Eliot Elisofon: the Materiality of Colour in Photography, Technicolor Film and the Archive of Moulin Rouge (Dir. John Huston, 1953)

The archive of working notes and correspondence between photojournalist Eliot Elisofon, John Huston, and Director of Photography Oswald Morris on the colour design of Moulin Rouge (1953) references a series of photographic tests with lens filters and colour gelatines. The discourse on colour control, which deviated from the recommendations of Technicolor’s Color Advisory Service, is evidenced in Elisofon’s Life Magazine photo-essays, including his 1953 article ‘Seven Stars in Seven Colors’. Colour via chromatic lighting (Misek 2010) was used in Moulin Rouge to signify emotion, psychological conflict, and to explore shifting social values by referencing the work of fin de siècle artists in Paris. Yet, the influence of Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dances (white clothes, make-up ‘painted’ with coloured light), which were a subject of Toulouse-Lautrec’s chromolithographs and echoed by Elisofon’s approach to colour design, remains sublimate in the discourse surrounding the film. The use of colour, lighting and close-ups – reviewed through the archive of experiments, theatrical and painterly references, which Director of Photography Morris described as unwieldly – and Elisofon’s repeated references to an article about Toulouse-Lautrec in Art News Annual 1951, begins to visualise subjectivities and sexualities inferred as transgressive in a cultural imaginary that sees the ‘deregulated physicality’ (Pollock 1999) enacted in Toulouse-Lautrec’s work persist in Huston’s film.