Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s
"The blurb on the back of this book claims that 'Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow is the first scholarly history of Technicolor aesthetics and technology, as well as a thoroughgoing analysis of how color works in film. Scott Higgins draws on extensive primary research and close analysis of well-known movies ... to show how the Technicolor films of the 1930s forged enduring conventions for handling color in popular cinema.' It also claims that Higgins 'formulates a new vocabulary and method of analysis for capturing the often elusive functions and effects of color that, in turn, open up new avenues for the study of film form and lay a foundation for new work on color in cinema'. These claims are well founded. Indeed, if anything, they understate rather than overstate Higgins's achievements...Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow does indeed formulate 'a new vocabulary and a method of analysis' for capturing the effects and the functions of colour. It also provides a convincing account of the ways in which three-colour Technicolor was deployed in three distinct and successive 'modes' in the 1930s... he has produced an exemplary book." Steve Neale, Screen 2008, issue 49