DOI 10.15664/fcj.v0i17.2082

Filmmaker Claire Denis’ palette is known for its natural, urban, and earthy tones that call attention to experiences and perceptions of skin colour. Critics Andrew Asibong and Isabelle le Corff have observed that her filming of Black skin, in particular, enters into the colour spectrum as a means of mediating postcolonial, social, and political spaces.[1] However, in her most recent film High Life (2018), colour exceeds the overt reference to racialised perceptions to focus on broadly conceived questions of existence and ethics in a world marked by loss, isolation, and exile. Denis achieves this by experimenting with the chromatic medium and colour sensations, notably through the use of intensely saturated hues and luminous fluorescence.

Set in the not-so-distant future, High Life takes place inside a spaceship designed for prisoners who have opted for the participation in a scientific mission to outer space, in lieu of execution or life imprisonment on Earth. The spaceship is the film’s dominant object, shaped through isolating and repetitive shots that alternate between its colour-saturated interiors and rectilinear exterior.[2] The artificial green, blue, red, and yellow lights of the film’s palette are rendered all the more striking with the help of Denis’ artistic consultant, Olafur Eliasson – an installation artist who describes his own work as activating light and space through the use of colour.[3]

Drifting through deep space, High Life’s spaceship speaks of the inner and outer worlds of one of the prisoners, Monte (Robert Pattinson), who together with an infant, Willow (conceived with his sperm against his knowledge and consent, and born on the spaceship), become the only survivors of the mission after violent events lead to the deaths of the other prisoners. With no possibility of return to Earth, Monte decides to raise Willow and narrates his story through a series of distorted and discontinuous flashbacks which curiously echo the spaceship’s colourism.

Alongside the scenes set on the spaceship, which are filmed digitally, High Life features flashback sequences of stark, wintry landscapes on Earth that are shot on 16mm in Poland and which are dominated by blueish, darkened tones. As objects of nature, technology and memory, these images are moreover resonant with the extensive sample of seemingly random film and video materials sent from Earth. These range from early documentaries to glitchy home videos and sporting events, and are screened in a separate transmission room inside the spaceship. Engaging with the past and collective memory from Earth is no doubt central to the film. As these recollections and fictional/non-fictional forms of media interact, they force Monte to renegotiate with his past and the intolerable present on the spaceship.

In order to gain a better understanding of Denis’ engagement with representations of memory, this text will examine the provocative images of filmed colour, and how they function within the film’s framework. I will show that the images of intensified colour not only articulate the environment of the spaceship, but that they are also self-consciously framed as studies of memory attempting to describe a new sensibility in search of an alternative, even when there seems to be no imaginable future. First, I will look at High Life’s use of intensified colour in relation to Eliasson’s artwork and its ecological aesthetics. Second, I will theorise this use of colour as a perceptual affect through Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the colour-image, as it is conceptualised in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). This essay will ultimately trace the political and ethical potential of the colour-image, wherein colour acts as an agency in and of itself.

The opening shot of High Life figures the lush green imagery of the spaceship’s garden. By focusing on the abundant plant life, it reveals how the garden is tarnished by objects that suggest human presence. The atmospheric sound of the film emerges through a series of electronic overtones mingling with the lilting noise of spraying mist, which envelopes the viewer in a natural and artificial soundscape that attends to the visual tracking of this human-made garden. This establishing shot is followed by repetitive still shots of doorways and passageways of the spaceship; isolating and pausing on the moving flows of shadow and lights that glow green, orange, red, and blue, illuminating the otherwise bare space. Poignantly, then, a baby’s cry enters the soundscape, followed by Monte’s comforting voice, as the visual cuts to a fixed shot of Willow watching two screens simultaneously showing footage of early ethnographic documentaries by Edward Curtis and of Monte within the spaceships’ surveillance cameras.[4]

The temporal structure evoked here curiously merges an origin story from a distant past with high-technological modernity. The scrubby nursery surrounding Willow (Scarlett Lindsey) figures sagging wires, sound speakers, and spotlights which reflect a constellation of small patches of multi-coloured lights playing on the darkened walls of the room. Recalling early nineteenth-century magic lanterns, these initial shots use back projection, concealed mirrors, screens and multi-coloured glass to project light and illusory images, not only as means of evoking the freewheeling interchange between the animate and inanimate world, but also to modulate the spaceship’s translation of matter and memory into form; precipitating a split between organic life and technology that will govern the rest of the film.

Spotlights, coloured air, and luminous patches of light are indeed prominent elements of many of the film’s still and tracking shots, created with the use of smoke, grids, monofrequency lamps, plastic panels and coloured glass. While watching these images that reconfigure techno-vitality and natural phenomena inside artificially constructed spaces, one thinks specifically of Eliasson’s own immersive installations, such as Your Lighthouse (1991-2004), Your Rainbow Panorama (2006-2011) and The Weather Project (2013), to name few. Known for using organic material and innovative technology, Eliasson’s installations stress the importance of a subject’s embodied perception and sensory experience. They are intended, as the artist himself explains, to construct a discourse of environment and of one’s positionality within an ecosystem.[5] This ecological aesthetic is present in Denis’ film as it is in Eliasson’s art.

As if immersed in Eliasson’s installations, the camera in High Life often follows the prisoners as they move inside the eco-machinic set-up of the spaceship, activating its sensory atmosphere, but also its vital functioning through the use of colour. For instance, flashing red lights, alarm sounds, and fog warn the prisoners to enter a daily report (“to feed the dog,” as Monte says), which allows for the “prolongation of life-support systems for 24 hours”. Some of the flashbacks emerge as if directly triggered by the spaceship’s surface, as we see in a scene in which a dropped tool reminds Monte of his crime on Earth; or in another, where engraved words on the spaceship’s damaged walls trigger a series of various memory images. As the film shifts between 16mm and HD images, between materiality and memory, it becomes increasingly evident that colours, technology, bodily presence and vitality bind together to produce and structure an interrelated ecology.

Critics often discuss the way Eliasson’s artworks straightforwardly point to constructed climates, changing atmospheres (or atmospheric change) and spaces of containment as primary means of collective, political and environmental engagement. Jonathan Crary, for instance, considers them as “groundless spaces filled with forces, affects and intensities”, emphasising the way they materialise non-hierarchical “virtual zones”, hovering on the edge of actualisation.[6] Bruno Latour, moreover, views his installations as explorations of the “nature of atmospheres in which we are all collectively attempting to survive”.[7] This discussion particularly resonates with the filmic fabric of High Life, where specific references to environment and climate merge with themes of incarceration.

In one flashback, Monte’s voice-over explicitly refers to human beings with signifiers of environmental politics: “we were scum, trash, refuse that didn’t fit into the system, until someone had the bright idea of recycling us” – a claim which is illustrated with images of train-hopping outcasts, then disciplining and assimilating prisoners, rendering them productive for the system. This is equally reflected in scenes set in the corridor, where the characters circulate, enveloped in an intense blue that is created by monochromic lighting.[8] The colour blue that glows with this fluorescent and synthetic force, inevitably solicits our attention to Earth, the “blue planet”, to its nature and organic vitality, but it also poignantly mirrors the atmosphere of strong gravity and radiation of outer space, as well as the atmosphere of confinement often experienced through Eliasson’s installations. Unlike the grainy blueish texture of the 16mm film, which recalls a medium of the past, the intense fluorescent blue on the spaceship, filmed using digital technology, brings to attention qualities related to both artificial, synthetic colouring and digital colour technologies in the new age of electronic media.

As Carolyn L. Kane observes, fluorescent technologies, whether chemical or electronic, illustrate several paradoxes in terms of perceptible quality, including the fact that they both generate and reflect light.[9] When used in cinema, fluorescent, digital colour can simultaneously “intensify the narrative form” and the “aesthetic of the visual image” as it appears on screen.[10] Kane furthermore illustrates that, like the development of fluorescent colour in Western aesthetics, digital colour technologies are hardly divorced from mass consumerism, and market and commercial interests.[11] Seen through this perspective, High Life’s use of fluorescent, digital colour is highly suggestive when read within the visualisation of the discourse and critique of corporate globalisation, presented in the film through the heroic and radical collective project imposed on the prisoners. The experiment they are engaged in, which could be interpreted as a thinly veiled suicide mission, consists of investigating energy extracted from a black hole to build up Earth’s energy resources. The mission is regarded as a viable techno-ecological solution to the contemporary global population crisis, society’s dependency on scarce natural resources such as oil, and the accordingly turbulent geopolitics. However, as the film makes clear, this experiment is also issued from a long history of imperialism, colonisation, prisoner exploitation, over-taxation of the environment as well as marginalisation and exclusion. This gesture poignantly alludes to global economic and ecologic issues, notably critiquing the existing political landscape imposed by “Occidental government authorities”, as the Indian philosophy professor (Victor Banerjee) puts it, in one flashback to Earth. By suggesting that the effects of imperialist governance, digital-synthetic cultures and environmental issues are intertwined, High Life urgently calls into question the different kinds of ethical and political sensibilities shaped in relation to existing integrations of the debates and discourse on the technocratic governance of the global system of late-capitalism, and the unpredictable (yet impeding) catastrophic effects of climate change.[12]

While Eliasson’s installations are intended to produce critique through the spectators’ physical presence and immediate perception, Denis’ film engages us from the perspective of the cinematic process of visualisation and narration. High Life, like many of her earlier films, uses voice-over and elliptical narration, flash-forward, and long tracking shots that allow for time to emerge somatically, and eschew conventional image-sound relations in favour of emphasising different kinds of movement through a given space. Colour, through this movement, loses its referential capacities, detaches itself from the narrative action of the film, and comes to act as a force that intervenes between perception and action. This construction of colourscapes brings to mind Gilles Deleuze’s associations of the splitting of actual and virtual in what he termed time-image and specifically, colour-image, one of the time-image’s avatars. As Deleuze explains, there takes place a certain “worldizing” [mondialisation], a depersonalising effect, when colour no longer attaches itself to a character or action, but acts as an asignifying affect, absorbing characters, and situations beyond the movement of the narrative, and enabling cinema to become “pure optical, sound (and tactile) image”.[13]

The use of colour as means of arresting narrative is not something new to modern cinema, and is apparent in the history of colour film more broadly. As Joshua Yumibe observes, the vast majority of early silent films used filters and applied colouring techniques such as toning and tinting in ways to undermine the logic of realism of the cinematic narrative. There, as Yumibe writes, colour “functions as a direct address, rupturing the scenic to project a virtual sense of physical contact with the audience, in high relief”.[14] While most viewers of classical cinema have become accustomed to colour uses that are motivated by realism as well as narrative, some directors, like Denis, manage to use cinematic image as a kind of sensate flesh, “in high relief”, as Yumibe puts it, bringing to attention the colour’s “thingness”.[15] This use of colour is precisely what interested Deleuze about modern cinema. For him, the colour-image takes the form of a perceptual affect; it does not refer to a particular object nor is it strictly used symbolically, but rather “absorbs all that it can” in a movement beyond the narrative action of the film.[16] The examples of colour-images that Deleuze provides, interestingly stem from films in which colour creates, as he puts it, images that look “out of this world” – a term that also intimately resonates with High Life’s aesthetics.[17] The examples Deleuze gives include: the mental and vital colours of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey (1968), or Antonioni’s deserted, empty spaces of Red Desert (1964), but also the colourful reveries of Minnelli’s musical comedies. The colour-image in these films reconfigures movement by giving rise to “dream-worlds” or states of “reverie, of waking dream, strangeness or enchantment”, activating in the process, virtual potentials no longer attached to the narrative movement.[18] We can see this, for instance, in the musical numbers of Minnelli’s films, in which from an ordinary, banal situation like walking on a street, a character gets transported into a virtual “implied dream” of a shared world.[19] Colours here rise up beyond the actual situation of the narrative of the film, absorbing characters, objects and the whole situation into a collective, virtual movement of pure affect.[20]

Unlike Minnelli’s colour-images of enchanted collective dreams, High Life’s colour-images are subjects to something darker, as they encompass individual sufferings as well as an overall intolerable atmosphere of isolation and confinement. Within these colour-images, the cinematic process of slowing things down to the point of suspension is enhanced by lighting and colour to engage a particular spectatorial consciousness that loses track of both narrative and lived time. This is best demonstrated in situations where the characters, overwhelmed by intense colour, are positioned in interstitial spaces that apprehend the similarities between the natural world on Earth and the constructed environment of the spaceship. In one of the film’s most dazzling scenes, we see a flashback to Dr. Dibs (a prisoner participating in the mission, played by Juliette Binoche) bewilderingly enveloped in bright blue light and a stream of air blowing from the spaceship’s air conditioning system.[21] The camera alternates between medium shots of Binoche’s body and close-ups of her closed eyes, as she dramatically inhales the conditioned air as if it were a fresh mountain breeze. Evoking elements of the natural world, the technology of this scene’s setting simulates the atmospheric effects of weather. Dibs is situated in the spaceship’s corridor where the monochromic lighting and reflecting panels colour the air and the whole of the setting with a glowing blue intensity. The exchange between her and the blue-infused air illuminating her in a halo is profoundly affective, evoking a sense of intimacy and tactility. The colour-image of this scene allows for a reconfiguration of time relations and narrative linearity. In order to understand this, it is crucial to trace how this blue dreamy scene emerges in Monte’s flashbacks.

Figure 1: Dr. Dibs absorbed in blue-infused air. High Life (Claire Denis, 2018).

Like the random films and videos from Earth that reach the spaceship’s screens, (which Monte calls “viruses” and “parasites”, using again the semantic play of references to biology and technology), we can be led to believe that this hallucinatory scene erupting into Monte’s present is equally uninvited. At first, the scene appears to merge an objective reality with Monte’s fantasy. However, on second viewing, this scene might also appear solely as a product of fantasy, evoking something not witnessed by Monte. Suspended between past and present, between memory and fantasy, this blue-saturated scene does not re-create an event from the past or uncover a truth about something that happened on the spaceship. Rather, it points to a direct and conscious creation of the past, which opens itself to the possibility of a different future. It intervenes in the way the temporality and the ordering of the world of the spaceship operate within the time and structure of the film itself.

If we look at the microscopic world of the spaceship presented through the perspective of Monte’s memory, we will see that even early into the mission, Monte is figured as a solitary character, isolating himself from the others, and realising perhaps that this bubble-world of the spaceship resembles the imaginary and socio-economic coordinates of the violent and wrongful world he had experienced on Earth. The film indeed alludes to the many ways the world of the spaceship, together with its outwardly capitalist mission, perpetuates the social and teleological coordinates of our current world, profoundly dominated by “Occidental authorities” and white imperial logic. Thus, in Monte’s memory, the characters and events on the spaceship appear as somewhat distorted versions and figures of our own world. Dibs is an embodiment of the mythical Medea (the tragic protagonist from Euripides’ play Medea (431BC), who killed her children to punish her husband) and a witch (her heavy hair reaches her thighs), who biologically experiments on the prisoners to “create the perfect human”, despite radiation effects. As the film unfolds, we see her reproductive exploitations lead to the death of Elektra (Gloria Obianyo), a black woman whose name is another reference to a tragic mythological figure. After this event, Tcherny (André Benjamin), the other black prisoner onboard, states that “black people are the first to die even in outer-space” – a claim, which is not without reference to Denis’ long-standing attention to racial dynamics, and which points to the hierarchical ordering and control of the world as we know it. As the narrative develops, we find out that Dibs’ experiments ultimately lead to the birth of Willow, who in the film is presented as the result of two white people’s supposedly “strong genes”. After other violent and tragic events, such as rape, murder and suicide, leave Monte alone on the spaceship, he decides to raise the infant – initially by following and recreating the order of this world. It is not accidental that “taboo” is the first word Monte teaches Willow – a Freudian concept that underlies the notion of incest and the beginning of (Western) civilisation.[22]

As Deleuze explains, the colour-image emerges as a cinematic stoppage that interrupts the narrative continuity of the film and signals a temporality that exists beyond the diegesis.[23] On the level of High Life’s narrative movement, the blue-suffused colour-image emerges at the moment when Monte’s idea to recreate a world on the spaceship according to the logic of our world on Earth collapses. This colour-image can be viewed as the climax of Monte’s blockage to act upon his situation, but also as the beginning of his opening up to the ideas of the possible to establish new morals and order. The colour here detaches itself from an individual character and a specific reference. Its intensity and perceptual affect transform the perceptible fabric of a shared world. If we look at this scene again we will see that it is filmed through a series of reaction shots between the prisoners and Dibs. The sequence begins by capturing Dibs absorbed in her own thoughts and blue-suffused air. As the prisoners watch her, the camera shifts to close-ups of their faces, bodies and actions. Some of them in turn interrupt their daily affairs and pause, as if transfixed and aroused, to collectively absorb the appeal of Dibs’ image, which comes to echo and resonate with a new desiring intensity. The intense colour-image absorbs them and the whole of the spaceship as an affective reality, momentarily circumscribing different facets of a shared, but hidden single world. This affective reality is the complementary landscape of the possible, which in the given situation cannot be actualised, but can only serve as a means to signal a new sensibility, asking for an ethical engagement, without revealing in what form or expression this novel appearance of promise and belief might look like.[24]

The last scene of High Life, staged outside the spaceship, incorporates elements from Denis’ and Eliasson’s previous collaboration on a short film, Contact (2014). It begins by showing Monte and teenaged Willow (Jessie Ross) against the black hole’s absolute intensity, which nimbly illuminates them in yellowish tones, as they decide together to move forward, their futures uncertain. Poignantly, Denis shot this scene on 35mm in order to capture, as she explained, an “irradiating” yellow light through the direct “chemical reaction” of film.[25] In a final moment that reverberates into the future with new intensity, Monte asks “Shall we?”, a sentence Denis describes as a marriage proposal.[26] Their first and last step into the unknown of the black hole, appears at once as a death sentence and a promise of resurrection. The scene ambiguously ends by displaying a horizontal band of yellow light expanding to fill the entire screen in intense white, transforming the screen into a blank canvas. As the narrative closes, obliterating the characters into the void of the black hole, the screen’s intense brightness reverberates, folding the film back on itself. Denouncing the intolerable, corrupted vision of the world, this final gesture is both an over-exposure and an erasure of its narrative, asking us to rethink the world and invent new ways to live and relate.

Notes

[1] Andrew Asibong, “Claire Denis’s Flickering Spaces of Hospitality,” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 154-167; Isabelle le Corff, “Postcolonialism in Claire Denis’ Chocolat and White Material: Africa Under the Skin,” Black Camera, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 123-143. Chocolat (1988), Beau Travail (1999), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), White Material (2009) are some of Denis’ films that explicitly tackle such issues. For another productive account of Denis’ use of colour in relation to racialised perception of skin, see Michael T. Martin, Eileen Julien, “Post colony’s Colonial Registers in Claire Denis’s Chocolat and White Material,” Black Camera, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 99-122; For a broader reflection of Denis’ cinematic style and colour palette, see Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2005); and Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester U Press, 2004).

[2] The spaceship resembles a floating container or “shoebox”, as Denis puts it, emphasising its atmosphere of containment and capture. See, David Sims, “The Artistic Chemistry of Robert Pattinson and Claire Denis,” The Atlantic, April 10, 2019: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/robert-pattinson-and-claire-denis-talk-high-life-artistic-collaboration/586768/ (last accessed May 8, 2020).

[3] Olafur Eliasson, “Olafur Eliasson: Playing with Light and Space,” TED2009 video, filmed February 2009, posted July 2009.

[4] This juxtaposition is striking, bringing attention to forms of colonialism, and establishing a relation of visual order between the regimes of ethnographic practices and disciplinary/observational technology. For Denis’ discussion of High Life and Edward S. Curtis’ fictionalised documentaries, see Pamela Hutchinson, “Heavenly Bodies,” Sight and Sound, vol.29, no. 6 (June 2019): 25; and listen to podcast Le réveil culturel, “Claire Denis : ‘C’est plutôt un film de prison que de science-fiction,’” directed/written/performed by Tewfik Hakem, aired on July 11, 2018, on France Culture: https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-reveil-culturel/claire-denis.

[5] Quoted in Olivia Eriksson, “Reaching out: Activating space in the art of Olafur Eliasson,” NECSUS: European journal of media studies, vol.4, no. 1 (June 12, 2015): 287-293.

[6] Jonathan Crary, “Olafur Eliasson: Visionary Events,” Olafur Eliasson, ed. by Kunsthalle Basel (Berlin / Muttenz: Schwabe & Co, 1997), 63-64.

[7] Bruno Latour, “Atmosphere, atmosphere,” quoted in Louise Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 9, no. 1 (2017): 67.

[8] For Eliasson’s use of monochromic fluorescent lamps, see Anna Souter, “The Sprawling Ecologies of Olafur Eliasson,” Hyperallergic, August 5, 2019: https://hyperallergic.com/510475/olafur-eliasson-in-real-life/ (last accessed June 16, 2020).

[9] Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Colour, Computer Art and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago and London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014), 44.

[10] Ibid, 251.

[11] Ibid, 47-58.

[12] On political governance, ecology and economy, see Thomas Pringle, Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, Machine (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), esp. 49-99. For a more detailed discussion on the relationship between incarcerated population and climate change, see Njideka C. Motanya and Pamela Valera, “Climate Change and Its Impact on the Incarcerated Population: A Descriptive Review,” Social Work in Public Health, vol.31 (May 5, 2016): 348-357.

[13] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 58-64.

[14] Joshua Yumibe, Moving Colour: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 79. Yumibe emphasises how colour is used to create spectacular, eye-catching images of the world, —examples of what Tom Gunning has termed the “cinema of attractions.” On the attraction of colour in early cinema, see Tom Gunning, “Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Cinema,” Fotogenia 1 (1995): 249-255.

[15] Yumibe, Moving Colour, 79.

[16] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 118.

[17] Deleuze, Cinema 2, 204-205.

[18] Ibid, 58-59.

[19] Ibid, 59.

[20] Ibid, 61-64, 102.

[21] This scene also intimately resonates with the colour blue in cinematic history, namely the film Three Colours: Blue (Krzystof Kieslowski, 1993), which also features Juliette Binoche.

[22] For Freud’a psychoanalytic analysis of this concept, see Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. First published 1950, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London: Routledge Classics, 2001) and Civilisation and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (W.W Norton and Company, 1962).

[23] Deleuze, Cinema 2, 182-84.

[24] This resonates with what Thomas Elsaesser via Jean-Luc Nancy has identified as “community-to-come’ in relation to Denis’ recurrent use of abject/sacred character figures. Monte’s character can be viewed as another instantiation of this figure. See Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail,” New Literary History, vol. 43 no. 4 (2012): 703-725.

[25] When shot digitally this scene gave green tones. Instead, Denis opted for 35mm film, which gave the colour and tactility she desired. (The translations of Denis’ descriptions are mine). See Jean-Sébastien Chauvin and Stéphane Delorme, “Tabou: Entretien avec Claire Denis,” Les Cahiers du cinéma n°749 (2018): 36.

[26] Ibid, 35.

Bibliography

Asibong, Andrew. “Claire Denis’s Flickering Spaces of Hospitality.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011) : 154-167.

Beugnet, Martine. Claire Denis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Branigan, Edward. Tracking Colour in Cinema and Art. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.

Crary, Jonathan. “Olafur Eliasson: Visionary Events.” In Olafur Eliasson, ed. by Kunsthalle Basel, 60-66. Berlin / Muttenz: Schwabe & Co, 1997.

———“Your Color Memory: Illuminations of the Unforeseen.” In Olafur Eliasson: Minding the World. Ed. by Caroline Eggel, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Gitte Ørskou.  219–25. Aarhus: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2004.

Chauvin, Jean-Sébastien, and Delorme, Stéphane. “Tabou: Entretien avec Claire Denis.” Les Cahiers du cinéma n°749 (2018): 34-36.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athalone Press, 1989.

Eliasson, Olafur. “Olafur Eliasson: Playing with Light and Space.” Filmed February TED2009 video. Posted July 2009.

Elliott, Nicholas. “S’envoyer en l’air.” Les Cahiers du cinéma n°794 (2018): 32-33.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail.” New Literary History, vol.43, no.4 (Autumn 2012): 703-725.

Eriksson, Olivia. “Reaching out: Activating space in the art of Olafur Eliasson.” NECSUS European journal of media studies, vol.4 no.1 (June 2015): 287-293.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. English Trans. First published 1950 by Routledge & Kegan Paul. London: Routledge Classics, 2001.

———-. Civilisation and Its Discontents. trans. James Strachey. W.W Norton and Company, 1962.

Gunning, Tom. “Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Cinema.” Fotogenia 1 (1995): 249-255.

Haken, Tewfik. Le réveil culturel. “Claire Denis : ‘C’est plutôt un film de prison que de science-fiction.’” Aired July 11, 2018, on France Culture. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-reveil-culturel/claire-denis.

Hornby, Louise.  “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control.” Environmental Humanities, vol.9, no.1 (May 2017): 60-83.

Hutchinson, Pamela. “Heavenly Bodies.” Sight and Sound, vol.29, no. 6 (June 2019): 20-25.

Latour, Bruno. “Atmosphere, atmosphere.” In Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, ed. by Susan May, 29-41. London: Tate, 2003.

Le Corff, Isabelle. “Postcolonialism in Claire Denis’s Chocolat and White Material: Africa Under the Skin.” Black Camera, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 123-143.

Martin, Michael T. and Julien, Eileen. “Post colony’s Colonial Registers in Claire Denis’s Chocolat and White Material.” Black Camera, vol.10, no.1 (Fall 2018): 99-122.

Mayne, Judith. Claire Denis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Motanya, Njideka C., and Valera, Pamela. “Climate Change and Its Impact on the Incarcerated Population: A Descriptive Review.” Social Work in Public Health, vol.31 (5 May 2016): 348-357.

Kane, Carolyn L. Chromatic Algorithms. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

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Yumibe, Joshua. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Filmography

Three Colours: Blue. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski. France, Poland, Switzerland, 1993.

Contact. Dir. by Claire Denis and Olafur Eliasson. Dir. by Claire Denis. Berlin: Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2014.

High Life. Dir. by Claire Denis. France, UK, Germany, Poland, USA, 2018.

About the Author
Tamara Tasevska is a PhD candidate in French and Francophone Studies at Northwestern University, where she is a Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellow with the program in Critical Theory Studies. Her research focuses on the creative networks of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis, as well as writers Marie NDiaye and Emmanuel Hocquard in counterpoint with Gilles Deleuze’s writings on aesthetics, politics and cinema. Her article on Godard’s use of media, comics, and politics was published in the journal Etudes Francophones (Spring 2020). She also has a forthcoming book chapter on François Ozon and the queering of cinematic form.

DOI 10.15664/fcj.v0i17.2083

The Cuban capital, Havana, is a city vibrant with colours. Walls of houses may be dilapidated, but the colours make the streets photogenic. The decayed spectacle recalls a prosperous past, before the U.S. imposed embargos on the island (around 1960). Havana has never failed to impress its visitors, whose initial sensory experience of the urban landscape begins with a unique palette of pink, beige, turquoise, and light-blue.

When my film crew first arrived in Havana in January 2015, we did not know that the small Chinese-Cuban community was preparing to celebrate the 170^th anniversary of the first Chinese to arrive in Cuba.[1] Havana’s Barrio Chino – one of the oldest Chinatowns in America (but without many Chinese) – showed signs of revival. The new Chinese restaurant quarter injected a cluster of Chinese red, golden-yellow, and emerald-green into the city’s heart. These three colours stand out amidst the surrounding lighter colours of pink, beige, turquoise, and light-blue, leading us to explore a question that Umberto Eco asks but cannot answer, “how culture conditions the colours we see?” In his writing, Eco affirms that colours are a very “private affair” and that their meaning is more puzzling than other signs because languages simply fail to describe them.[2]

Figure 1: Havana cityscape from a rooftop taken in January 2015.

Figure 2: Havana’s Chinese restaurant quarter in January 2015, the yellow plate with three Chinese characters meaning Chinatown was relatively recent.

I find colour a natural point of departure when filming on location and a useful umbrella concept to understand an unfamiliar culture. This film featurette reflects upon the making of the documentary Havana Divas (2018), from the initial encounter of colours in filming to later research that led to critical decisions in postproduction.[3] The film depicts the lives and times of two Cuban women – Caridad Amaran (1931-) and Georgina Wong-Gutiérrez (1929-), spanning from the 1930s to 2019. Caridad was born to white Cuban parents but raised by her mother, Josefa Amaran, and a Chinese foster father, Julian Fong. Georgina was the daughter of Afro-Cuban woman, Juana Gutiérrez, and Chinese man, Alfredo Wong. Caridad and Georgina learned Cantonese Opera in 1930s’ Havana and toured Cuba in the 1940s. Caridad was the star of her opera troupe, who played huadan (or sassy, young, female) roles. Georgina’s kungfu skills allowed her to play male warrior roles, but she left opera early for college. Although Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution and compulsory military service interrupted Georgina’s study, she eventually became a diplomat. Caridad worked as a cashier after 1959.

Following their retirement, Caridad and Georgina began practicing Cantonese opera again. Between 2011 and 2019, they received sponsorship to make three trips to the origin of their art – Canton, or Hong Kong and Guangdong Province of China – and reconnect with the culture their Chinese fathers came from.

The following discussion will reveal how colour was mediated through their memories, changing cultural identities, and toning technologies in digital filmmaking. Havana Divas was mainly shot on digital video cameras, but it includes a lot of old photos and stock footage shot on celluloid and video processed in digitised forms. Unless otherwise noted, all images illustrating this article are stills from the documentary.

Cuban Divas of Cantonese Opera

The historical background of Havana Divas is complicated, but can be understood through two parallel aspects. The first, regarding the early Chinese immigrants that formed the audience base for Cantonese Opera in Cuba, and the second, concerning the route and modes of performances by travelling opera troupes from Canton.

Between 1847 and 1874, about 125,000 to 150,000 indentured Chinese men arrived in Cuba to replace vacancies left behind by freed black slaves.[4] They were called “coolies” – a word adopted from Chinese, meaning “hard labours”. Nearly all of them were from Canton, a term referring to both Hong Kong and Guangdong Province of China today, where Cantonese Opera originated. As Cuban historians Mauro Garcia Triana and Pedro Eng Herrera describe, from 1860 to 1875, many Chinese fled from the U.S. to Cuba “to escape new anti-Chinese laws and general Sinophobia.” The wealthy newcomers were called “the Californians” in Cuba. They formed the foundation of Barrio Chino, and as Garcia and Herrera note, “hired Chinese laborers freed from their indentures to work in their enterprises.”[5] When Caridad’s foster father, Julian Fong, and Georgina’s father, Alfredo Wong, arrived Havana in the 1920s, they respectively worked as a laundryman and a tailor in Barrio Chino. Even though Cuba’s Chinese population dropped from 60,000 to 30,000 from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, there was still enough interest in, and a good audience for, Cantonese Opera.[6]

Figure 3: Caridad (centre) was with her mother Josefa Amaran and her foster father Julian Fong around 1939, when she began to perform with Kuoc Kong Company.

Figure 4: Georgina in dresses made by her father, who was a famous dressmaker in Barrio Chino, respectively taken c. 1935, 1939, and 1942.

The history of Chinatown Cantonese Opera in North America can be traced back to the 1852 performance by the Hong Fook Tong troupe’s debut in San Francisco, which was followed by a string of theatres built for Cantonese Opera.[7] Since then, travelling troupes from Canton would visit cities with Chinese communities, often stopping over in Hawaii, California, British Columbia, Ontario, New York, and even Cuba.[8] As early as 1875, Cantonese Opera actors had already performed in Cuba, and a Canton-style theatre was built on in Cienfuegos, a city to the east of Havana. The next year, a troupe of “94 Chinese artists” performed at the opening of Teatro de los Chinos.[9] A traveling troupe consisted of at least forty people, so contracting them to perform needed an enormous budget.

When Caridad’s foster father, Julian Fong, and his friends organised Kuoc Kong Company in 1939 to teach and perform Cantonese Opera, they were making a home for opera in Havana so that they later would only need to hire a few stars instead of a whole troupe. When visiting stars were in town, the local company supplied musicians and actors to play minor roles. Thus, after these visiting stars would leave, the local company could continue entertaining its audience. Australian-born conductor Erich Kleiber (1890-1956) made the following comments after watching an opera in  Havana’s Chinese Theatre,

“They have some professional actors and, what is even more interesting, daughters of Chinese, Cuban by birth. These compatriots of ours, with slightly almond-shaped eyes, connoisseurs of great historical and legendary cycles, declaim in Chinese for four hours at a time, sing traditional arias, and perform with exquisite elegance the symbolic gestures that accompany action in Asian theater.”[10]

Since most girls could not speak Cantonese, the company maestros had to drill them very hard to get the pronunciation right. They learned a new play every week and performed over the weekends in collaborating theatres, including Shanghai Theatre, Golden Eagle, and New Continent Theatre.

Figure 5: Caridad’s image in a local newspaper’s feature article, c. 1947.

Figure 6: Cuban cities that Kuoc Kong divas toured: Matanzas, Cienfuegos, and Ciego de Avila, Camaguey, Guantanamo, and Santiago de Cuba.

In its heyday, Kuoc Kong had twenty actors, a dozen musicians, a few maestros, and even a costume maker. Caridad, who diligently learned to write and read in Chinese, was able to sustain her career as an opera diva for ten years. She was the only huadan in Kuoc Kong, who was good enough to play important roles on the same stage with the visiting stars. Limited by her language skills, Georgina mainly played supporting roles and dropped out early. When other stage sisters passed in old age or disease, she was the only one left who could play male roles and who could be paired up with Caridad. Kuoc Kong’s fame soon spread throughout Cuba, and the company received invitations from other cities during the 1940s and into the early 1950s. Kuoc Kong closed in 1957, shortly after Caridad’s wedding, which took place during the last visit of opera stars – this time from Honolulu.[11] By this time, the opera girls were in their late twenties and had to take up responsibilities as grown women. Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 put the comfortable and bohemian life of the Chinese community to an end. Caridad became a cashier in a Chinese restaurant. An episode Caridad shares in the film, and in other interviews, is that one day when Castro came to dine, he was impressed by how she could easily translate the Chinese menu into Spanish. Georgina graduated from college and then worked in the foreign affairs bureau. Meanwhile, wealthy Chinese-Cubans moved to other countries in fear of communism, causing the Barrio Chino to quickly decline, and the Cantonese Opera to lose its audience.

Chinese Colours and the Opera Look

Within the cultural-historical context laid out above, I will address Eco’s question of –“how culture conditions the colour we see” – in the following discussion. Among all colours, the chinese-reds and golden-yellows are believed to offer a distinct and exotic visual experience unique to China. Danish architect Jørn Utzon, for instance, was so taken by these “imperial colours” during his 1958 visit to the Forbidden City, in Beijing, that he applied them to his designs for the Major Hall of the Sydney Opera House.[12] With these colours, he writes, the halls “will form another world – a make-believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impression[s] and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood.”[13] Chinese-red, golden-yellow, and emerald-green decorate Barrio Chino’s restaurant quarter and characterise many other Chinatowns around the world. The visual impact felt by Utzon was also reflected by early western spectators of Chinese Opera in San Francisco, New York, Havana, London,  and Singapore, since the mid-1800s, as opera offers an enriched palette of colours.[14] Kleiber describes the actors as “sumptuously adorned” and the theatre “a world of wonders”, stating that if “there is a crisis in our theater, the Barrio Chino is clearly unaware of it!”[15] Watching an opera in Vancouver in the 1940s, Wayson Choy felt “a burst of color struck” his eyes when the “door size curtain parted”, and when the actors came on stage “in sequined costumes of forest green and gold, jolting cobalt blue and fiery red, living myths swayed onto the stage, their swords slashing the air, their open ornate fans snapping.”[16]

Traditional Chinese colour symbolism is built around five colours representing the five essential elements of the universe – white for metal, green for wood, black for water, red for fire, and yellow for earth. Moreover, these five colours respectively govern the west, the east, the north, the south, and the Centre. Historically, colours were used in formal attire to distinguish rank, title, and status in the imperial court.[17] Traditional Chinese opera costumes, are mostly in accordance with this colour-coding, as they mainly involve ten colours. The Upper Five Colours include fully saturated red, green, yellow, white, and black, while the Lower Five Colours include maroon, pink, purple, light-blue, and olive-green.[18] The upper colours are often used pure, while the lower colours can vary in shades. The most complex and expensive costumes are longpao (dragon robes) for emperors, nobilities, high-ranking military officers, and the kao (armour) worn by male and female warriors. Following the general cultural custom, Chinese Opera reserves golden-yellow for the roles of emperors and empresses.[19] Other symbolic assignments of colours to different roles include orange for nobilities, red for respected figures, darker shades for mature characters, and lighter colours for the youthful roles. The colours are not gender-specific, yet a pure white dress with no pattern is designated for the roles of female ghosts and spirits, but white dragon robes are for dashing young generals, like Pinggui in the play of Baochuan – a favourite of Caridad’s.

Opera actors have their own chests of costumes that accompany them from one place to another when they perform. Caridad used to have beautiful gowns and dresses given to her by visiting divas from San Francisco, but unfortunately lost them over the years and later had to make her own. In 1993, during the centennial celebration of Casino Chung Wah – the most significant Chinese community house in Cuba – Caridad and Georgina and other stage sisters performed Cantonese Opera after a thirty-six-year gap. During the event, many Cubans and Cuban-Chinese witnessed how Chinese theatre was performed in the 1950s by actresses of Cuban-Chinese descent.[20] Their children and grandchildren finally were able to catch a glimpse of their unique art. By that point, the opera performance was a rather isolated event, not a recurring form of entertainment as it used to be. The older generations of Cuban-Chinese and visitors from Canton who were familiar with this artform, could tell that Caridad and Georgina’s self-made costumes and headpieces were far from proper.

Chinese American photographer Lau Pok Chi was the first outsider to discover Caridad and Georgina’s stories and to film them performing. Lau’s short video, Cuban Chinese (2010), has a clip which is included in Havana Divas, showing them playing an episode of Baochuan in their home-made costumes. This play is based on a legend passed down from the 10^th century. Baochuan is the youngest daughter of the prime minister, who insists on marrying a handsome but poor young man of her choice against her father’s will. To punish her, her father severs their bond and sends Pinggui to war. After 18 years, he finally comes back to her with high status earned from his courage and military traits.[21]

Figure 7: Caridad plays the role of Baochuan in Cuban Chinese (2010).

Figure 8: Georgina, who holds a horsewhip in the style of the opera prop, plays young general Pinggui in Cuban Chinese (2010).

Any opera fan can tell that the colours and styles of these costumes are all wrong and do not match the roles they play [Fig.7 and 8]. The plot requires two sets of contrasting costumes for Baochuan: before marriage, she wears a red dress with a red embroidered cape [Fig. 9] revealing her status; after marriage, she wears a simple black long jacket decorated with blue hemline over a white dress underneath to indicate her life in poverty. In the role of a young warrior, Georgina should wear white armour [Fig. 10] instead of an orange-red jacket [Fig. 8].  The opera shows sympathy to Baochuan and Pinggui by dressing them in the upper colours of red, black, and white. From Caridad’s photos, we can see that even when playing Baochuan 60 years ago, she had on the same black jacket. In 2009 when the video was shot, Caridad and Georgina had only one set of costumes [Fig.7 and 8], which were not made for any particular role. When we saw the video, we were confused about the roles they played at first, but then understood their situation.

Figure 9: Caridad (right) and Georgina played the role of Baochuan and the prime minister in an episode of Baochuan.

Figure 10: Caridad (right) plays Baochuan in poverty and Georgina her husband, Pinggui. Both photos are by Eugene Cheung and shot at Hong Kong Art Festival, 2019.

From Cuban Chinese, we can see that their makeup was far from “proper” either. Cantonese Opera has intricate facial paintings for formidable characters. Still, most roles only involve makeup with three colours – black, rouge, and a white oil-base, which is similar to the greasepaint makeup used in early black-and-white cinema, and functions in a similar way with the opaque grease erasing differences in complexion.[22] Before opera makeup is applied, the hairline is wrapped by a black cloth, that is tied tightly around the head to pull both face’s skin and eyebrow ends upward to give the face a lift. The white oil-base was designed to enhance facial visibility while lending the actors a look of otherworldliness. When applied to the Cuban divas, it erased the racial differences between Caridad and Georgina [Fig. 11].

Figure 11: Caridad and Georgina tried on different costumes in their photos session in 2011.

The above photos were shot during their first trip to China in 2011, in a historical area called Zhuangyuanfang in Guangzhou city where the last opera costume factory with Canton-style embroidery remains in operation.[23] Caridad and Georgina posed for former Vogue photographer Hilda Hsu with full opera makeup and in several sets of costumes. They were seventy-nine and eighty-one at the time, but their professional makeup and hair-setting restored their youth. I remember the gasp in the cinema when viewers saw these images on the big screen. The divas, oceans apart and half a century later, regain an eternal moment of glory and glamour in these photographs, which contribute to a new set of memories for them.

Memory Is Never Monochromic

The colour dynamics of both Cantonese Opera and Havana’s cityscape are part of the two divas’ lives and can be seen clearly from the footage we shot in Cuba and China between 2011 and 2019. To visualise their theatrical career from the 1930s to the 1960s as recounted by Caridad and Georgina, I relied on newsreels and photographs collected from archives, as well as the two divas. Black-and-white images account for about one-third of the entire film and are more concentrated in the first hour of the 96-minute film. During the postproduction, I had to make a decision whether or not to leave these black-and-white images untouched. I do appreciate the “powerful cultural connotations” within the “blackness”; what Tom Gunning calls “an aesthetic” of “the absence of color” in black-and-white films.[24] I also agree with his affirmation that in early cinema “the colors do not perform any obvious narrative or thematic function” or carry fixed meanings.[25] These two affirmations, however, led to my decision not to leave any frame of the black-and-white images completely monochromic for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there is an enigma between the colourfulness of memory and its documentation in black-and-white. As discussed by Richard Misek, black-and-white was linked to “realism” rather than “spectacle” in early cinema and perceived as a “technological relic” when colour film became the norm in the 1960s. Misek examines several films produced between 1965 and 1983 that juxtapose black-and-white and colour sequences, where black-and-white is associated with, or created to mimic, documentary.[26] Still having an influence today, this approach might result from the memory of watching wartime newsreels before features, which most of my interviewees over seventy remember. When recalling the past, they described their life events and emotions in vivid expressions and colourful languages that I find the monochromic (moving) images unable to represent.

Secondly, once the decision was made to add colour to the black-and-white images, my options were colourisation and tinting. We began with a careful examination of coloured photos of Caridad, which were hand-painted. We did try colourising a very clear photo of Caridad in opera costumes and daily fashion [Fig. 12 and 13], but the result was not ideal. It seems challenging to make the skin tone look natural on a black-and-white photo even with digital tools.[27] Caridad has a couple of photographs taken in colour, but they are faded considerably.

Figure 12: Caridad dressed as Lin Daiyu in a classic play titled “Dream of the Red Chambers,” c. 1939.

Figure 13: A still juxtapose Caridad at 14 (left) and 15 (right, coloured) in 1945 and 1946.

Among our newsreel footage from the 1940s, there were two colour films: a tourism documentary and a short film titled San Francisco Chinatown Rice Bowl Party (circa. 1941) by Joseph Sunn and C.R. Skinner.[28] I could not possibly achieve the perfectly balanced and naturally looking colours in Sunn’s film through colourisation, but I can get close to the effect of the tourism film shown in Figure 15 through tinting.

Figure 14: A still from a Havana tourism film shot in the 1904s.

Figure 15: A still from San Francisco Rice Bowl Party (Joseph Sunn and C.R. Skinner, c. 1941) documenting the 79-days of the 1941 fund-raising campaign.

The last challenge lay in how to make tinted sequences work well with the rest of the film. Since scientists have already proved that there is no “universal preference” of colours for human psychology, we choose a tint for each period of Cuban history that the divas lived through, setting the basic emotional undertones according to their memory.[29] We settled upon five colours for tinting. The dark history of the Chinese “coolies”, who were captured, sold, and beaten on their way to Cuba in the prelude, followed by Caridad’s early childhood years, are tinted in a purplish indigo [Fig. 16]. After Caridad and Georgina began to enjoy life in the prosperous Barrio Chino, the tint warms to light blue [Fig. 17 and 5]. Georgina described their opera years as a rosy dream, so images of their opera years are tinted in rose pink [Fig. 18]. Both Cuban and Chinese revolutionary palettes later resonated with Eisenstein’s utilisation of red in his early works in Russia, which Misek describes as a “redness [used] to glorify and elicit a sense of pleasure in the rise of Communism”.[30] Thus newsreels of Castro’s communist revolution and following sequences about Georgina’s interrupted college life are tinted in maroon red [Fig. 19]. Images of Georgina and Caridad’s happy family life were tinted an orange-beige [Fig. 4].

Figure 16: A frame tinged in indigo.

Figure 17: A frame tinged in Carolina blue.

Figure 18: A frame tinged in rosy-pink.

Figure 19: A frame tinged in maroon.

The five tints we applied – purple-indigo, light-blue, rose-pink, maroon-red, orange-beige – resonate with four of the Lower Five Colours of Chinese Opera costumes (pink, purple/indigo, maroon, and light-blue) and three colours of Havana’s palette (pink, orange, and light-blue). In this manner, when one sequence transitions to the next, there is always at least one or two colours continuing from frame to frame. The tints brighten shades of grey in black-and-white images, reducing the contrast between the black-and-white areas of the image, and resulting in connected hues across the film. Edward Branigan explains this practice very well in his discussion of the aesthetics of colour harmonies. In our case, the transitions between tinted and coloured sequences can better provide what he calls “a route of least resistance for the movement of a perceiver’s eye.”[31] The overall transition of tint from cold to warm is a feeling we hope to pass on to the audience. As commented by a Hong Kong critic, in her review of the film, “the base color of Cantonese opera is warm”, that is why it can console many homesick hearts.[32]

Figure 20: The middle part of this graphic shows a summary of the entire Havana Divas in a key-frame view. The stills lined up on the left, and the right respectively exemplifies coloured and tinted sequences. The top left image and the bottom right image both have tinted silhouettes of Caridad in a coloured background, establishing a narrative closure.

One year after the premiere of Havana Divas around the Chinese New Year of 2018, more screenings followed in Hong Kong, and the divas finally performed at Yaumatei Theatre during the 2019 Hong Kong Art Festival. Caridad was eighty-eight and Georgina ninety. The hour-long performance included three episodes of Baochuan and dialogue with Lau Pok Chi sharing their life stories. Most members of the audience had read reports of their first two trips or had watched Havana Divas. This time, Caridad and Georgina had makeup artists, wardrobe assistants, and a full band playing a musical score that Caridad received from her father. Isolated for decades in Cuba, they have helped preserve a piece of Chinese cultural heritage that we might have forgotten. It was very touching to find fans waiting at the stage doors for them to come out of the dressing room. That was a moment evident to the divas’ reclaiming of an identity that they had lost for sixty years.

Figure 21: A coloured black-and-white photograph dated 1947 shows Caridad in a female warrior’s armour, which is used on the film’s poster.

Figure 22: The world premiere of Havana Divas in Hong Kong’s MOViE MOViE cinema on February 11, 2018.

Their three journeys to Canton between 2011 and 2019 were called home-comings by the media.[33] Being treated as Chinese daughters in Canton has generated new memories for Caridad and Georgina. When I close my eyes, I can still see Caridad standing on the famous opera stage at Foshan’s Ancestry Temple, singing about the passing of youth with her frail yet enduring voice.

*All figures courtesy of Blue Queen Cultural Communication Ltd.

Notes

[1] In 2015, according to Jorge Chou, the Spanish Secretary of Casino Chung Wah (the most prominent community house of Cuban Chinese), there were only about 120 first-generation Chinese immigrants left in Havana. Most of them were over 70 years old. Starting from the divas’ generation, very few second-generation Cuban Chinese could speak or read Chinese. Casino Chung Wah is maintained with partial sponsorship from both the Cuban government and the Chinese Embassy.

[2] Eco, 1985, 157-159.

[3] Havana Divas was shot between 2011 and 2015 and first completed as a 90-minute feature film premiered on February 11, 2018, in “Life Is Art” Film Festival, Hong Kong. After a second trip to Havana in January 2019, the film was revised to include new footage.  The 96-minutes “Director’s Cut” was premiered on March 12, 2019, at Hong Kong Art Festival.

[4] Historians cite different numbers of the first wave of Chinese men between 1847 and 1874.  1874 was the year when the Chinese government formally established embassies in Cuba to protect Chinese labourers. Narváez’s number is 125,000 (2005, 869) and Treto’s 150,000, (2008, 90).

[5] Triana and Herrera, 2009, xii.

[6] Benton, 2007, 39-40.

[7] Rao, 2017, 8.

[8] Rao, 2017, 207-308.

[9] Triana and Herrera, 2009, 114-115.

[10] Triana and Herrera, 2009, 115-116.

[11] Caridad told us this information with photographs as proof; Triana and Herrera also document this event (2009, 116).

[12] The “imperial colours” are named “Chinese red” and “yellow gold leaf” in the article by Chiu, Myers, and Goad on Jørn Utzon’s design (2020, 288-291).

[13] Utzon, 2002, 59–60.

[14] Spectators wrote similar accounts of different places, see Rao, 2017, 8; England, 1922, 11; Triana and Herrera, 2009, 116; Thorpe, 2016, 124; Chua, 2019, 575.

[15] Triana and Herrera, 2009, 116.

[16] Rao, 2017, 4.

[17] Vollmer, 1980, 3-11.

[18] Bonds, 2008, 73, 77, and 79; different names are used for lower five colours, for instance, bronze instead of “maroon,” light-green for “olive green,” Zhang, 1999, 9.

[19] Zhang, 1999, 66, 20, and 34.

[20] Triana and Herrera, 2009, 117.

[21] The legend of Baochuan has many versions beyond the initial plot set up described here. It inspired many operas in different regional forms, four motion pictures respectively made in 1939, 1956, 1959 and 1967, two TV series made in 1999 and 2012, as well as a 1950 English TV film and a 2017 book—both titled Lady Precious Stream.  Even today, the legendary cave Baochuan lived in is still a tourist site in Xian, China.

[22] Dootson’s essay has a detailed discussion on the makeup invented for making the skin looking natural on Technicolor films (2016, 108). The oil-base for opera, even though very similar in texture, is mainly to enhance the visibility of actors’ faces in all sorts of lightings.

[23] Jin, 2012, 39.

[24] Gunning, 88.

[25] Misek, 2010, 14-16.

[26] Misek, 2020, 4, 101.

[27] Misek, 2010, 102-109.

[28] There is little documentation on this film. The title and the name of photographers are printed on the film. Joseph Sunn is better known as Joseph Sunn Jue (1904-87), who founded the Grandview film company in San Francisco in the 1930s. According to Law Kar and Frank Bren, in the 1940s, Grandview’s black-and-white films were all shot on 35mm but color films on 16mm (83). My copy was from Oddball Films, a stock film company in San Francisco. A few clips from the film can be watched here: https://www.oddballfilms.com/clip/13161_12846_chinatown_sf2

[29] Taylor, Clifford, and Franklin, 2013.

[30] Misek, 2010, 23.

[31] Branigan, 2018, 152.

[32] Wei, 2018, 42.

[33] Li, 2018, 10.

Bibliography

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Bonds, Alexandra B. 2008. Beijing Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Chiu Chen-Yu, Peter Myers, and Philip Goad. 2020. “Chinese Colours and the Sydney Opera House (1956-1966): Jørn Utzon’s Reinterpretation of Traditional Chinese Architecture” in Journal of Design History, 27(3), 278-296.

Chua, Soo Pong. 2019. “Chinese Performing Arts” in Chong Guan Kwa and Bak Lim Kua eds. A General History of the Chinese in Singapore. Singapore: Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations.

Dootson, Kirsty Sinclair. 2016. “‘The Hollywood Powder Puff War’: Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s” in Film History, 28:1, 107-131.

Eco, Umberto. 1985. “How culture conditions the colours we see” in M. Blonsky. Ed. On Signs. Oxford: Blackwell, 157-75.

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Gunning, Tom. 2013. ‘Where Do Colors Go at Night?’ In Color and the Moving Image, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, 81–92. New York: Routledge.

Jin, Xiangfu. 2012. “Shop Front, Factory Back: Zhuangyuanfang Opera Costume” [in Chinese] in Nanguo Hongdou, No.5, 39-42.

Jones, Loyd A. 1929. “Tinted Films for Sound Positives” in Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 13 (37): 199–226.

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Li, Neil. 2018. “The Divas Come Home” in China Daily (Hong Kong Edition), April 13 (2018), 10. https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/27/20/22/1523586961605.html

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Triana, Mauro Garcia, and Pedro Eng Herrera. 2009. Trans. and Ed. The Chinese in Cuba, 1847-Now. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Utzon, Jørn. 2002. Sydney Opera House: Utzon Design Principles. Sydney: The Sydney Opera House Trust.

Vollmer, John E. Five Colours of the Universe: Symbolism in Clothes and Fabrics of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644-1911). Edmonton, Alberta: The Edmonton Art Gallery, 1980.

Wei, Yulan. 2018. “Cuban Chinese and Lasting Opera” [in Chinese] in Asian International Weekly, 32:10, March 18 (2018), 42-43.

Zhang, Ming. 1999. Ed. Trans. Li Zhurun and Andrew McEwan. Costumes of Peking Opera. Beijing: Intercontinental Press.

Filmography

Sunn, Joseph, and C.R. Skinner. 1941. (photographers) San Francisco Chinatown Rice Bowl Party. Colour. Length not known.

Lau, Pok Chi. 2010. (director, producer) Cuban Chinese. Short, 23 minutes, HDV.

Wei, S. Louisa. 2019. (writer, director, editor) Havana Divas, feature documentary, 96 minutes, HD. Supported by the Hong Kong Art Development Council. Hong Kong: Blue Queen Cultural Communication Ltd.

Wei, S. Louisa. 2014. (writer, director, editor) Golden Gate Girls, feature documentary, 90 minutes, HD. Supported by the Hong Kong Art Development Council. Hong Kong: Blue Queen Cultural Communication Ltd.

About the Author
Louisa Wei is an Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong, a documentary filmmaker, and a member of the Hong Kong Director’s Guild. She writes extensively on Chinese female directors and women’s cinema, having published many articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, and two books on the topic. Her two feature documentaries, Golden Gate Girls (2014) and Havana Divas (2018), respectively focusing on how Chinese language films and Cantonese operas travelled in North and Latin America from the 1920s to the 1960s. Both films have received positive reviews and reportage from major media like The Hollywood Reporter and BBC.