In this week’s selection we take a cinematic stroll through the lush settings of several gardens shot in Technicolor. All selected films display studio-built recreations of the natural world to evoke a sense of otherworldliness. In the first garden, bits of landscape and botanical configurations of all sorts form a vibrant Technicolor reality, enough for Judy Garland to remark she has the feeling she’s “not in Kansas anymore” after leaving behind the black-and-white real world. The result is a mix between real and the fabricated plants, think of the bright red poppies at the end of the Yellow Brick Road or the patchy gardening skills of Munchkins, all of which make up the imaginary space of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). In A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1946), our second selection, Technicolor captures the divide between heaven and earth, curiously reversing the ethereal colouring of The Wizard of Oz. After a mix-up in heaven, a “conductor” is sent down to retrieve a British aviator left alive by mistake. Upon his descent from black-and-white heaven to a garden filled with blushing pink rhododendrons on earth, the conductor can only sigh: “One is starved of Technicolor up there”. In our last selection, Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (1958), pebbles, sparse shrubberies and even a fish-fountain become substitutes for beautiful greenery. Here, the garden signals an opposition between the old and the modern. Tati’s Villa Arpel, the studio-set for the film and his take on modernistic architecture, harbours a garden mockingly modelled on a bourgeois style, the exact opposite of the other two films but otherworldly in its own right. Monsieur Hulot, always a visitor from another time and place, visits his nephew and his terribly conformist parents, creating a comical clash of worlds.
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) is available on Pickx.
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1946) is available on Amazon Prime.
Mon oncle (Jacques Tati, 1985) is available on LaCinetek and Arte Boutique.
Film Pages
