Colour in film, however, is not only relevant in terms of salience and visually separating/connecting elements in frames but also concerning symbolic meaning. Unfortunately, it is a category of mise-en-scène that is often not given enough attention to in film commentary. Both in film and real life we often take colour for granted although it communicates with us in so many different ways. Even when crossing the street red tells us to stop and green tells us to go. Moreover, red is not just red and green is not just green. C. P. Biggam lists four categories that constitute colour calling them “hue, saturation, tone and brightness” (3). In our daily lives we do not only meet colour symbolism in traffic but also in baby-boy-blue furnished nurseries or baby-girl-pink coloured walls at gynaecologists’ waiting rooms. Also, red for love and aggression, yellow for the sun and envy, blue …show more content…
As the title already suggests, in “Snow White and Rose Red” red is portrayed in contrast to white. In “Snow White”, black is added as contrasting colour at the very beginning of the fairytale referring to Snow White’s physical traits and her beauty: “Haut so weiß wie Schnee, Lippen so rot wie Blut und Haare so Schwarz wie Ebenholz” (Grimm/Grimm 264). Generally, this tricolour motif of red, white, and black has its traditions in folk mythology around the world. Dominique Guerrero-Ricard argues that this trilogy of colours represents a “unification of love and beauty, and the initiation of an adolescent into the secrets of life and death” (Hemming 316). Following a Freudian analysis, she associates red with blood, female fertility, sexual love, health, and life in general. She further reads white as death-in-life, latency, and dormacy, not as purity (cf.