Color And Color In Eduard Grau's A Single Man
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The use of lighting and filters for colours is not just used for simple illumination but it is more meaningful. It helps to understand the characters and focus our attention on certain objects and actions.
The colour can be used as a motif, an occurring manifestation in which the shades themselves become an important part of the story, reflecting emotions, altering situations and underlining scenes. (Bordwell, Thompson and Smith, n.d.)
Eduard Grau, the director of photography of A Single Man, creates a specific palette for the film. He plays with the saturation, making us see the happy sporadic moments ( throughout the past and the present) in bright colours sharply separating the two different ways of George behaving with people and surroundings.
Grau says about the decision of him and Ford to choose Kodak 5279 “It has very beautiful grain, and in a way, is timeless. . . . We tested it along with other stocks, and Tom and I both decided this would be the one.” The particularity of this stock is the high saturation, especially for the reds. (Thompson, nd)
As Kirsten Moana Thompson says on "Falling in (to) Color", the colour scheme used in A Single Man is a "fall to embodiment, sensuality and the pain of a lover 's loss."
This phrase could be the exact description of the film, in which desire and loss collide into a powerful depiction of the story of George.
It makes the story intimate, relatable even, despite the poetry of telling a story with music and artistic