This article explores the correspondences and differences in terms of color design between two screen versions of Black Narcissus, a popular novel by Rumer Godden published in 1939. Conceptual approaches drawn upon include ideas of “the figural,” intertextuality and hybridity as central to understanding how Black Narcissus operates on many complex levels, arguing that color is a key expressive mode in their articulation. Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film and a 2020 television mini-series directed ...
This article explores the correspondences and differences in terms of color design between two screen versions of Black Narcissus, a popular novel by Rumer Godden published in 1939. Conceptual approaches drawn upon include ideas of “the figural,” intertextuality and hybridity as central to understanding how Black Narcissus operates on many complex levels, arguing that color is a key expressive mode in their articulation. Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film and a 2020 television mini-series directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen are for the first time compared in relation to landscape and the natural environment; interior spaces; costume; race. The texts’ experimentation with color, lighting and diffusion enables boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, as well as between characters’ memories and repressed desires, to be problematized. As “end of empire” texts, the literary and screen iterations of Black Narcissus are related to postcolonial theories in which a series of hybrid, “in-between” spaces and cultural attitudes are explored.
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