4. Oscillating Op Art

Chapters Three and Four discuss the two main ways to juxtapose and combine (contrasting) colours, known as successive and simultaneous contrasts. Chapter Three elaborates on successive contrasts, that are created through a rapid succession of contrasting colours, as is often the case in films through the principle of montage. The chapter mainly elaborates on two types of successive contrasts. One is extreme dark-light contrasts, which, at the time, were also used to create hypnotic states and imaginary colours in what was known as the Flicker Film. The other type is succeeding colours, which are complementary or almost complementary. Here, in a nutshell, an afterimage is created that enhances the strength of the following colour. These successive contrasts have an awakening effect, ensuring that the audience does not doze off in the cinema. By zooming in on the cinema of the period, the particularities and connotations that came with these successive contrasts in cinema are made clear. Simultaneous colour contrasts occur when one colour influences the perception of another colour because they are placed in close vicinity to each other in the same image. This produces instabilities, changes, and fluctuations in the appearances of colours in, for example, painting. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a high interest in this phenomenon in art-school colour education, colour psychology, and the art movement known as op art or art-cinétique. Chapter Four elaborates on how these ideas and practices can be traced back to popular and art cinema of the period, either as an aesthetic trope or because of the op artworks on display in the pro-filmic space. In those cases where many op artworks are present in the film image, they make the simultaneous contrasts combined with moiré and other effects the core aesthetics of the film image.