Red: a building or structure*

“It's just a dream, Agnes.”

– Anna

Red as an expression of inner and outer worlds. Even the scene transitions are red.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

A character wearing pink on National Pink Day (USA), not to be confused with the much more poignant International Day of Pink

“Paris, Paris, Paris C'est sur la Terre un coin de paradis Paris, Paris, Paris, De mes amours c′est lui le favori Mais oui, mais oui, pardi Ce que j'en dis on vous l′a déjà dit Et c'est Paris, qui fait la parisienne Qu′importe, qu'elle vienne du nord ou bien du midi Et c'est aussi le charme et l′élégance Et l′âme de la France Tout cela, mais c'est Paris”

Joséphine Baker, Paris, Paris (Georges Zacharie Tabet)

Cowherd Mory and student Anta journey from Dakar to their new destination, the city of Paris.

Green for Irish-American Heritage Month (USA)

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”

– caption

Synchronous to the screening of a film that wasn't, Derek Jarman's Blue was broadcast on radio and television. Those who tuned into the radio could request a special card printed in that most spectral of colours, International Klein Blue, a blue that according to its creator Yves Klein, has “a quality close to pure space” and “immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched”.

“You say to the boy 'Open your eyes'. When he opens his eyes and sees the light, you make him cry out, saying 'Oh, Blue, come forth! Oh, Blue, arise! Oh, Blue, ascend! Oh, Blue, come in!'.”

– Nigel Terry

Submerged in #blue, seeing through what was left of Jarman's eyes, we live through the artist's life, and love, and loss. When you leave the theatre, put down that card, you're temporarily blinded by the physiological afterimage of a devastating disease. What remains is the voice of a filmmaker who lost his sight.

Someone wears purple on Purple Day (International Epilepsy Day).

 

Both in The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954), Marjorie Cameron wears shades of purple. Professionally known as Cameron, she was a follower of #Thelema, the philosophical movement founded by occultist Aleister Crowley.

“Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight”

– Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX (1904)

Meanwhile in 1946, rocket scientist #JackParsons and (pre-Scientology) sci-fi author #LRonHubbard worked on a series of Crowley-related Magick ceremonies named Babalon Working. After Parsons declared the rituals a success, he encountered Cameron in his own house. She became the element required to continue the ceremonies, this resulting in her being declared Babalon, the Scarlet Woman.

Miroslava Safránková plays Hans Christian Andersen's doomed little mermaid – Malá morská víla in Czech – who falls in love with a mortal and gives up her beautiful voice to be with him. Sadly, the mortal, a prince, doesn't recognize his mute saviour and doesn't return his love.

“The other day I got caught in some fishermen's net. Of course, I had to drown them. I couldn't allow them to touch me, could I?”

– the little mermaid

The wonderful soundtrack is by Zdeněk Liška who also composed music for Ikarie XB 1 (Jindřich Polák, 1963) and Spalovač mrtvol (Juraj Herz, 1969).