The quality of Guillermo del Toro's horror and grisly art is due to his tenacity as to
how his stories should unravel and how each detail should be presented, as well as his
precision in the execution of details and fine-tuning of his beliefs about myths, creatures,
and legends.
His personal struggles about the meaning of human existence, religion, and horrific
dark elements within our world are in the center of all his stories as dark, mystic,
and metaphysical.
As Willis mentions, the villains in most of his films are united by the common attribute
of authoritarianism, which represents his deep hatred of any and all institutionalized
social, religious, or economic holdings.
This video essay will examine the role of color as a form of narrative construction in genre
as evidenced in the works of director Guillermo del Toro.
The essay will start with a general overview of color in cinema, then examine how del Toro
uses color as a powerful visual element in his films as a transitional device, a symbol,
and an expressionistic tool.
It will explain how he structures and color codes his films to serve as an aid in the
construction of his narratives and investigate specific uses of color and its meanings at
particular moments in the following films, Chronos, The Devil's Backbone, and in detail
Pan's Labyrinth.
Contrary to the speedy acceptance of sound in cinema, color cinematography took four
decades to find its place in films.
The introduction of color to cinema in the early 20th century and the concept of using
color as a means to improve realism were fiercely opposed by theorists and filmmakers alike.
Hansen indicates that some of the early theories on film saw the absence of color as something
that distinguished cinema from other art forms, and in particular from real life itself.
To expect color in films as natural was a misconceived approach to its potential usage.
As Edward Boscomb expresses, the first decade of Technicolor's appeal was limited to two
possibilities, signifying luxury and spectacles, as depicted in the films The Wizard of Oz
and Gone with the Wind, which proved the shock and awe brought by the impact of the
use of Technicolor's brilliant and saturated colors in film.
The significance of the color red presented in the narrative of films such as Michael
Powell's Black Narcissus and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo marked the emotional and psychological
quality of color as one of the important effects in films after the 1960s.
Del Toro, far from being a fantasist or humorist, challenges cultural authority with his embrace
of genre and destabilizes conceptions of political propriety through his merging of the horrors
of history and the monsters of the imagination.
Set in post-Civil War Spain, 1944, while guerrillas are holding out in the woods against the
triumphant Franco regime, Pan's labyrinth represents a child's real and fantasy worlds.
In an interview with The Guardian, Del Toro said he wanted to make movies in which the
visuals truly contribute to the telling of the story.
The images carry the narrative's burden and are the grammar of the story.
The strong visual concept is especially crucial in Pan's labyrinth in order to establish the
parallel narratives and then bring them together.
Del Toro stated that the key element in the design of Pan's labyrinth is color.
He deliberately designed the fantasy world to be extremely uterine by choosing a fallopian
color palette of deep crimson and golden ambers of amniotic-like fluids to suggest a womb-like
environment underscored by rounded shapes that give off a warm, organic, nurturing, dream-like
feel.
Del Toro repeatedly emphasizes the physicality of the primary world as one end of a continuum
between the mythic secondary and the temporal primary.
As demonstrated in a single, extraordinary shot, Del Toro tilts down to the inside of
the mother's womb, where we see a golden fetus mutely listening to Ophelia's story.
Color, if isolated from it realistic or descriptive function, is able to assume an independence,
even abstract identity, and in doing so, access spaces and times that lie between the images
or beyond the frame.
By contrast, the harsh reality of the real world, represented by Vidal and his troops,
is coated in dark, cold hues of blue and green, enhanced by straight lines and sharp
angles of the environment.
The heavily filtered blue darkness, as Vidal interrogates and then kills a father and son
caught in the hills at night, intensifies the viewer's horror of the captain's efficiency
and swiftness in killing both men, and his emotional disconnect from the torture he dispenses.
Del Toro's preference for visual over verbal and his boldly symbolic use of extreme color
contrasts and light, jacket shapes and jolting colors, come together in composition that
suggests madness and horror.
The first striking contrast in color palettes that marks the character and the audience's
entry from one realm to another, is that the very first scene in the movie, where the cold
blue tinted image of a dying Ophelia is replaced with the sunny warmth of the gold and green
forest.
In dramatizing this movement from the cold blue night world of the dying girl to the
sunny warmth of the gold and green forest, Del Toro heightens the audience's sense of
immersion into the marvelous in the physical, temporal and emotional contrasts.
As the story unfolds and the parallel narratives connect, the colors begin to mix, creating
the illusion of the fusion of both worlds, generating a sense of movement, immersion
and treachery that makes it difficult to differentiate between fantasy and reality.
The Pale Man sequence from Pan's Labyrinth is a perfect example of this contamination.
As Ophelia enters the underworld chambers, the Pale Man's lair is lit in crimson and
gold, and the heavy and colorful laden feast at a time when Spain was suffering from starvation
represents the abuse of the political powers of the real world.
This matches an earlier scene of the captain's lavish dinner party for the local dignitaries.
While describing his plan to starve out the rebels, he hands out ration cards.
Here, the red and golden colors of these two places and the positioning of the captain
and the Pale Man at the head of their respective tables is a statement of the political power
and corruption of the real world.
What appears in the form or shape of a common fairy tale suddenly opens up a third mixed
space that not only belongs to reality or fiction, but where the two overlap.
We as viewers no longer try to distinguish between history and fantasy, but rather recreate
a human conflict somewhere in between.
Del Toro's dark sense of humor comes from spending a significant part of his childhood
frightened of purgatory and hell.
Guilt fueled by his grandmother's oppressive piety, the tortured memories are the key element
in the creation of his characters that seem to exist in a limbo-like interstitial state
of being that blurred the line, the borders between life and death, light and darkness,
redemption and loss, being and nothingness.
Del Toro's continuous use of contrasting color palettes represents something different
in each film.
Inspired by the colors of alchemy, the movie Kronos is colored to symbolize aging and
decay, fear and obsession with death, as indicated by Silver and Orsini.
The true horror of Kronos is not in his supernatural events, but in the sense of lurking evil,
beneath the everyday ambience of underlying decay.
In Kronos, the contrasting colors play an important role in character development.
The protagonist, Jesus Gris's environment, is color-coded in relatively light, airy
and warm earthly tones, representing a man that lives a private carefree life with his
wife and granddaughter.
This contrasts with the colors of the interiors of LaGuardia's factory, especially his sanitized
dimly-lit inner chamber, with nightmarish casts dressed in black and dark grays, associated
with his evil deeds and obsession for immortality.
This use of warm colors connects both the human and teacher with life rather than death
and good rather than evil, complicating traditional views of the vampire.
Contrasting colors are also used to introduce and magnify a concept, as illustrated in Kronos,
when Gris, injured by the device for the first time, finds himself desperately looking for
something to satisfy his thirst.
The cold bright blue color of the background magnifies the blood-red color of the meat,
signaling to the audience his transformation into vampirism.
The inviting colors of Gris's shop and home, versus the cold black and white colors of
the bathroom, where he licks the vivid red blood, is expressed to show the power of the
transformation of a man who is once very clean, ordered and ordained into an unclean, disorderly
and outcast creature.
While the entire movie is in black and white and very cold blue and gray tones, the color
red is only associated with Gris's granddaughter Aurora.
According to Davies, in Toro's opinion, death is meaningless to a young child, so red symbolizes
the true immortality in the process of Gris's transformation.
Del Toro's colors play a vital role in his expert plotting and pacing that gives viewers
a sense of continuity of perspective throughout his movies.
He explores ideas of what the supernatural might be and offers different options, expecting
the audiences to make up their own mind.
Set against the Spanish Civil War, the devil's backbone follows the life of ten-year-old
Carlos living in a crumbling republican orphanage for boys, where the everyday betrayals within
families and communities replicate the trauma of the Civil War outside the walls.
The symbolic role of the color red here signifies danger and evil deeds, as demonstrated in
the scene where Jacinto locks up the kitchen door with a bright red padlock, hinting to
the audience of an evil deed.
Again, right before he sets off the explosion that kills many people, he picks a red apple
from the basket with his knife, symbolizing bloodshed.
The red also signals the presence of the spirit of the little boy killed by Jacinto.
The contrasting colors of the red ribbon, separating from the unexploded bomb against
the cold blue night, symbolically warns the presence and location of the ghost.
The golden ambers of amniotic-like fluids suggest a womb-like environment to link the
fetuses in the bottles, the ghost in the pool, and an insect in amber.
According to Berry, they are all symbols of what del Toro thinks a ghost is, a moment
suspended in time.
They are all symbols of what del Toro thinks a ghost is, a moment suspended in time.
They are all symbols of what del Toro thinks a ghost is, a moment suspended in time.
They are all symbols of what del Toro thinks a ghost is, a moment suspended in time.
