The first panel is designed after German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary. The not-quite-in-focus image, the ambiguous periphery, the ochre tint, and the slightly blown out highs and lows are all designed to look like a tinted silent film, circa 1920. The statue appears to be transparent, as if made by a double-exposure on a hand cranked camera.
The second panel adds a decorative element. The color scheme mimics Bogart-era black and white sound films. There is a hint of blue, so the image is not entirely without chroma.
Panel three gets its palette from early two-color films from the mid-to-late 1920s. It's surprising how much of the spectrum you can get with just red and green. Even so, the image still has reduced chroma when compared to the real world. Some areas in the image have almost no chroma at all.
Panel four has an exaggerated range of chomatic intensity. This is designed to look like three-color film stock that was "pushed" during processing. This sort of color manipulation has been used to create sustained emotional tension in movies. Examples include Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
Neo-noir films tend to cool skin tones. Sometimes the entire environment also leans toward the cool side of the spectrum, in which case colors also tend to be desaturated (as in Blade Runner, 1982). Other times, cooled skin tones are set against warm environments for contrast, and colors are more saturated (as in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, 1986).
Panel five uses a selective, chromatically rich palette to set cool figures against a warm ground. Since warm colors tend to move forward and cool colors tend to recede, this has the effect of flattening the apparent space and creating visual tension. That which should be in the back wants to come to the front, and vice versa.
And here are all five panels arranged as a unit; a sort of abbreviated history of color in film noir, old and new.
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