Before finding several rolls of colour film about the German army, and realising twenty minutes of pure chromatic genius in Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein had dedicated pages to colour in film. In a story about fugitive lovers, Doctor Chance, the first colour film by an expert in black-and-white cinema, issues from the same experimental excitement: How do you bring a film to the level of the chromatic initiatives of painting, like in certain medieval altarpieces, engravings by William Blake or paintings by Asger Jorn? In his Notes de travail (1996), F.J. Ossang elucidates: ‘This film should have the razor-sharp and vaguely coloured purity of a poem by Georg Trakl – no to a cinema more miserable than misery, more sexual than sex, heavier than the lead it paraphrases. Detail: a black-and-white close-up doesn’t have the same effect as a close-up in colour (why). Why do the scripts of contemporary films seem ‘comatised’ by emanations? Defilement of colour by structures. Deterritorialization.’
