Vittorio Storaro discusses his film The Last Emperor where he represented different stages of the young Pu Yi's life with different light and colours. Storaro claims to use red at the beginning of his life. Orange is the warm colour of the family which is the same colour as the forbidden city. Yellow is the colour of our identity and Green is the colour of knowledge
For my practical, i'm only looking to use coloured lighting, not create a whole set one colour.
Vision of Light
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The last emperor (1987)
“there was one idea that came to my mind,
that there was a possibility to make an analogy between the life and light. The
journey that Pu Yi was doing into himself could be represented with different
stage with the different stage of light. Different colors. The first time he
was cutting his own vein, and you see for the first time red. Red is the color
of the beginning, the color when we’re born. he was, remember, being born as an
emperor. We go into the scene when the people with the torches are arriving to
pick him up. When we see orange in the picture, it is the warm color of the
family. It is the color of the forbidden city. I was using all the lights
around the young Pu Yi to get the feeling of family. Of warm, or maternal
embrace. Yellow, is the color of our identity. When we come conscious, is the color
it represents the emperor, is the color that more leads the light, the more
represent the sun itself. Green, is knowledge. We see green the first time only
when the tutor is coming. He bring s a green bicycle. It’s the knowledge of
something. Up to that moment, Pu Yi was living in the forbidden city, it was
kind of the forbidden color for him. He didn’t know anything about one section
of the color spectrum, green blue, indigo, violet. He knew only red, orange, and
yellow. The emperor shouldn’t know anything, should know only a portion of it
because knowledge can hurt him. I export our feeling in his way of seeing, and
I re-import once again all the experience back to him.”
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