The invisible ideology of white light

This paper explores the role of white light in film history. It argues that, though we live our lives immersed in ‘white’ daylight, the historical hegemony of white light within moving images has been far from inevitable. The paper elaborates this claim by focusing on how and why Technicolor Inc. predicated its infamous but influential ‘law of emphasis’ on white balanced lighting, and by foregrounding ways in which subsequent uses of and discourses about colour in film have assumed the presence of full-spectrum light. Having drawn attention to this imperceptible – and so, until now, unnoticed – visual ideology, the paper then explores cinematic challenges to the hegemony of white light in films including South Pacific, Querelle and Chunkging Express.