Colour in art is not just used for it’s visual appeal. It is also used to give meaning to the piece. Colours are often given meaning and this can be utilised to give extra layers of meaning to the work of art. The colours that are chosen can say various things about the work.
Colours are often given cultural value. For example flags use specific colours, along with patterns, to represent a specific political state. Sometimes the colours in flags can also be used to represent aspects of the country that the flag represents. Many americans associate the colours Red, White and Blue with their national identity. French people also sometimes have the same attachment to red white and blue, as their flag is just three stripes in these colours.
One example of a series of films which use Red, White and Blue to speak about France and French culture is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three colours trilogy. This trilogy consist of the films, Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White and Three Colours Red. On the box set of the trilogy, released by Artificial Eye, the three films are each represented by a strip of their title colour with images from the film inside that strip. These strips are laid out like the French flag.
If you put the boxes inside the main box in order they also resemble a french flag as the spines of the cases are also the same colour.
The three colours trilogy is supposed to represent three concepts of the french revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. The colour of the title of each film is also used in the production design and lighting of each film as well. Such as in this shot from three colours blue when flashes of blue lighting synch with music which is playing in the head of the main character.
There are also many painters that use strong colours. These painters include Rothko,
(in an ideal world when you were reading this part of this essay the room would suddenly go pitch black and an entire wall in your office would suddenly be taken up by the above painting. Forcing you to do nothing but stare at it. This isn’t an ideal world however, so instead I’ve included a big picture of it), Matisse,
and many more.
Kevin Bacon is sometimes colourful in the way that he dresses, but a lot of the time I just assume that he hasn’t really thought that much about the colours he wears from an ideological point of view and has perhaps just thrown something on because he thinks it looks good.
I like colours a lot lot because they are pretty. Ooooohhh! 
For more detailed information about colours please consult my visual culture research from last year that was done on the same subject.
Blue has often been thought of as the colour of sadness. For example there is a music genre called the Blues which is often an outlet for expressing sadness. Miles Davis has an album called Kind of Blue. Paintings done by Picasso in one period of his career are referred to as being part of his Blue Period. These paintings are often of a melancholic and sombre tone which suits this particular meaning of the colour blue. 
This painting of a guitarist. Shows the subject with his head lowered, which suggests sadness. He may have lost enthusiasm for his music, as you may have lost enthusiasm for marking this piece of work, but I don’t think that that is the case. I think that the old man is actually expressing his sadness and hurt by playing his music.
Black & White film versus colour film.
There was a time when colour film was too slow to expose and therefore could not be used in motion picture. There were various different methods of shooting colour film in motion picture invented before a method was invented that recreated the colours of real life to a satisfactory level. Even when this method was invented however, it took a few decades for it to become the norm in theatrical films. When it finally did become the standard, it was still very common for people to shoot films in Black & white for artistic reason. This continues to this day, despite the fact that in many geographical areas, such as the UK, there is no longer a cost advantage to shooting black & white. In fact in the UK it has actually become more expensive to shoot on black and white film. If people shoot digitally, there is almost no practical differences between making a film in black & white and making one in colour. The way that digital filmmakers often work is making footage black & white, simply by selecting an effect on editing software. This begs the question, why do people choose to shoot in black & white over shooting in full colour when there is virtually no practical advantage?
Modern films using Black & White and shot digitally
- A field in england - Directed by Ben Wheatley..
- Melancholia - Directed by Lav Diaz.
- Frances Ha - Directed by Noah Baumbach.
- Much Ado About Nothing - Directed by Joss Whedon.
I think one of the reasons why making black and white films is so appealing to digital filmmakers is that sometimes, if footage is not colour graded very well, digital video can look extremely harsh and flat. It almost has the vibe of CCTV footage. It can be almost too real. This stark realism often seems unemotional and flat and can therefore hinder a person’s ability to get lost inside the world of the film. A film made digitally needs to have better acting, in order to get people invested in it. This is because the flatness of the footage can make it too obvious that you are watching actors and not real people. Therefor it seems that, in order to get fully involved in a film, a certain level of artistic distance must be put in between the world of the audience and the world of the film. This is why I believe black & white is so appealing in the world of digital filmmaking, as it is a very easy way to add in this artistic distance.
One filmmaker who uses black & white with digital cinematography to good effect is the filipino director Lav Diaz. Lav Diaz’s films are the kind of films that could only be made digitally, as he has found a way to use the practical benefits and limitations of digital video in a unique way. This means that his films are very different to the way they would be if they were shot on film. He uses long static shots that are often held for longer than a 16mm camera with a 400 foot load of film could shoot. The length of his films is usually much longer than a standard film. Melancholia (not to be confused with the Lars Von Trier film of the same name), for example is eight hours in length, Evolution of a Filipino Family is twelve hours long and even Norte The End of History, one of his shortest works and perhaps his most accessible, is four hours long. More interesting than this however, is that he uses the imperfections of the medium to his advantage. He often uses very cheap microphones, that are built into the camera.
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