Even without being Derek Jarman, I can see how it would be almost irresistible to make a film after reading Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour (1950—1951), because it is full of statements like this:
Would we say that my fictitious glass pane in the cinema gave the things behind it a white colouring?
There is gold paint, but Rembrandt didn't use it to paint a golden helmet.
Imagine we were told that a substance burns with a grey flame.
I doubt that Goethe's remarks about the characters of the colours could be of any use to a painter. They could hardly be any to a decorator.
What advantage would someone have over me who knew a direct route from blue to yellow?
There is no such thing as luminous grey. Is that part of the concept of grey, or part of the psychology, i.e. the natural history, of grey? And isn't it odd that I don't know?
Darkness is not called a colour.
The difference between black and, say, a dark violet is similar to the difference between the sound of a bass drum and the sound of a kettle-drum.
I treat colour concepts like the concepts of sensations.
Look at your room late in the evening when you can hardly distinguish between colours any longer; and now turn on the light and paint what you saw in the twilight.
Do I actually see the boy's hair blond in the photograph?! —Do I see it grey?
White cancels out all colors,—does red do this too?
We might say, the colour of the ghost is that which I must mix on the palette in order to paint it accurately. But how do we determine what the accurate picture is?
Why is green drowned in the black, while white isn't?
—But couldn't Martians say something like this? Somehow, by chance, the first humans they met were blind.
That's a fraction of the text I typed out for reference later. It's like a book of prompts. Next up: read Jarman's Chroma (1993), wait for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks to read them both, and then we watch Wittgenstein again. You can see, in this material, where some of the film came from. I want to know what else I've missed.
Would we say that my fictitious glass pane in the cinema gave the things behind it a white colouring?
There is gold paint, but Rembrandt didn't use it to paint a golden helmet.
Imagine we were told that a substance burns with a grey flame.
I doubt that Goethe's remarks about the characters of the colours could be of any use to a painter. They could hardly be any to a decorator.
What advantage would someone have over me who knew a direct route from blue to yellow?
There is no such thing as luminous grey. Is that part of the concept of grey, or part of the psychology, i.e. the natural history, of grey? And isn't it odd that I don't know?
Darkness is not called a colour.
The difference between black and, say, a dark violet is similar to the difference between the sound of a bass drum and the sound of a kettle-drum.
I treat colour concepts like the concepts of sensations.
Look at your room late in the evening when you can hardly distinguish between colours any longer; and now turn on the light and paint what you saw in the twilight.
Do I actually see the boy's hair blond in the photograph?! —Do I see it grey?
White cancels out all colors,—does red do this too?
We might say, the colour of the ghost is that which I must mix on the palette in order to paint it accurately. But how do we determine what the accurate picture is?
Why is green drowned in the black, while white isn't?
—But couldn't Martians say something like this? Somehow, by chance, the first humans they met were blind.
That's a fraction of the text I typed out for reference later. It's like a book of prompts. Next up: read Jarman's Chroma (1993), wait for
rushthatspeaks to read them both, and then we watch Wittgenstein again. You can see, in this material, where some of the film came from. I want to know what else I've missed.
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