Don't Look Now: Transience and Text

Colour fades and colour balances shift. A comparative analysis of the colour red which operates across a series of releases of what is ostensibly the same film, but on different formats (35mm print, videotape, DVD) addresses the extent to which the film materials – by deterioration or design - can affect the formation of meaning at the level of the text. This study of Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) explores the significance of such variations for a diegetic and extra-diegetic discourse on colour, memory and loss. This work theorises the deterioration and restoration of film materials and archive as they affect the resolution of images and sounds on which textual analyses are based.