The Monopack Revolution, Global Cinema and Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953)

This article discusses the impact of cheaper colour film stocks introduced in the 1950s on the global film market. After a contextual overview the cases of India and China are briefly considered before a more detailed examination of conditions in Japan, and how the world’s attention was drawn to the achievements of Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) as an exemplary colour film that was influenced by both Japanese culture and Hollywood melodrama, particularly The Mississippi Gambler (Rudolph Mate, 1953), an American film that was notable for its display of different colours, fabrics and silken textures illuminated by lighting. The history of colour filmmaking in the sound period is detailed, as well as how Japanese technicians visited Hollywood in the early 1950s to study colour. Following a textual analysis of Jigokumon , the article considers its reception by Japanese and British critics. Shifting attention away from the more prevalent analyses of colour in American, British and European cinema, the article highlights the need for transnational approaches to more fully understand a critical period in the history of global cinema. The contemporary context of film restoration is also referenced as of prime importance in recovering the chromatic qualities of films shot in Eastmancolor that were subject to deterioration. Conceptualising global colour as an expansive, fluid phenomenon that has been largely formed by transnational exchange constitutes an important step towards bringing colour more centrally into the frame of transnational studies as well as informing our understanding of colour’s relevance to the development of national cinemas.

Street: The Monopack Revolution, Global Cinema and Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) Art. 2, page 3 of 29 Disney's Silly Symphonies series of short animated films was thus used in the 1930s as a platform for promoting Technicolor and as an inspiration for later landmark animated feature films including Fantasia (1940) that intertwined colour design with a film's narrative structure (Moen, 2010: 385). Live-action filmmaking however took less readily to colour, a situation that did not change until the introduction in the 1940s and 1950s of cheaper, single-strip 'monopack' colour film stocks that could be used in any camera. While the commercial availability of these stocks expanded the potential market for colour films, it was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that colour became the dominant aesthetic choice for filmmakers and audiences in Europe and the USA, a trend that has continued to the present and pertains across the world. As this article will explore, this process was even more delayed in India, China and Japan for cultural, economic and other reasons. But once it was achieved the world on screen was defiantly in colour, a momentous shift that occurred during the previous decades (Misek, 2010).
Unlike the relatively fast introduction of sound to cinema, colour faced a much longer, drawn-out series of practical obstacles and entrenched cultural and aesthetic issues. As emergent technologies, colour processes constantly had to make a case for their superiority in markets dominated by cheaper, black-and-white films that were often admired by critics as more aesthetically pleasing. Practitioners were faced with a central dilemma: to draw attention to itself colour had to be different, even spectacular, yet for complete acceptance in some countries it needed to take care to support, rather than challenge dominant aesthetic preferences and established codes of realism. In Britain, for example, although many preferred the 'restrained' aesthetic of Dufaycolor to Technicolor, it was Technicolor that ended-up dominating colour production. Dufaycolor was championed by supporters including artist Paul Nash who appreciated its 'understated' and 'natural' qualities in spite of several technical difficulties the process encountered (Street, 2012: 40). Yet the preference for a 'restrained' approach to colour that was deemed by many as appropriate for British aesthetic tastes influenced how cinematographers, directors, set and costume designers developed Technicolor in British films; the same technology but with a Street: The Monopack Revolution, Global Cinema and Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) Art. 2, page 4 of 29 national inflection that was known as such all over the world (Street, 2012). In this way, the reception of new technology is only in part influenced by economic or scientific considerations. The negotiation of innovation involves a complex set of exchanges between interested parties that contest the cultural terms on which it is based. It is only by appreciating this fully that we can understand how technology works in the world.
What contemporaries thought about colour was of fundamental importance to its application within mass culture. While seeing the world in colour was a part of everyday life, on screen it was a complex engagement with notions of realism and the attractions of film spectacle. The boundaries between realism and spectacle were indeed stretched as filmmakers negotiated established aesthetic regimes while at the same time exploited colour's artistic potential. Much as with the critical elevation of silent cinema to the status of art cinema once sound was introduced, for many black-and-white films appeared aesthetically superior when colour was on the agenda but was far from totally accepted. Cultural preferences for black-and-white were underpinned by philosophical positions that privileged line and form over the addition of colours that might cause distraction. Roland Barthes wrote about colour as ' a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph.
For me, colour is an artifice, a cosmetic ' (1982' ( : 81, quoted in Batchelor, 2000. As we shall see, concern over colour creating too much distraction as ' artifice' was voiced in very different national contexts, a position that revealed a wider cultural anxiety over colour as uncontrollable, even dangerous. in new processes and films won international awards (Kuleshov, 1987(Kuleshov, [1947).
In India, the process was much slower and colour films were not made in significant numbers until the 1960s. The first colour film was Kisam Kanya Street: The Monopack Revolution, Global Cinema and Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) Art. 2, page 6 of 29 (Cinecolor, directed by Moti B. Gidwani), produced in 1937 and then after a gap of fifteen years a few films were made using Technicolor, Gevacolor and Fujicolor.
Film stock was imported while the processing of Technicolor films was done in the UK. In this way colour processes developed in national contexts had much wider, transnational impacts. Although they might be associated with particular aesthetic qualities and national sensibilities, their transnational circulation provided scope for degrees of local variation that facilitated their assimilation into diverse national contexts. Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) was the first Indian socially-themed colour melodrama to be a major box-office success as well as being highly regarded internationally. The film was shot using Gevacolor (a Belgian stock produced by an affiliate of Agfacolor) and processed in Technicolor. This was a common approach that underlined the shift in Technicolor's business from production to post-production in which dye-transfer imbibition printing was retained as the company's 'unique selling point' for many years. But it was the commercial success of Junglee (Subodh Mukherjee, 1961), an Eastmancolor film, which heralded a major shift to colour aesthetics in Hindi cinema that celebrated colour spectacle for a sustained period.
Its popular music and distinctive filming of the Kasmiri landscape was a winning formula that was repeated with films including Kashmir Ki Kali (Shakti Samanta, 1964), Mere Sanam (Amar Kumar, 1965) and Jab Jab Phool Khile (Suraj Prakash, 1965). Since then Indian cinema has been identified with a rich, saturated look that is a vital component of popular Hindi musicals and melodramas.
Despite the chromatic density, vibrancy and particularity of Chinese films following the output of the acclaimed 'Fifth Generation' filmmakers of the 1980s and early 1990s, in the past engagement with colour was spasmodic and is patchily documented. The first major colour film, Shengsi hen/Remorse at Death (Fei Mu, 1948), was an opera film that benefitted from the technical input of ' chromatic pioneer' Yan but the results were criticized for producing too strong blues and failing to deliver the qualities associated with the stage performance (Xu, 2012: 460). Shengsi hen did not herald a breakthrough to a sustained period of colour production. In subsequent years films were more often shot in black-and-white, with critics reluctant to discuss technologies that had been developed in other countries or the aesthetic potential of colour (Hillenbrand, 2012: 4). A general suspicion of colour as artifice tended to repress discussion of its attributes as positive, a position that western critics also often defended. There were, however, a few significant colour films released in the 1950s that should be noted, for example New Year's Sacrifice/Zhu Fu (Hu Sang, 1956) and Women's Basketball Player No. 5/Nǚlán Wǔ Hào (Xie Jin, 1957 Chinese filmmakers, and China aimed to be technologically self-sufficient once the necessary expertise had been transferred. Yet one of Jiang Qing's favourite films was apparently The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948). She watched this repeatedly, presumably attracted to its message of the ballet dancer dying for the greater purpose of art, a sentiment that chimed well with Cultural Revolution propaganda (Zhu, 2018). The use of colour to heighten emotional intensity, in combination with strategic low-key lighting had indeed been a feature of several other key British films, particularly melodramas such as Blanche Fury (Marc Allégret, 1948), so we should be wary of constructing colour as necessarily nationalist or exclusively inward-looking.
In the 1980s several distinctive Chinese colour films were however released including Yellow Earth/Huáng tǔdì (Chén Kǎigē, 1984) which drew inspiration from colours associated with regional folk art to contrast with the dominant yellows indicated by the title. This approach rejected Socialist Realist codes 'by critiquing them through traditional aesthetic codes', once again indicating the significance of ideological imperatives during moments of chromatic change (Berry and Farquhar, 1994: 95). Another interesting case is Jú Dòu (Zhang Yimou, 1990), a film set in a dyeing works and which also actively uses colour, particularly reds, to heighten melodramatic impact and emotion. Its chromatic references resemble Chinese painting traditions, particularly portraiture and rich, expressive colour. Lau details how Jú Dòu is designed to relate colours to emotions, investing them with a strong sensual appeal that is accentuated by side-and back-lighting. The fabrics that feature so prominently in the film are shot to bring out their vibrant hues but also to provide contrasting darker shades as tragic themes become obtrusive towards the drama's conclusion. The colour red, for example, is subject to different meanings as it fills the screen entirely on several occasions: seen as bright and shiny but later acquiring more sinister ' or even monstrous' connotations when tinged with black (Lau, 1994: 142). Contrary to most references, it is unlikely that Jú Dòu was processed using the Technicolor dye transfer equipment that had been transferred from London to Beijing. It is important to note that the production, filmed at the Xi'an Film Studio, had attracted Japanese finance and was processed by the 'Imagica' laboratory in Japan (Dootson and Zhu, 2018). ' a lack of depth and an empty display' (Chow, 2001: 393). This position associated colour with surface values that were seen to be directed towards foreign audiences and critics, as emphasized by the foregrounding of colour in film titles. On the other hand, the turn to expressive colour proved to be a sustainable route to global circulation that arguably enriched cinematic output and a culture of transnational co-production in subsequent decades.
In the rest of this article I want to focus particularly on Japan as an instructive case study in the transnational flow of colour cinema in the early 1950s. Japan is a particularly interesting example since there was no Technicolor subsidiary there, and the development of colour was open to many different influences. Since Nöel Burch claimed: 'It is beyond doubt that Japan's singular history, informed by a unique combination of forces and circumstances, has produced a cinema which is in essence unlike that of any other nation ' (1979: 11), it has been acknowledged that such binary conceptions of how national cinemas evolve do not allow for the full range of diverse influences that are co-present in any given decade (Vitali and Willemen, 2006). The path to colour in Japan was typified by indigenous experimentation, foreign influence and considerable caution. Desser has even gone so far as to argue that 'Japanese cinema was little disposed to color. Even throughout the late 1960s, when color became the standard in worldwide film-making and black-and-white the exception, the latter maintained a palpable presence in Japan ' (1994: 307).
Various colour processes were experimented with in Japan, including Multicolor, a US-invented two-colour subtractive process. This was used by Dai Nihon  (Figures 1 and 2). This film uses colour to exaggerate the impact of a dancer's return from Tokyo to her rural home, the vividness of her costume symbolizing the shock of her transformation which is culturally associated with sexuality and city living. A black-and-white version of the film was also shot because its production company Shochiku was not confident that it could deliver sufficient colour prints to cinemas. Consequently, only eleven colour prints were released. Yet it took time before colour was adopted more systematically and Fujicolor did not become the dominant colour stock used in Japan until 1970, after which it expanded into the world market. In terms of other monopack systems, Ozu Yasujirō favored the look of Agfacolor prints which he used for Equinox Flower/Higanbana (1958). Agfacolor was comparatively muted in its palette, such as greens with a grey accent and appearing less vibrant in comparison with Technicolor that was known for its ability to reproduce strong reds. The tints of Fujicolor were cyan/blue-ish and as stocks became faster their ability to record natural light or night scenes improved.
Eastmancolor was nevertheless a major player in Japan, particularly consolidating its  Art. 2, page 12 of 29 position in the years from 1958 to 1961. This caused concern among independent Japanese producers that the USA was monopolizing the market and forcing them to use Eastmancolor (Brunel, 1956: 85 This spirit of pragmatic commercial co-operation can be related to developments in the 1950s when, following the success of Rashomon on the film festival circuit, Japanese producers aimed to maximize exports (Balio, 2010: 121  Paris'. Maté frequently films characters in conversation from behind one of them in over-the-shoulder mid-shots so that the full colour detail of accessories such at hats adorned with flowers can be seen (Figure 3). In addition to the sumptuousness of the women's clothes, Mark's costumes are of note, including an embroidered silk waistcoat glimpsed underneath a blue jacket with silk lapels. On another occasion, he wears a white shirt and the pattern of its delicately embossed fabric is accentuated through the gentle play of light on its surface (Figures 4 and 5). It is not surprising that observing the production of this film impressed Universal's Japanese visitors, particularly in view of the importance of filming the coloured fabrics that were a major feature of period films featuring traditional dress.
Although The Mississippi Gambler was shot and processed by Technicolor, at the time they would have heard discussion about the impact of monopack stock on the company. It soon became common for films to be shot on monopack stocks such as Eastmancolor but processed by Technicolor so that the dye-transfer process remained in currency after shooting films with Technicolor cameras had more or less ceased.   On his return to Japan Midorikawa Michio advised on shooting Jigokumon/ Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) in Eastmancolor (Figure 6), the first major Japanese colour film to be released outside Japan and widely acclaimed for its colour.     As David Desser notes, Japan's interest in colour in the 1950s was not prompted by a desire for greater realism, a discourse that often featured in pro-colour arguments voiced in the West, but to enhance films for export (Desser, 1994: 307-08). The play, unlike in the West, is an art, and as art it demands a great simplification and restraint with emphasis on what lies beneath the surface. In order to create an impression of likeness, there should be a tinge of the "unlike", the subtle as opposed to the obvious; the hint as opposed to the statement.

Contemporary reviewers immediately saw that
In order to represent anger, the actor should retain some gentleness in his moods, else he will portray not anger but violence…Squandering of emotion, Heiji revolt is rolled out by an anonymous hand. In the following thirty minutes or so, the story in this scroll painting is dramatized with more colorful costumes, props, and sets. Traditional Japanese beauty is thus replaced by a cinematic form, and because of the scroll paintings, bright colors especially in the sets appear to be a realistic depiction of historical incidents ' (2013: 277). The film's costumes shown in high-key lighting are certainly remarkable, especially in the scenes of the horse race which highlight the ceremonial costumes: purple for Morito and red for Wataru (Figures 9 and 10). Even in the early scenes colour appears to almost jump out of the screen, particularly for Kesa's costumes. Indeed, Morito believes she is the empress because of her gorgeous red, green, gold, white and yellow silken attire that contrasts with his blue warrior's suit that has thick, shiny bands across the chest which glint in the light. The bands appear as constricting apparel, the costume underscoring his emotional repression as he becomes infatuated with the woman he has rescued.
Kesa, by contrast, appears to glow with rarity and finesse even after her masquerade is exposed. The theme of forbidden attraction is symbolized by her costume: when they encounter each other after the escape, Kesa's red and orange costume is covered by a gauze, translucent fabric that when removed reveals the chromatic density of the vibrant hues underneath.
Daisuke Miyao notes that the arrival of colour film in Japan signaled a retreat from the ' aesthetics of shadow' that had dominated production in black-and-white films (2013: 281). Yet when Gate of Hell shifts gear to the slower-paced, cumulative   of Hell is created in good part by colour effects and play with textures and spatial depth. In this respect, the film lends itself very much to a textual, analytical approach that is inspired by Giuliana Bruno's work on 'haptic materiality' (2014). As has already been indicated, the film's fine and varied costumes, for example, constitute material expressions of the characters' psyches, of their histories and changes in circumstance across the narrative. Bruno refers to ' connective fabrics', or how clothes become affective metaphors that are profoundly related to mood and psychology.
This idea accentuates how textures, folds, pleats and seams animate clothes as they appear mobile, as visible traces of their wearer's body while moving through the architectural spaces they inhabit. As Bruno puts it: 'Home of the fold, fashion resides within the reversible continuity that, rather than separating, provides a breathing membrane -a skin -to the world. Sensorially speaking, clothes come alive in (e) motion. They are physically moved as we are, activated by our personas. Livened by kinesthetics and our spirits, clothes are the envelopes of our histories, the material residue of a corporeal passage…From folds of the soul to pleats of matter, emotions are mediated and designed in an elastic architexture' (Bruno 2014: 28).
The colours of Gate of Hell are often lit in lower-key to register shadow, particularly in the second half when interiors feature very prominently with expressive use of shadow, colour, fabrics and gauzes to communicate the mood of impending tragedy.
The different areas of the house are delineated by translucent drapes that float gently as the characters move through the spaces. These are also used as means of underscoring emotional resonances as when Kesa is informed that a messenger from Lord Kiyomori has come to see her. In this scene, the left-hand frame of the image has a translucent drape in front of her husband while the right-hand shows Kesa normally: the screening effect almost prefigures subsequent events and is a graphic indication at this point of Wataru's ignorance of Morito's plans (Figure 11). The complex folds of material that feature prominently in so many scenes accentuate the pervasive mood of intrigue and the acceleration of emotional tension (Figure 12).
Morito tricks Kesa into meeting him by forcing her aunt to send a message saying that she is ill. The scene at her aunt's house has very low-key lighting but Kesa's light pink silk costume, trimmed with green, is visually striking. When Morito pushes her against the wall the pink contrasts with his blue silk robe, visually accentuating the physical difference between them as she shrinks from his advance.   colour design were being experimented with transnationally, not just in Gate of Hell.
The film was indeed a prime example of colour's potential as ' chromo-drama' and of an aesthetic approach that occasionally was adopted in American and European films by ' colour-auteurs' such as Douglas Sirk, Rudolph Maté, and Powell and Pressburger. Contemporary critics were invariably cautious about colour and what we now appreciate as complex chromatic designs were seldom commentated upon.
Gate of Hell's reception as a breakthrough film in colour terms says much about the period's shifting taste cultures which the international film festival circuit was conducive in developing.
The cases considered in this article have demonstrated the variety of approaches to colour following the introduction of technologies that led to its eventual ubiquity across global film production. At first hesitant, the film industries of India, China and Japan delayed their uptake of colour systems for reasons that are complex but to some extent similar. While attention has often been paid to how different national cinemas used colour it is clear that conventions also can be seen as circulating more transnationally. The extent to which Technicolor served as a technical and aesthetic model is indicated by the visits of key Chinese and Japanese technicians to Hollywood that proved to be significant encounters of technology transfer. While the rapid expansion of India's turn to colour in the 1960s was propelled by Eastmancolor, in China and Japan learning from Hollywood was particularly important in demonstrating how colour could be effectively used with different lighting strategies. As we have seen from Gate of Hell, these were appropriated and extended to produce a film that was noted by the rest of the world for its chromatic qualities. The imperative to export Gate of Hell as a prestigious example of Japanese cinema propelled the film into a context of international circulation that appreciated its aesthetic design.
As an ' exotic' product that showcased colour through a historical and melodramatic canvas, it was both familiar and exotic. In China, this approach distinguished the Fifth Generation's colour films that opened-up chromatic experimentation across borders. As well as moving across the screen, these moving images demonstrate how films travelled both within and across national borders. Conceptualising global colour as an expansive, fluid phenomenon that has been largely formed by transnational exchange constitutes an important step towards bringing colour more centrally into the frame of transnational studies as well as informing our understanding of colour's relevance to the development of national cinemas.