Color In Motion And Cyberpunk At The Academy Museum

This past weekend The Academy Museum opened its latest exciting exhibits. Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema is a comprehensive journey into the boundless world of color and how it is used to affect the mood and tone of a film. The exhibition is certainly the most colorful and awe-inspiring exhibit from the museum, featuring cameras, projectors, costumes, props, animation cels, and film posters.

When you enter the space you are transported to a powerful whirlwind of kaleidoscopic color. It’s an experience to immerse yourself in and give in to the unlimited power of vibrant color. This exhibit is very interactive with areas for visitors to interact with the spectrum of color on display. A must-see for film fans, featuring vivid objects like the red shoes from Powell and Pressburger’s timeless film The Red Shoes (1948), Kim Novak’s green dress from Alfred Hitchock’s masterpiece Vertigo (1958), and Heath Ledger’s Joker suit from Christopher Nolan’s epic, The Dark Knight (2008).

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema takes us on a journey to the recent past, which presents dystopian futures not dissimilar to what we are experiencing. A present that juxtaposes tech advances with social upheaval. Worlds of wonder mixed with scenes of despair. This Sci-Fi subgenre, Cyberpunk is ubiquitous in modern culture and has only grown its influence and standing over the years. The stunning exhibit features props from iconic films like Blade Runner (1982), eXistenZ (1999), and Total Recall (1990) among others.

Immersive recently spoke with Color in Motion curator Jessica Niebel about the exhibit. Niebel is an amazing curator and got to the heart of what makes color so integral to the movie-going experience.

[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]

What was the general concept behind this exhibit?

I’ve always loved how colors appeal to the subconscious and how detailed filmmakers think about color and how they employ color to create mood, meaning and drive the narrative forward. It is something that viewers or audiences never usually think about, but it’s doing so much subconsciously. It has such a tremendous impact on your viewing experience, but you never consciously think about it. So that is appealing to me.

Absolutely. I think you hit a number of the major checkboxes. The Wizard of Oz has one of the greatest cuts in movie history when it turns from black and white into color. Are there any personal favorites when you started this process?

I love 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Stargate sequence, which you see at the very end of this exhibition, is so transformative and so trippy in a sense that it can alter reality. I love tinted and toned films of the 1920s when most people thought all the films from the silent era were black and white, but now the majority of these films are in color and more than that in monochrome colors, which automatically have psychological impact. They’re mesmerizing and almost hallucinatory.

2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite movie, it is the ultimate trip. You have to be on the wavelength, you’re the wave. The combination of color, music, and visual effects.

That is one thing we wanted to explore here too, because when you think about what color is, and its very nature, it is a wavelength. It’s light. So it’s very similar to sound, which is sound waves. So they’re very hard to grasp. They’re very hard to define. They don’t physically exist yet. You experience them and the two of them work together.

This is why film is the ultimate art form. When those things come together, there’s nothing else like it. Please, elaborate on how color travels like sound.

When you think about it, color only exists either as pigment or as light. We’re trying to look at both of these aspects in this exhibition. How does color manifest itself, for example, on these costumes or these props, but also how does color look in its form as light? So that’s why it was really important to include all these projections here, especially in the monochrome film installation where the color in its form as light can unfold.

In Vertigo, the obsession with a certain woman and a specific color is associated with that woman. So that was also another really interesting field of research for us to think about that connection between femininity and color. We haven’t always come to create clear conclusions where you can say, okay, this is a proven thing.

Certain colors are arousing to the eye and can be a powerful tool when establishing attraction.

You can use color for personal expression of positive feelings such as joy or celebration, crossover and that can easily become something very dangerous. So there’s a danger associated with color and there’s a certain fear that is connected to women in some of these Technicolor films.

The color in the film Niagra is especially powerful. When Marilyn Monroe first comes on screen, she is smoldering in a dazzling dress with red lipstick.

Interestingly, you brought up Marilyn Monroe because what our marketing team has chosen here (on the wall across from us is a famous sequence from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) is in my mind, a bold color choice. I mean, a pink dress in a red set design. It’s crazy. Can it be any more intense? It’s incredibly intense.

Immersive also had the pleasure of speaking to the wonderful Doris Berger, a brilliant mind who captured the aura and essence of the Cyberpunk phenomenon.

[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]

When you started Cyberpunk, what was kind of like the major impetus?

We didn’t include every Cyberpunk film ever made. We made conscious choices of introducing our audiences to the main themes and topics and visual motifs of Cyberpunk and futurist films, which as you know, relate our science fiction films that relate cyber worlds with human worlds and our urban environments, or wastelands sometimes. How those constellations have been negotiated over the years is quite exhilarating.

One thing I find very fascinating about watching futuristic movies, now all the dates of these movies have passed, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, The Running Man… Looking at things that they got right, some things wrong, and some aspects that are a little different. How did that inform the exhibit?

Some films take place after World War III, which makes you cringe, right? It makes you smile to a certain extent. Video telephoning didn’t exist before, but it was an idea of how it could exist. Flying cars are a common motif in Sci-Fi films in general.

Any personal favorite films that you felt you had to include?

Neptune Frost, because for me it relates, brings so much back to where electronics come from, the resources being extracted and where they go to when they are kaput, when they’re destroyed. So that film, that’s part of the film aspects in the film, which I find really an interesting thought process.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is a great movie. There are lots of retrospective articles about that year and it always either gets left off or towards the bottom. To me, that’s one of the best…

Yeah. 1995 was a really interesting year for Cyberpunk. You have Hackers, Ghost in the Shell, and Strange Days is another underappreciated film, I think. It was also important for us to bring films to the forefront that we felt deserved to be in the spotlight.

What do you hope people take away from this? Because obviously, a big part of cyberpunk is dystopian themes. So what do you hope people kind of take away from seeing these sorts of images and objects together?

A sense of agency. Maybe the punk aspect in it. Because we live in the cyber world. We are in it. We negotiated every day with how we relate to artificial intelligence in various ways. Some are great, some are complicated.

But the punk for me is the aspect of agency. As a person, as a community, you can live with a system or in a system, but you also can take a stand in it and can make your own story within it and maybe change a few things here and there. So that’s what I like about it.