Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 124

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Popular Culture Review

setting—which is now the site of Lincoln Center.
The film that emerged was clearly a social, cultural, industrial and generic
product of its time. West Side Story's Technicolor musical aesthetic creates a highly
stylized version of stark realism: the film’s color uses its lavish three-strip visual
design to highlight an extreme light/dark, gritty contrast of muted tones, deep
shadows, and dark mise-en-scene—where the exception is a dominant use of the
color red (e.g., the conscious stylistic design of the bright red walls of the dance
hall is a site o f racial conflict as well as o f love). A wo/r-inflected approach to color
is consistent with earlier color serious musicals such as The Red Shoes (1948), A
Star is Born (1954) and Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Such dark musicals were
forerunners in developing a “color noir” aesthetic which would become prominent
in later contemporary “neo-noirs” (i.e., Chinatown, Blade Runner.) Wise describes
West Side Story's approach to color as “a musical set in a real background not a
never-never land; a tough side of New York City requiring a good, strong color
scheme to accommodate darker areas of the film realistically, but not too flamboyant
except in the gym with the red walls. We tended to use low-key colors.” The result
evokes a black-and-white film with moments o f bright color for thematic
punctuation. Wise explains how he sought out Linwood Dunn, an “old associate”
from RKO who “did all the optical work for Kane and Ambersons” to achieve a
stylized three-strip Technicolor dissolve between the dress shop and the dance at
the gym using color-separated figures (Wise in Kutner, 33)— evocative of
Hollywood’s use of avant-garde style in later 1960s films.
West Side Story also uses extreme camera angles, especially in the opening
shot—a straight down (avant-garde-inspired) aerial view of an oppressive gray
New York skyline to visually constrict rather than sweepingly expand space, while
the soundtrack uses silence and ambient sounds of traffic in lieu of a symphonic
score—more like film noir, gangster and urban crime films than the musical.10
Instead of sweeping conventional angles with “lyrically” moving camera in classic
musical style, it uses extreme, Dutch or low angles evocative of the horror genre
and German expressionist films, even to film dance sequences—in a visual style
accentuating progressively noir conventions.11The milieu is increasingly dark and
stylized, descending into a world of blackness, flashing neon and reflective surfaces
such as water, glass, windows, and mirrors in a nocturnal setting. The framing is
decidedly noir with compositional emphasis on ominous shadow, darkness and
bars of entrapment which are privileged over light to foreground restrictive black
obstructions between camera and subject—repeatedly chain link fences slice the
foreground to fragment, splinter and destabilize compositional space. Such a formal
style undermines the musical’s utopian happy ending to emphasize themes found
in film noir and gangster formulas and imply that a corrupt world is out to get the
individual.