SikkensFoundation
Sikkens Prize
1983 ETTORE SCOLA — For the use of color and its development in his films Una giornata particolare, Passione d’amore, and La nuit de Varennes, accompanied by the complexity of these works. The reasons for awarding the Sikkens Award to Scola were formulated by Hans Keller in the accompanying pu- blication. The board based its choice particularly on the application of the use of color in Scola’s films Una gior- nata particolare (1977), Passione d’amore (1981) and La nuit de Varennes (1982). According to Keller, Scola’s use of color served particularly as a character, a third person which developed independently next to the other storytel- lers and the communicative capacity of their environ-Back to index
ment. Where necessary, it colors the development of the events and their dramatic signifcance and sometimes it says what it stands for sooner than the other characters. In Una giornata particolare, this happens in a very spectacular way because of the pale UFA tinge gi- ven to the era in which the story takes place. Just below this drama without color, it is possible to see how the me- dium of color is directed in a style of increasing intensity and changes in tone and harmony when the other cha- racters require this. The extent to which the author is aware of the theatrical use of color is clear, for example, from the constant use of large pieces of fabric and pla- nes of color: bedspreads, sheets, and fags. In Passione d’amore, color is used as a mes- senger of objective decay, how summer turns to autumn, how saturation becomes slimmed down. History has raised the nature of passion, how red is infected by gray and finally becomes so grubby that it attains a new color – albeit with a deformed and bizarre character. Protago- nists, as well as their attributes and entourage, owe the lighting of the changing role in the narrative above all to the color signals accompanying them. In La nuit de Varennes the downfall of the old and the emergence of the new age merge mercilessly and irrevocably as a result of light and color. The film contains a wealth of theatrical statements about color – from the make-up scenes with Casanova to the some- times striking changes in light during a 24-hour period. Just as Casanova and Thomas Paine never met in real life, light and color do not interrelate in this way in reality. And yet this is more real. Scola’s three films for which he was given the Award we- re shown in the cinema The Movies in Amsterdam: La nuit de Varennes, Una giornata particolare and Passione d’amore. The commercial film circuit showed more of Scola’s films during that period, and the distribution com- pany Film International tried to show some of Scola’s films which had never been shown before in the Nether- lands. Download text as pdf
