4 The Guardian | Friday 27 August 2010

While staying in an Edinburgh B&B, I got talking to a fellow guest over breakfast. He was an Ivy League-

educated executive who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and had the refined manners of a 19th-century aristocrat – until, that is, it came to the subject of his current president. Anybody partly acquainted with American politics is familiar with his complaints – big government, bad bail-outs – but they were brought to a close with the following statement: “Paul, I just find myself asking, ‘Why won’t someone assassinate this man?’”

I couldn’t finish my kedgeree that morning. But after going through this week’s nominations, it became clear that a) there would be an American bent this week and b) there is a long history of US leaders – political, religious or cultural, being gunned down in their prime.

Abraham, Martin and John, as written by Dick Holler in the aftermath of the deaths of Martin Luther King and the brothers Kennedy, seeks to make a link between their assassinations and that of Abraham Lincoln a century before: “They helped a lot of people/ But it seems the good die young.” It’s a song of bewilderment at great loss, but when performed by Marvin Gaye it acquires an air of transcendence, the vocal being so beautiful it is impossible to feel despair.

In the Summer of His Years also concerns the death of JFK, but is both a lament and a poetic retelling. “A shot rang out like a southern shout/ And heaven held its breath”, sings Mahalia Jackson. The solemnity of the moment is, again, conveyed solely through her voice, accompanied only by a martial drumbeat. Peter Gabriel offers another perspective on events in Deeley Plaza, this time from the point of view of the assassin (left unnamed). Again the music is disconcerting, a gentle piano line giving way to chugging guitars. In the end, the killer blames it on his parents.

That John Lennon’s death is considered an assassination shows the extent of his influence. Loudon Wainwright III’s song is built around the image of Lennon leaving his studio in a limo, warning: “All you heroes best beware.” Is this the voice of Mark Chapman, or someone sympathetic? It’s not clear. Paul Simon ties together his memories of the death of blues singer Johnny Ace with the passing of Lennon, but both are unconventional responses.

Then we have Black Star talking about what the killings of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur said about hip-hop culture at that time, and Charlie Poole, in the 1920s, remembering the death of the 25th president of the US. Phil Ochs attempts the thesis that America’s history of killing is inevitable: “The eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind/ To the safety of sterility, the threat has been refined.”

We end with two songs from Africa, where assassination has – in many people’s minds – shaped the destiny of the continent. Tinariwen salute the passing – officially in a plane crash – of a rebel Touareg leader, while Senegalese rappers Awadi address perhaps the most famous lost African leader of all, the Congolese Patrice Lumumba.

Readers recommend songs about assassinationBy Paul MacInnes

This week’s playlist

1 Abraham, Martin and John Marvin Gaye

2 In the Summer of His Years Mahalia Jackson

3 Family Snapshot Peter Gabriel

4 Not Johnny Loudon Wainwright III

5 The Late Great Johnny Ace Paul Simon

6 Definition Black Star

7 White House Blues Charlie Poole

8 Crucifixion Phil Ochs

9 Mano Dayak Tinariwen

10 J’Accuse Awadi

Next week: songs with jokes

Give us your recommendations and learn how to download this compilation http://music.guardian.co.uk/readersrecommend

Colouring in Hollywood * A long-wave educationIron Man 2, Transformers, Saving Private Ryan and O Brother Where Art Thou

What French pop radio taught me

Richard Williams

It’s the summer of 1963, and letters are exchanged with a girl who is on holiday with her parents at a campsite on the Côte d’Azur. We’re both 16, a good age to be discovering stuff. She writes, in letters smeared with Ambre Solaire and smelling faintly of Disque Bleu ciga-rettes, about listening to French radio and hearing “this fabulous record called something like My Boyfriend’s Back, and Little Dutch Coupe by the something Boys, but they play about four records back-to-back and sometimes they don’t tell you what they’re called”. She’s read-ing Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and in-structing me to buy a pair of blue jeans. The Crystals’ next record is good, she reports: “It’s called And Then He Kissed Me.” Oh, and this: “I bought a magazine yesterday called Salut les Copains.”

The future’s orange and teal

Phil Hoad

Film fans might have noticed a colour revolution in cinema recently, because Hollywood seems to gave gone teal-and-orange crazy. Studio films from Hot Tub Time Machine to Iron Man 2 have used the combination, with the greenish-blue teal forming a backdrop and the orange (which includes flesh tones) in the fore-ground. The film blogger Todd Miro has suggested it’s all down to the colours being complementary: “Anyone who has ever taken Colour Theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colours and put them next to each other, they will ‘pop’, and sometimes even vibrate,” he wrote, posting dozens of stills from the year’s big movies, united by the prevalence of teal and orange.

It’s no conspiracy, though, says Stefan Sonnenfeld, a leading Hollywood colour-ist who worked on the Transformers films (Miro counts them among the main offenders). “There’s no specific colour decision-making process where we sit in a room and say, ‘We’re only going to use complementary colours to try and move the audience in a particular direction – and only use those combinations,’” he says. “Every film has its own look. We are always pushing our tools and our creative capabilities on every project.”

It took Miro’s accusation to bring to light one of cinema’s hidden arts. Colour grading, in which a film’s palette is altered in post-production, has become more prevalent over the last decade, as digital technology has erased the limits on what can be done. In 2000, O Brother, Where Art Thou? became the first film to be scanned on to a hard drive in its entirety to create what the labs call a digital intermediate (DI) print, ready for the colourists’ virtual crayons; the Coen brothers, of course, went to town with the sepia on that one. Now everyone follows suit with their chosen colours.

“Colour-grading is an absolute neces-sity now,” says Sonnenfeld, “Because there are so many different formats that are being used, from film stock to digital capture, semi-professional to consumer cameras. Blending all that stuff and having it work cohesively is a very important part of the process.”

The special effects explosion over the last decade has been good news for colourists, offering a constant stream of work as spectacular effects are worked into films: “Special effects [only] come to life when you transfer them digitally,” Sonnenfeld says. “When we integrated the robots for the first time in Transformers, it was amazing. And that all has to do with contrast and lighting. We went back and forth so many times. Michael Bay is a genius at that.”

But do colourists just execute directors’ instructions, or are they artists in their own right? The lines have to be drawn on each job, and sometimes the colourists are forced to call the shots. “I’ve been working hard to make cinematographers feel we’re not there to dictate what the movie should look like,” says Sonnenfeld, “Oftentimes, it’s not our doing, but the cinematographer isn’t there for the process, because they’re off shooting another film.”

That’s also the name of the radio programme on which she’s hearing all these terrific records. It’s on Europe 1, a long-wave station, and I can hear it, too, on my parents’ valve radio. It comes on at 5pm, which is when kids who are still at school get home, and it lasts for two hours. Pretty soon it’s obvious that the disc jockey, Daniel Filipacchi, has a better ear for new sounds than anybody on British radio. Some of the French records he plays – mostly covers of American songs – are pretty horrible, but by the end of the year he’ll be playing Martha and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave, Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness and Major Lance’s The Monkey Time, evoking visions of Parisian clubs where effortlessly cool kids in terrific clothes are dancing to one great record after another.

This is a time when pop music on the BBC is restricted to a couple of hours on a Saturday morning – presumably a time at which it can’t get in the way of homework. There are no pirate stations yet. Radio Luxembourg exists, but the signal fades in and out. Salut les Copains seems to be made by people very like the ones at whom it is aimed, and so does its affiliated publication (the start of a magazine empire that Filipacchi will turn into one of the world’s largest). If the girl on the beach in the south of France got the idea of the blue jeans from Kerouac, it is the pages of Salut les Copains that make them seem feasible to an or-dinary kid in a provin-cial town. There are pictures of French singers in the first flush of success – Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc, France Gall, Claude François, Chantal Goya,

Brief encounters

Pho

tog

ra

PhS:

rEX

/aLL

Sta

r/M

arV

EL

3 Or, like Bobby de Niro as stalker extraordinaire Max Cady in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, you might just want to scare people.

4 Amnesiac Leonard just needs an aide memoir to keep his mind on the job in Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

5 Or you might want to dupe a widow into leaving you her loot, as does Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.

1 You can have tattoos to show your colleagues your work, as Viggo Mortensen does in Eastern Promises.

2 Perhaps it’s simply a way of life, as it is for Brad Pitt’s bareknuckle boxer Mickey in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch.

Got movies on your mind? Join in our blog in which a reader picks their favour-ite clips on a particular

theme. This week: tattoos

Have your say at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/series/clipjoint

Josh Du Sautoy writes: “Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.” So said Jack London, though he probably didn’t foresee the day when more than a fifth of British adults would have one.

Most of us will know someone with a tattoo, even if they’re not willing to

show it. Inking has definitely become a part of the mainstream, but in cinema it remains something of a novelty. A lot of film characters have become like politi-cians: as bland as possible, so as not to offend anyone. Where are the tattooed romantic leads? Perhaps it has something to do with marketing, to paraphrase

London: show me a man without a tattoo and I’ll show you a product bland enough to tickle every demographic.

Whatever the reason, you can generally pigeonhole film characters with tattoos into psychos, gangsters and Angelina Jolie. But one thing is certain: they always have interesting pasts …

Clip joint tattoos

Hugues Aufray – and who wouldn’t want to look like that?

So now, almost half a century later, I walk into a store in the south of France and discover two boxes of CDs, eight discs in all, commemorating the show and the music it presented between 1959 and 1969, complete with jingles and facsimiles of the original magazine covers. Richard Anthony’s Nouvelle Vague, an imaginative and very French recasting of the Coasters’ Three Cool Cats, is an early highlight; others among the 200 tracks include his J’Entends Siffler le Train, an excellent adaptation of the folk song 500 Miles, Johnny Hallyday’s Les Mauvais Garçons, Michel Delpech’s Inventaire 66, Hardy’s Mon Amie la Rose and La Maison Où J’Ai Grandi, and two fine examples of Bob Dylan’s influence on French pop: Dutronc’s Et Moi et Moi et Moi and Antoine’s endearingly daft Les Elucubrations d’Antoine.

Some of the music maintains a precarious balance between chanson and yé-yé, which sounded hopelessly

corny at the time, but now has a curious charm. That benign fate has also overtaken semi-competent covers such as Eddy Mitchell’s Repose (Roll Over …) Beethoven, Sylvie Vartan’s Le Loco- Motion,

Dick Rivers’s Va T’En Va T’En (Go Now) and Henri Salvador’s Le Lion

Est Mort Ce Soir (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). The

occasional American and British originals – Telstar, Baby Love, The House of the Rising Sun, Wild Thing, California Dreamin’ – arrive almost as interrup-tions to a collec-tion lacking only the mingled scent

of Ambre Solaire and Disques Bleu.

Nowadays 3D is the brave new frontier for colour grading. Alice in Wonderland was another recent Sonnenfeld job, and his team constructed two different palettes for the 2D and 3D versions – because the latter demands greater colour depth. At the other end of the scale are the desaturated action scenes that have been with us since Saving Private Ryan, the dialled-down tones transporting viewers back to the hyper-adrenalised state of fight-or-flight lurking in the deepest, most reptilian parts of our brains. The best colourists, says Sonnenfeld, push those primal buttons: “It’s a latent tool. It’s got this hidden power. And you don’t necessarily realise how important it is until it’s done incorrectly.”

Jacques Dutronc

While staying in an Edinburgh B&B, I got talking to a fellow guest over breakfast. He was an Ivy League-

educated executive who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and had the refined manners of a 19th-century aristocrat – until, that is, it came to the subject of his current president. Anybody partly acquainted with American politics is familiar with his complaints – big government, bad bail-outs – but they were brought to a close with the following statement: “Paul, I just find myself asking, ‘Why won’t someone assassinate this man?’”

I couldn’t finish my kedgeree that morning. But after going through this week’s nominations, it became clear that a) there would be an American bent this week and b) there is a long history of US leaders – political, religious or cultural, being gunned down in their prime.

Abraham, Martin and John, as written by Dick Holler in the aftermath of the deaths of Martin Luther King and the brothers Kennedy, seeks to make a link between their assassinations and that of Abraham Lincoln a century before: “They helped a lot of people/ But it seems the good die young.” It’s a song of bewilderment at great loss, but when performed by Marvin Gaye it acquires an air of transcendence, the vocal being so beautiful it is impossible to feel despair.

In the Summer of His Years also concerns the death of JFK, but is both a lament and a poetic retelling. “A shot rang out like a southern shout/ And heaven held its breath”, sings Mahalia Jackson. The solemnity of the moment is, again, conveyed solely through her voice, accompanied only by a martial drumbeat. Peter Gabriel offers another perspective on events in Deeley Plaza, this time from the point of view of the assassin (left unnamed). Again the music is disconcerting, a gentle piano line giving way to chugging guitars. In the end, the killer blames it on his parents.

That John Lennon’s death is considered an assassination shows the extent of his influence. Loudon Wainwright III’s song is built around the image of Lennon leaving his studio in a limo, warning: “All you heroes best beware.” Is this the voice of Mark Chapman, or someone sympathetic? It’s not clear. Paul Simon ties together his memories of the death of blues singer Johnny Ace with the passing of Lennon, but both are unconventional responses.

Then we have Black Star talking about what the killings of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur said about hip-hop culture at that time, and Charlie Poole, in the 1920s, remembering the death of the 25th president of the US. Phil Ochs attempts the thesis that America’s history of killing is inevitable: “The eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind/ To the safety of sterility, the threat has been refined.”

We end with two songs from Africa, where assassination has – in many people’s minds – shaped the destiny of the continent. Tinariwen salute the passing – officially in a plane crash – of a rebel Touareg leader, while Senegalese rappers Awadi address perhaps the most famous lost African leader of all, the Congolese Patrice Lumumba.

Readers recommend songs about assassinationBy Paul MacInnes

This week’s playlist

1 Abraham, Martin and John Marvin Gaye

2 In the Summer of His Years Mahalia Jackson

3 Family Snapshot Peter Gabriel

4 Not Johnny Loudon Wainwright III

5 The Late Great Johnny Ace Paul Simon

6 Definition Black Star

7 White House Blues Charlie Poole

8 Crucifixion Phil Ochs

9 Mano Dayak Tinariwen

10 J’Accuse Awadi

Next week: songs with jokes

Give us your recommendations and learn how to download this compilation http://music.guardian.co.uk/readersrecommend

Colouring in Hollywood * A long-wave educationIron Man 2, Transformers, Saving Private Ryan and O Brother Where Art Thou

What French pop radio taught me

Richard Williams

It’s the summer of 1963, and letters are exchanged with a girl who is on holiday with her parents at a campsite on the Côte d’Azur. We’re both 16, a good age to be discovering stuff. She writes, in letters smeared with Ambre Solaire and smelling faintly of Disque Bleu ciga-rettes, about listening to French radio and hearing “this fabulous record called something like My Boyfriend’s Back, and Little Dutch Coupe by the something Boys, but they play about four records back-to-back and sometimes they don’t tell you what they’re called”. She’s read-ing Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and in-structing me to buy a pair of blue jeans. The Crystals’ next record is good, she reports: “It’s called And Then He Kissed Me.” Oh, and this: “I bought a magazine yesterday called Salut les Copains.”

The future’s orange and teal

Phil Hoad

Film fans might have noticed a colour revolution in cinema recently, because Hollywood seems to gave gone teal-and-orange crazy. Studio films from Hot Tub Time Machine to Iron Man 2 have used the combination, with the greenish-blue teal forming a backdrop and the orange (which includes flesh tones) in the fore-ground. The film blogger Todd Miro has suggested it’s all down to the colours being complementary: “Anyone who has ever taken Colour Theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colours and put them next to each other, they will ‘pop’, and sometimes even vibrate,” he wrote, posting dozens of stills from the year’s big movies, united by the prevalence of teal and orange.

It’s no conspiracy, though, says Stefan Sonnenfeld, a leading Hollywood colour-ist who worked on the Transformers films (Miro counts them among the main offenders). “There’s no specific colour decision-making process where we sit in a room and say, ‘We’re only going to use complementary colours to try and move the audience in a particular direction – and only use those combinations,’” he says. “Every film has its own look. We are always pushing our tools and our creative capabilities on every project.”

It took Miro’s accusation to bring to light one of cinema’s hidden arts. Colour grading, in which a film’s palette is altered in post-production, has become more prevalent over the last decade, as digital technology has erased the limits on what can be done. In 2000, O Brother, Where Art Thou? became the first film to be scanned on to a hard drive in its entirety to create what the labs call a digital intermediate (DI) print, ready for the colourists’ virtual crayons; the Coen brothers, of course, went to town with the sepia on that one. Now everyone follows suit with their chosen colours.

“Colour-grading is an absolute neces-sity now,” says Sonnenfeld, “Because there are so many different formats that are being used, from film stock to digital capture, semi-professional to consumer cameras. Blending all that stuff and having it work cohesively is a very important part of the process.”

The special effects explosion over the last decade has been good news for colourists, offering a constant stream of work as spectacular effects are worked into films: “Special effects [only] come to life when you transfer them digitally,” Sonnenfeld says. “When we integrated the robots for the first time in Transformers, it was amazing. And that all has to do with contrast and lighting. We went back and forth so many times. Michael Bay is a genius at that.”

But do colourists just execute directors’ instructions, or are they artists in their own right? The lines have to be drawn on each job, and sometimes the colourists are forced to call the shots. “I’ve been working hard to make cinematographers feel we’re not there to dictate what the movie should look like,” says Sonnenfeld, “Oftentimes, it’s not our doing, but the cinematographer isn’t there for the process, because they’re off shooting another film.”

That’s also the name of the radio programme on which she’s hearing all these terrific records. It’s on Europe 1, a long-wave station, and I can hear it, too, on my parents’ valve radio. It comes on at 5pm, which is when kids who are still at school get home, and it lasts for two hours. Pretty soon it’s obvious that the disc jockey, Daniel Filipacchi, has a better ear for new sounds than anybody on British radio. Some of the French records he plays – mostly covers of American songs – are pretty horrible, but by the end of the year he’ll be playing Martha and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave, Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness and Major Lance’s The Monkey Time, evoking visions of Parisian clubs where effortlessly cool kids in terrific clothes are dancing to one great record after another.

This is a time when pop music on the BBC is restricted to a couple of hours on a Saturday morning – presumably a time at which it can’t get in the way of homework. There are no pirate stations yet. Radio Luxembourg exists, but the signal fades in and out. Salut les Copains seems to be made by people very like the ones at whom it is aimed, and so does its affiliated publication (the start of a magazine empire that Filipacchi will turn into one of the world’s largest). If the girl on the beach in the south of France got the idea of the blue jeans from Kerouac, it is the pages of Salut les Copains that make them seem feasible to an or-dinary kid in a provin-cial town. There are pictures of French singers in the first flush of success – Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc, France Gall, Claude François, Chantal Goya,

Brief encounters

Pho

tog

ra

PhS:

rEX

/aLL

Sta

r/M

arV

EL

3 Or, like Bobby de Niro as stalker extraordinaire Max Cady in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, you might just want to scare people.

4 Amnesiac Leonard just needs an aide memoir to keep his mind on the job in Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

5 Or you might want to dupe a widow into leaving you her loot, as does Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.

1 You can have tattoos to show your colleagues your work, as Viggo Mortensen does in Eastern Promises.

2 Perhaps it’s simply a way of life, as it is for Brad Pitt’s bareknuckle boxer Mickey in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch.

Got movies on your mind? Join in our blog in which a reader picks their favour-ite clips on a particular

theme. This week: tattoos

Have your say at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/series/clipjoint

Josh Du Sautoy writes: “Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.” So said Jack London, though he probably didn’t foresee the day when more than a fifth of British adults would have one.

Most of us will know someone with a tattoo, even if they’re not willing to

show it. Inking has definitely become a part of the mainstream, but in cinema it remains something of a novelty. A lot of film characters have become like politi-cians: as bland as possible, so as not to offend anyone. Where are the tattooed romantic leads? Perhaps it has something to do with marketing, to paraphrase

London: show me a man without a tattoo and I’ll show you a product bland enough to tickle every demographic.

Whatever the reason, you can generally pigeonhole film characters with tattoos into psychos, gangsters and Angelina Jolie. But one thing is certain: they always have interesting pasts …

Clip joint tattoos

Hugues Aufray – and who wouldn’t want to look like that?

So now, almost half a century later, I walk into a store in the south of France and discover two boxes of CDs, eight discs in all, commemorating the show and the music it presented between 1959 and 1969, complete with jingles and facsimiles of the original magazine covers. Richard Anthony’s Nouvelle Vague, an imaginative and very French recasting of the Coasters’ Three Cool Cats, is an early highlight; others among the 200 tracks include his J’Entends Siffler le Train, an excellent adaptation of the folk song 500 Miles, Johnny Hallyday’s Les Mauvais Garçons, Michel Delpech’s Inventaire 66, Hardy’s Mon Amie la Rose and La Maison Où J’Ai Grandi, and two fine examples of Bob Dylan’s influence on French pop: Dutronc’s Et Moi et Moi et Moi and Antoine’s endearingly daft Les Elucubrations d’Antoine.

Some of the music maintains a precarious balance between chanson and yé-yé, which sounded hopelessly

corny at the time, but now has a curious charm. That benign fate has also overtaken semi-competent covers such as Eddy Mitchell’s Repose (Roll Over …) Beethoven, Sylvie Vartan’s Le Loco- Motion,

Dick Rivers’s Va T’En Va T’En (Go Now) and Henri Salvador’s Le Lion

Est Mort Ce Soir (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). The

occasional American and British originals – Telstar, Baby Love, The House of the Rising Sun, Wild Thing, California Dreamin’ – arrive almost as interrup-tions to a collec-tion lacking only the mingled scent

of Ambre Solaire and Disques Bleu.

Nowadays 3D is the brave new frontier for colour grading. Alice in Wonderland was another recent Sonnenfeld job, and his team constructed two different palettes for the 2D and 3D versions – because the latter demands greater colour depth. At the other end of the scale are the desaturated action scenes that have been with us since Saving Private Ryan, the dialled-down tones transporting viewers back to the hyper-adrenalised state of fight-or-flight lurking in the deepest, most reptilian parts of our brains. The best colourists, says Sonnenfeld, push those primal buttons: “It’s a latent tool. It’s got this hidden power. And you don’t necessarily realise how important it is until it’s done incorrectly.”

Jacques Dutronc