Colour Consciousness and Design in Blanche Fury as Technicolor Melodrama

This article addresses colour and music as elements associated with the rhetoric and excesses of film melodrama through a case study of Blanche Fury (1947). Music is discussed as an analogy for thinking about colour composition and the moving image through the rhetoric and practices of Technicolor design and a theoretical context contemporary to the film’s making discerned in both production materials and film text. Colour takes on a musical value which serves a diegetic function by both situating characters in relation to the mise-en-scène and operating as a cue to instances of perception attributed specifically to the female protagonist. Drawing on theories of melodrama and colour I will argue that colour and music are integral to and offer material for further explorations of feminine desire and sexual difference as they can be seen to operate in this particular melodrama.