Colour and Motion: Some Notes on Spielberg’s Fantasy and Science Fiction Films and the Visual Style of Vincente Minnelli

As a student, a long time ago, at the University of Warwick, I took a seat in the library one day, the photocopiers nearby chugging and churning away, and opened the new issue (May-June 1992) of Film Comment. As a lifelong devotee (I was only 19) of Steven Spielberg’s movies you can perhaps imagine my astonishment when I turned a page to find an essay entitled “The Panning of Steven Spielberg (Part One),” written by Henry Sheehan. To this day, Sheehan’s piece remains a touchstone in writing about Spielberg’s filmmaking. Limited to the space of a magazine page, Sheehan’s eventual two-part essay made such sense, and it was the first time that I’d really read something about Spielberg’s films that looked so consistently at the film style being deployed across his body of work.

A key point that Sheehan made in that two-part essay was the way that décor featured prominently in Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1991) (the film had very recently been released in UK cinemas), which allowed Sheehan to make a stylistic connection between Spielberg’s movies and those of Vincente Minnelli (Fig. 1). Talk about good timing: I’d just been introduced to the films of Minnelli and his film The Pirate (1948) in a Film class by V.F. Perkins, one of my university tutors. With that décor-focused thought in mind, here’s a pertinent note from a wide-ranging piece about Minnelli that ran on the Senses of Cinema website in 2004: “Décor in Minnelli’s world is most often projected out, both as an expression of the self and as a method of entrapping others. […] If Minnelli’s cinema is filled with teachers it is also filled with enchanters performing feats of magic.” This observation takes us back to what Sheehan was commenting on in relation to Spielberg’s movies. Suffice to say: in their premise and plot developments, Spielberg’s movies are quite different to those of Minnelli. The connection between the two filmmakers, though, is to be found in their shared emphasis on artifice and colour and movement, particularly. In Minnelli’s movies, the camera has an elegant mobility to it and we see an analogue to this in Spielberg’s films, particularly as the filmmaker has also acknowledged the influence on his work of the mobile camera in the films directed by William Wyler and Lewis Milestone. Very specifically, we can make a point about Minnelli’s affinity for the use of a camera on a boom crane, allowing the camera to rise and fall: it’s an ever-present shot choice in Spielberg’s movies and his fantasy movies relish the scope that those changes in perspective and scale of situation can offer. Just recall the moment when Roy and Gillian clamber up a slope of rough ground to finally sight Devil’s Tower with their own eyes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Of his film style, Minnelli noted that “I use colours to bring fine points of story and character.” Colour has been key to Spielberg’s accentuation of the relationship between these two elements. We can indicate the vivid use of colour in ET: The Extra Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982). The red of Elliot's hoodie stands out so vividly against the desert sand and beige and the colour speaks to ideas of passion and pain (Fig. 2). Then, too, there are the brightening colours of a potted plant in the film that signal a shift in the fortunes of the characters. Minnelli’s movie Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) also focuses on young people and children, and perhaps one of its most famous sequences is that which is set at Halloween.

**Fig. 3 - The Halloween scene from *Meet Me in St. Louis*.**

The Halloween story in the film begins with a wide shot of the golden light of rooms lit up on an autumn night, engulfed by night skies. The camera pushes in on the house; as before in the film, the camera leads us, immerses us, in the physical space of the story. A dissolve to a pair of Halloween masks and then to the children (Tootie and Agnes) preparing to go out trick or treating (Fig. 3). This is precisely a scenario that unfolds in Spielberg’s fantasy movie, ET: The Extra Terrestrial. The pumpkin in the background of the scene in Meet Me in St. Louis is candlelit from within and the visual patina threading through the Halloween sequence is similarly gold and orange: it all feels that bit heightened and theatrical. Agnes and Tootie step out into the leaf strewn night and watch a group of kids throwing chairs onto a bonfire; the red and gold of firelight creating an alternative reality to the sunkissed street that we saw at the beginning of the film. Tootie is the smallest child in the group and she’s the one who goes to trick their neighbours, her courageous walk down a suburban street taking them further away from the known world of home. She eventually arrives at the neighbour’s porch that every other child has been keen to avoid visiting. Tootie approaches the house, the doorway cast in a silhouette thrown by a bare tree. It’s a visual that might hint at arboreal spookiness to come in Spielberg’s productions, Poltergeist (TObe Hooper, 1982) and Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) (also depicting an autumnal moment). As a footnote of sorts, the energy of Agnes and Tootie in the Halloween scene of Meet Me in St. Louis suggests the realisation of The Lost Boys on screen in Hook and also of the children in Spielberg’s short film Kick the Can which comprised an instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante & George Miller, 1983). Then, too, the dressing up of the children for Halloween in Meet Me in St. Louis might also make you think of the dressing up that the Lost Boys and Peter undergo en route to Peter Banning becoming Peter Pan once more. Performing and pretending (storytelling) is central to Spielberg’s most recent movie, The Fabelmans (2022).

In Spielberg’s fantasy Hook, there’s again a similar break with a sense of realism through colour when Peter arrives in Neverland and, more specifically, at the Lost Boys home in and around the Nevertree. There’s shallow focus at work and playfulness and colour, and performing the role of being Peter Pan is what the action moves towards. The artifice foregrounded by the film is essential to the fact that this is about a man’s journey away from reality. In Hook, colour pours off and out of the screen. The cool blues of a winter night that characterise the first act of the film are set aside for the primary colours of Neverland. Indeed, its colour paint that is literally used to restore colour and a sense of variety and joy into the life of Peter Bannon on his gradual transformation back to his original self of Peter Pan. Way back in 1985, Steven Spielberg talked about making films that escaped with reality rather than from it. Once we arrive in Neverland, the shallower focus images contrast neatly with the deeper focus of the non-fantasy scenes.

The connection with Minnelli is also at play in Spielberg’s supernatural romance, Always (1989), where the blue of moonlight is key to the film’s style in ways that characterise the romantic fantasy narrative (Fig. 4). There’s a clarity and deep focus to the action and amidst the fantasy scenario, or rather, as a prelude to the fantasy that unfolds, is a notable scene of real-world action in which the Minnelli motif of performance and artifice as a way of seeing reality more clearly manifests it in a scene in which Pete gives Dorinda a new dress for her birthday. Dorinda’s subsequent dress-wearing appearance for a date with her partner Pete anticipates the moment in Hook when Peter Pan meets with Tinkerbell once more within a magic tree that’s invested with the gift of Peter’s memories of his childhood and origin, and which functions as a clue to his future sense of delight. The sequence in which Peter remembers his childhood so carefully calibrates music and image and offers a range of very pretty, picture-book styled images. It is highly artificial and that is the point: the storytelling of a memory allows Peter to find his ‘true’ self. In perhaps the rawest scene of emotion expressed in Always that’s when the film’s prettiness and emphasis on play and artifice are virtually absent as Dorinda and Al share their grief at Pete’s death).

Minnelli directed a number of movie musicals (such as The Pirate) and Spielberg, throughout this career - and until very recently - had identified his ambition to direct a movie musical; finally doing so with his film adoration of the stage musical West Side Story (2021). The Minnelli-influenced artifice of film style is abundant in the film, and one of its great pleasures: at points transforming action into such heightened reality. Indeed, The Jets, and especially Riff, in the film might prompt you to see a connection with The Lost Boys in Spielberg’s Hook. The full movie-musical realisation that Spielberg finally achieved with West Side Story was the apotheosis of a smattering of movie musical-inflected scenes and sequences across his films 1941 (1979), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), The Color Purple (1985) and Hook. Hook had even been conceived originally as full movie musical and as the production evolved the overt musical element was reduced but not entirely removed.

**Fig. 5 - *AI: Artificial Intelligence* (2001).**

Spielberg’s affinity for musicals was manifest at points, too, throughout AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001); finding expression in the character of Gigolo Joe. Indeed, in preparing for AI, Spielberg had suggested to Jude Law (portraying the character) (Fig. 5) that there would be value in watching Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire films. With its emphasis on identity and dream, and fairy tale ideas, too, AI arguably pulls quite powerfully on a Minnelli influence for its staging and visual presentation. The story concerns the tension between fabricated and illusory experience with authentic (human) life. Indeed, in its fairy tale leanings, the film also anticipates Spielberg’s return to a fairy tale mode with The BFG (2016). Colour and movement, loneliness and learning all thread together The BFG’s story about growing up; and, as with Hook, trusting in the ineffable is part of young Sophie’s experience in Giant Country. The BFG’s nocturnal dream catching jaunt, accompanied by Sophie, takes on the quality of a slapstick dance sequence that affirms the friendship between the protagonists.

Typically, we might think of Spielberg invoking the influences of Hitchcock, Ford, Capra and Lean on his film style. His longstanding enthusiasm for Minnelli’s movies is perhaps less recognised. However, in a letter that Spielberg wrote to Minnelli’s wife in 1996, Spielberg says of Minnelli’s films that “I’ve sat at the feet of his work, to listen and learn, to absorb, retain and benefit. He is in my thoughts whenever I make a motion picture.”

**Article published: March 15, 2024**

Biography

James is a Visiting Lecturer on the MA Feature Film Development course at Birmingham City University. He also works as a Script Reader for the BFI and Channel 4. You can find out more about James’s work here: https://www2.societyofauthors.org/soa-member/james-clarke/.