Giuliana Bruno
Shed a Glow
A moving image emerges, where liminal shapes of vibrant colors shift fluidly across the picture plane in an almost rhythmic dance. The technique evokes both collage and montage, animating these forms as if they were searching for the hues they would eventually absorb over time.
There is a dynamic physicality—a touch of kinetic, almost cinematic energy pulsing through this composition. Here, an image is not merely drafted but grafted, a concept woven into the very essence of the cinematograph. We sense both the physical and mental motion at play in shaping color images that “move.”
It calls to mind Eisenstein’s reflections on color and montage in The Film Sense:
We must not fall into the error either of the madman or the Hindu magician, who see the sinister power of disease or the great power of the sun as solely reposing in the golden color. . . . Abstracting color from the concrete phenomenon, which was its sole source for the attendant complex of concepts and associations, seeking absolute correlations of color and sound, color and emotion. . . we will get nowhere, or worse, we will arrive at the same destination as that of the French symbolists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. . . . But if we look more carefully at the schemes for “absolute” relationships. . . , we will discover that in almost each citation, its author speaks not of “absolute correspon- dences,” but of images to which he has attached personal color concepts. It is from these various image concepts that the various “meanings” have evolved. . . . Rimbaud begins very decidedly: “A, black; E, white,” and so on. But in the following line he promises: Someday I shall name the birth from which you rise. . . .1. Sergei Eisenstein, “Color and Meaning,” in The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 10-41. Emphasis mine.