Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Theory of Everything

I had the opportunity over the holiday break to watch The Theory of Everything, a brilliantly acted docudrama covering the life of Stephen Hawking. I was accompanied by a friend for whom the viewing would be his third. And with his previous knowledge of the film, he asked that we pay special attention to changes of color throughout the movie. So we did.

Four barcodes for The Theory of Everything, with progressively increasing sampling rates from top to bottom. 
To paraphrase his ideas, yellows represent the relationship between Stephen and Jane, reds represent the difficult choices in their relationship, and greens represent Jane's moving away from the relationship. I don't recall the blues and whites.  

At the risk of committing a bucketful of logical fallacies: the movie is book-ended by mirroring swaths of yellow and blue; there are strong lines of red approximately 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the movie; a line of green bisects the movie and another leads into the second red line. 

The movie is worth watching once for the acting and once to figure out the specific coloring details. Indeed, the cinematographer mentions the use of strong and symbolic colors throughout the movie. I'm hoping my friend will have a chance to provide a more detailed write up in the future.