The Assistant

In his 1956 essay ‘Of Taste and Colours,’ filmmaker Éric Rohmer distinguishes between films that are remembered for their colour harmony as a general tonality and those, which highlight a “power of certain coloured objects.” Following this taxonomy, Catherine Wheatley’s lecture ‘Seeing Green: The Cinepoetics of Colour’ asks what it means to read a film from the perspective of colour, including hue, saturation and contrast. What are the ethical and political stakes of doing so?

Focusing on the different uses of the colour green in Kitty Green’s THE ASSISTANT (US 2019), Wheatley will examine the ways in which our subjective responses to and understandings of the ‘meaning’ of colour are interwoven with broader ideological forces. And, with Green’s film in mind, she also cautions against taking colour at face value. Billed as the first film of #MeToo movement, THE ASSISTANT will be shown after the lecture together with the educational short film SEEING GREEN (US 1937). (Hannes Wesselkämper)

The Cinepoetics Lectures are organized by the research center of the same name at Freie Universität Berlin.

Showing first: Seeing Green Jam Handy Organization USA 1937 Digital file engl. OV 9 min.