Week 7: Color | Wong

If you've saw my gestalt post, you'd know that I'm a huge musical fanatic. So before writing this post, I was watching RENT, and there's this one scene in the movie version that I absolutely love. It's an example of a subtle use of color and a great use of it. You'd have to watch the scene to understand, so unless you love RENT like I do, fast forward the video to 2:35, when Mark is in his own little world and unconscious in real life due to him falling and hitting his head on the cement floor.

They're singing "Tango: Maureen," so everybody in this scene is doing the Tango. It's a great subtle use of color because while everybody else is in black and white attire, Maureen is in red, so she stands out, allowing those who had never seen the movie or the musical to know who Maureen is. The choice of using red is great too because the Tango Maureen is "a tango to hell," and she's basically the vixen in the cast. And, red really stands out in a sea of black and white.

An example of a bold use of color can be found in another scene in RENT - when they sing "La Vie Boheme." Whoever made this video cut out the "I Should Tell You" part, which was a great use of subtle color, and they cut it really poorly thus why the video is a bit weird. But warning - please don't watch if you're easily offended.

So for those who've never watched RENT, the song "La Vie Boheme" is a really fun song, and celebrates bohemia, while mocking Benny's comment (which wasn't in the video) about bohemia being dead. Since it's a fun song, and isn't about something serious like other songs are about, the colors in the scene are very bright and happy. They're not as bright as the costumes used in the musical Hairspray, since RENT is about the bohemian life, but it's one of the brightest and most colorful scenes in the entire movie. It's a great contrast from the "I Should Tell You" scene, which was more monochromatic and also about a more somber topic (AIDS, HIV and AZT breaks). The scene could be seen below.