A «référence d’origine»: painting and colour in Jacques Demy’s cinematographic imagination

Abstract

Cinema and visual art are inevitably intertwined, and the dialogue between them in Jacques Demy’s production is no doubt a privileged one. Painting was a central aspect of the director’s life and played an important role in his work on many levels, especially in his unique visual universe. By examining many different project materials, some of which are previously unpublished and have not been taken into academic consideration before, the following paper analyses Demy’s artistic process and subsequent compositions, showing how the director always conceived images in pictorial terms, using colour as a raw material for their configuration, as a painter would. The pro-filmic elements play a decisive role in this sense, especially the décor and costumes: here Demy most clearly manifested his ‘pictorial conception of colour’ which would eventually lead him to physically repaint entire real-world objects