became a bit dull, to be honest. And often the point of telling the story of the film became a bit obscure too. Sometimes I would think – I’m not sure she’s mentioned a colour in the last three paragraphs…
However, her discussion of the use of blue and yellow in Billy Elliot was utterly fascinating and utterly perfect. Billy Elliot is one of the reasons why I rarely see films anymore, by the way. I find them far too immediate. When I took the kids to see it years ago, I was nearly in tears during a scene where one character becomes a scab. Maddy turned and looked up at me and asked if I was going to cry – hmm. I think I would have rather been the world-weary parent comforting my crying daughter at the pictures, than the crying father being comforted by his pre-adolescent daughter…
I’m always going to have problems with a book that says, “First and most importantly, you select your left-brain and click ‘Quit’.”
Left brains are handy things to have – no reason to quit them. If I had been writing this book I would have probably not organised it according to the colours of the rainbow. How we categorise things says more about what we are going to think about those things (what we will decide is the truth about those things) than we generally realise.
One of my favourite books of all-time is Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations by Luria. In that he gets a group of illiterate peasant women to group little rags of materials by their various colours. They completely fail to group these into what we would consider logical collections of colours. You know, the shades of pinks grouped with the reds or the light greens working their way up to the dark blues. When he asked them why they didn’t put, say, the light browns with the dark browns he finally got to see what was wrong and why they failed to not only come up with logical groupings of colours according to our ‘logic’ – but any logical groupings at all. The women told him – “no, that colour can’t go with that one! This is the colour of cream and that is the colour of cow shit. They can’t go together!”
If I was writing a book about colour and how it impacts on us I would probably want to look at colours as manifestations of relationships, rather than colours as things. I wouldn’t, for instance, have chapters on blue and red and green and purple. I would more likely have chapters on summer and spring, on night and twilight – and therefore on the colours likely to be seen in those times. The impact being reminded of those times has on our emotions. I would have chapters on lust and power and envy. She does this, but because she is doing it from a ‘green means toxic’, ‘red means lust’ sort of way (I’m overstating this – she is actually much more subtle and much more smart than that) I think it undermines itself. Let me explain. I think people will come away from this book thinking – ‘shit, look, purple – who’s going to die?’ But that shouldn’t have been the point of this book. It should never have been about directly linking colours to emotions – but precisely the opposite – linking emotions to colours - as she does beautifully and utterly clearly at the end with those wonderful paintings from her students on rage and tranquility. You shouldn’t think – ‘look, lots of red, I need to feel horny, or angry or elegant now’. Better by far that you do this in exactly the opposite way – what is going on in this scene that is making me feel angry? Oh, look at all the red. Look at the closed in space the shot is taken in and listen to the scratching sound of the music on the soundtrack. By organising the book by colour she made it almost inevitable that people would go looking for colours as if they were star signs.
If I was writing this book I would also talk much more about visual rhymes – but that is only because I’ve only started thinking about these recently and have become a bit obsessed with them. Still – more on the subtle affects of colours rhyming through films would have been really interesting (this is done so, so well in her discussion of American Beauty and the use of Red) – as would something showing how great works of art have been used in constructing various scenes in films, to work as subliminal reminders.
Anyway, this makes it sound like I hated this book, and I certainly didn’t hate it at all. It also makes it sound like I learnt nothing from it – and that wouldn't be true either. The discussion on American Beauty and that film's use of Red, White and Blue throughout was inspired, for example. This is on a subject I’ve become increasingly aware of and find increasingly important. It is good to be forced to notice things like the use of colour and the affect it has on how we see films, how we feel them, how we come to understand them. I worry that we are basically illiterate when it comes to understanding visual language – and tragically, the illiterate are those most likely to be manipulated.
June 15, 2022
This book examines the effects of color on emotion and the meanings of colors as used in films. It starts off with a questionable new age theory of color in the introduction. In this theory, the author states that our bodies are made of light and that colors somehow interact directly with the light in our bodies. Fortunately, this theory is raised much in the main text of the book. It is only hinted at when the author states that reactions to color are universal rather than bound to culture or experience.
Getting past the theory, the descriptions of the use of colors in films are interesting. However, there aren't many images in this book, so most of the color effects are described in text. This works fine when the author discussed movies that you know since you are able to visualize these descriptions. When the author discusses movies that you haven't watched, it a lot more difficult to visualize. If this book gets a new edition, it would be nice if more images were included.
Getting past the theory, the descriptions of the use of colors in films are interesting. However, there aren't many images in this book, so most of the color effects are described in text. This works fine when the author discussed movies that you know since you are able to visualize these descriptions. When the author discusses movies that you haven't watched, it a lot more difficult to visualize. If this book gets a new edition, it would be nice if more images were included.
May 3, 2022
An excellent book to study the different use of colors and how it affects our perception of things.
My favorite part of the book was when Patti tells the story about the all the experiments her students made and the paintings at the end where each one of them, without knowing, represented the emotions with the same colors.
I'll probably reread this in the future while I have a little marathon with all the movies mentioned!
My favorite part of the book was when Patti tells the story about the all the experiments her students made and the paintings at the end where each one of them, without knowing, represented the emotions with the same colors.
I'll probably reread this in the future while I have a little marathon with all the movies mentioned!
December 11, 2018
Beautifully written in a simple, friendly style. Isn’t afraid to talk about the impact of colour on our emotions, something semiotic analysis tends to lack.
Could only be improved by more pictures and colour swatches ❤️
Could only be improved by more pictures and colour swatches ❤️
December 24, 2023
pealkiri intrigeerivam kui raamat ise, aga häid mõtteid ikkagi jagus
October 10, 2024
Fioletowy to mój ulubiony kolor
August 2, 2011
Excellent book on the study of the use of color in production design in current films. Learn how color is used as a visual clue to where the story or character is or going. The opening chapter "Backstory" asks the question what do you think is "Red" and how people can experience color using all five senses.
July 10, 2012
Probably the most thought-changing book I've ever read. Changed how I watched films, advertisements, billboards, everything. Its all about how colors can influence your perceptions of a film. How they nudge you to accept a character dying or feel adrenaline with characters sitting. Recommend for anyone adapting something written to visual mediums.
July 29, 2016
Interesting & instructive book. It made me rethink of each color metaphor in any movie I'll see from now on.
I have to read it again and again after carefully watching each movie mentioned in it.
I have to read it again and again after carefully watching each movie mentioned in it.
August 12, 2025
Świetne źródło do czerpania informacji, przejrzysta, a zaraz wymagająca skupienia się, aby zrozumieć pewne niuanse, które zachodzą w pojmowaniu kolorów na ekranie, gdyż odpowiada za to prawa półkula mózgu. Za atut uznaje również wykorzystanie żywych i kolorowych ilustracji, aby urzeczywistniać przykłady, jednak czasami brakowało mi ich, może trochę mniejszych, ale w większych ilościach.
Mogę również powiedzieć, że jak na pierwsze 150 stron faktycznie czuć nową wiedzę, tak jak przy analizy ostatnich 2/3 kolorów, jedynie opis koloru jest edukacyjnym powiewem nowości, a reszta to opisy i analizy scen z kultowych filmów, które ciężko przenieść do notatnika, a potem do pamięci długotrwałej.
Mogę również powiedzieć, że jak na pierwsze 150 stron faktycznie czuć nową wiedzę, tak jak przy analizy ostatnich 2/3 kolorów, jedynie opis koloru jest edukacyjnym powiewem nowości, a reszta to opisy i analizy scen z kultowych filmów, które ciężko przenieść do notatnika, a potem do pamięci długotrwałej.
February 21, 2017
Does not delve much deeper into analysis outside the well known interpretations of color on film. Additionally, presupposes that one's interpretation of a certain color is somehow organic and innate, ignoring the much more plausible argument that the type of mood, emotion, behavior, etc. we associate certain colors with is to a large extent influenced by the overarching cultural paradigms and conventions established within the society over the course of human history.
November 11, 2022
I picked up this book thinking that Bellantoni was going to talk about the universal meaning of colors in film… but she didn’t. She only pointed out that the meaning of colors solely depends on the context of a movie scene. A waste of time.
April 9, 2020
Fascinating read on the bridge between aesthetics and psychology.
May 7, 2020
mehhhh (dnf)
November 30, 2023
Color, man
October 19, 2024
It was so interesting to see how color effects scenes and there were so many wonderful examples. Definitely worth a read to anyone interested in film or just color theory.
October 27, 2024
Shame it's somewhat just touch the surface of the topic. Could've been more comprehensively elaborated with deeper details.
Read
February 24, 2025Another thesis book!
December 12, 2025
for diss but still counts
February 3, 2025
Great book! Not one I would read start to finish, but a great reference book.
January 20, 2013
A very thorough examination of how color in film is used. For what it's worth, I remember reading the beginning of this book awhile ago and watching the film Black Narcissus, which isn't mentioned in the book. During a crucial scene there was a purple light in the background, and I remember thinking "some big shit is going to happen right now." Well, SPOILER ALERT, someone died a few minutes later during that scene, so there is something to this.
March 2, 2009
A discussion of color in film production design. It's not really a read-straight-through sort of book. Once you understand the premise and the format it serves as a reference; you can read what interests you. It's most helpful as a companion to the many sited films. I really enjoyed watching Quantum of Solace after reading the section on purple…
Currently reading
August 20, 2010I've only read a little of this book so far because I just bought it, and what I read was the introduction on the "look inside this book" section of Amazon.com, but just that little book was so intriguing that I had to order it - I hope the rest of it's just as good!
PS. Love the title! That's what originally grabbed my attention...
PS. Love the title! That's what originally grabbed my attention...
June 24, 2008
This book was awesome! Not just for different color used within lighting, but within all aspects of the stage.
August 15, 2011
great primer to color theory. also interesting for people who understand color theory as it's a case study for movies, color, and mood.
September 5, 2011
Quite whakadoodle!
August 4, 2014
Excellent reading for anyone working with any kind of visual storytelling.
December 13, 2016
Wonderful book on the anatomy of storytelling through color in film. A necessity for all artists in games and animation.
August 27, 2008
amazing look into what colors mean
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews