A bout de souffle in colour: Patricia's dress
Two months ago my correspondent Misako Otani wrote with a question that I couldn't directly answer: Are there any colour stills of A bout de souffle that could tell us what colour was Jean Seberg's striped dress?
My answer was that I had never seen any colour stills from the shoot, that I would be surprised if there were any since the stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier would only have worked in black and white, and if anyone had taken a personal photograph on set that would probably also have been in black and white. I think the only chance of knowing what colour the stripes were would be if it was mentioned in someone's reminiscences. (I have looked in Flashback, the memoirs of Seberg's husband François Moreuil, but he says nothing about the dress colour.)
My answer was that I had never seen any colour stills from the shoot, that I would be surprised if there were any since the stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier would only have worked in black and white, and if anyone had taken a personal photograph on set that would probably also have been in black and white. I think the only chance of knowing what colour the stripes were would be if it was mentioned in someone's reminiscences. (I have looked in Flashback, the memoirs of Seberg's husband François Moreuil, but he says nothing about the dress colour.)
Of course in a real sense the stripes are not any colour but somewhere on the scale from grey to black. That is how we see them in the film, and that is how they have been remembered. This is Nancy K. Miller:
Miller's book is a nostalgic memoir, and she can be forgiven for misremembering that the dress is explicitly not from Dior:
More odd is the same misremembering by scholars when they are analysing the exact detail of a character's clothing. Here is Alisia G. Chase on a top worn by Jean Seberg in her preceding film, Bonjour Tristesse (right), and a footnote making a comparison with the dress in A bout de souffle:
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In both of these instances the writers want the vestimentiary trap to be designed by Christian Dior, and they want the trap to be represented by black and white stripes. But they aren't black and white: in every view of the dress in the film the stripes are lighter in tone than if they were black:
Earlier in the film Seberg had worn a top with stripes darker than these, dark enough to be black, possibly, and the fixation on black-and-white stripes may come from a confusion of the two items of apparel:
However, this top might not be black and white either. A colourised still that came up for auction recently suggests not:
This is, I think, a contemporary colourisation, but there is no reason to suppose the colouriser knew what the original colours were, and anyway they appear to be working with a very limited palate. I'm prepared to believe the bear was brown, but not that Belmondo was almost as brown. I also doubt that his bathrobe was brown. Laziness or ignorance must explain why the Picasso print above Belmondo's head is grey and not blue.
For another still in the lot the colouriser gives us a lighter-skinned Belmondo, and has decided that the vest Seberg is wearing is striped red and black: |
The choice is arbitrary. The maker of this Italian poster for the film, An Inter fan possibly, preferred blue and black stripes:
In the auctioned lot of colourised stills was one showing the famous dress. I was somewhat surprised by the choice made here:
Light blue and grey stripes is to me among the less likely options; I can't imagine it being popular at the Prisunic.
The colouriser continues to dress Belmondo in brown here, as in the last still from the lot, showing Belmondo in Lilian David's room:
The colouriser has made no effort regarding David's pyjamas but, surprisingly, does seem to have checked on the original colours of Ingres's Baigneuse, the painting on the postcard behind her.
These four modified stills do not in any way help us determine the colours of a pro-filmic reality that we know now only in shades of grey. The stills' ugliness does, perhaps, tell us something about why colourisation of this kind, for this period, is rare. I have not seen it applied to any other New Wave films. |
I'll finish here with two contrasting visions of Jean Seberg. The knitted top - not a T-shirt as often affirmed - that she wears on the Champs Elysées was not off the peg but was tailored to her exact measurements. I don't know what colour it was, but I'm guessing white or cream, not the yellow chosen by at Belgian poster designer:
This headdress, which I think must be white, is from a 1963 Life magazine feature showing film stars in haute couture. It is by Yves Saint Laurent:
postscript:
My colleague Jann Matlock suggests that Patricia's stripes are more likely to be green, which seems to me entirely feasible. She also points out that the dress, far from being Dior-like, is a mass-market variant of the shirt-dress associated with Givenchy, exemplified here in 1954 and 1958:
Jann also points out that the makers of the film Seberg (2019) think that the stripes of the dress are blue: